So, 100,000 people arrested or otherwise taken from their homes under a new or previously unimplemented legal pretext?

Yes.

I think we need to add a narrow timeframe over which these detentions would occur, like a single week.

Why? 100,000 people over the course of a few months isn’t enough of a problem for you?

Is this number separate or inclusive of people who get deported on some immigration basis?

Separate. I’m excluding people who already don’t have a legal right to stay in the US. I think the number of people who are technically already vulnerable to deportation, who will be deported, will be much greater than 100,000. As you pointed out, that’s already going on. It’s hard to measure in a number how much additional cruelty Trump will add to that by doing a “better” job at rooting out and deporting those people, so I’m not including that. The 100,000 is only people who would have been able to stay in the US, or out of prison or extralegal punishment, who now will not.

A lot of people have been arrested at peaceful protests under Biden, so it seems like we’re already at a grim baseline condition. Not sure what the bet is here.

I phrased it as “serious charges” on purpose. Lots of people get arrested at protests and then released, either without charges or with some kind of misdemeanor. Biden didn’t invent that, and usually it’s being done by local cops who often don’t even like Biden, and definitely don’t care what he thinks about what they should be doing to the protestors.

I said “serious charges.” We can quantify it as a year or more in prison, or something similar or worse that’s extralegal. That happens on a very occasional basis here, to a handful of people like the cop city protestors, or to that handful of climate protestors in the UK. I expect that under Trump, the scale of serious charges and prison time or worse for these protestors or some other type of “enemy” will dramatically increase. That’s why I quoted the 100,000 people number as a total for all of this extralegal action, deportation and imprisonment and all.

Just to give you a sense of “or worse,” what he did last time was issue an order for the National Guard to start shooting them. They didn’t, last time, and I expect that they probably still won’t in a lot of cases. I think he may create new federal law enforcement agencies which will obey that type of order.

It sounds, to me, like you’re saying that Biden is causing BLM protestors to get arrested and held for a couple of days in the local jail, and that’s already happening so what’s the difference if Trump is creating a new federal law enforcement agency to give them felonies or just shoot them. If I’m hearing you right about that, then I think that indicates a lack of understanding of the grave differences between a Biden presidency and a Trump presidency. That’s what I’m trying to impress on you.

Maybe there are some bills or amendment text floating around you can point to that if passed and successfully enforced would meet this expectation? That includes beating first amendment challenges, right?

I think a lot of this will be extralegal. We can quantify it by saying that if people start getting criminal charges because of what they said on social media, or what they allow to be posted on their social media site, because it was anti-Republican in some sense, the bet is passed. I don’t know exactly what the legal structure if any will be surrounding it, so I don’t want to involve that into the equation. Whether or not the physical people start going to the physical courtrooms or prisons is the relevant factor. Trust me, if it starts happening, we won’t need to quibble. You’ll know it when you see it.

Are you guaranteeing all of these scenarios or just any of them? Or should each one be a separate bet?

Is there a betting community on Lemmy where we could post our bet?

It’s two scenarios. One is 100,000 people getting deportation or prison time for things that are currently absolutely clearly legal, such as being Hispanic or attending a protest. The other is people receiving charges for expressing, or amplifying or not, a political viewpoint. We can limit that second one to social media, as a way of making it more concrete. We can make those two things as two separate bets, I guess.

How much were you thinking? I don’t really want to bet, to be honest. I’m happy to give you some amount of money if it doesn’t happen. I’ll be so happy that I won’t give a fuck. If I win, we can set it up that you have to give that amount of money to some kind of charity or operation that’s trying to resist. I don’t want the money. It’s not a fun thing for me to talk about.