...in this environment, in this place, this time that we’re in is what I feared when I—because I saw, you know, and I realized it’s expanded more and more, that it’s not just the military, it’s not just the intelligence community. It’s not—it’s police. It’s the justice system. It’s immigration. Like all these systems are overlapping, and they’re suffocating people, deliberately and methodically, over decades. And this has been a continuing—you know, like people have been building this whirling death machine of power for decades now.
And you can focus in on a particular war or a particular moment or a particular controversy, but it’s the overwhelming awe of the giganticness of this system that has driven me to try to fight back. And we need to start—you know, like we don’t need to fix these systems, we need to stop them. We need to push back on them, whether it’s immigration or whether it’s the military or whether it’s the intelligence apparatus, because they’re all a part of the same system. And people are suffering. And we can’t wait. We can’t wait anymore. We can’t wait for change.

And, you know, whether it’s U.S. troops or ICE agents, or whether it’s police, we’re in a military—we’re in a domestic military occupation in many, you know, of the most vulnerable communities in America. I’ve seen what an occupation looks like. And I walk down some streets in Brooklyn, in Oakland and in Baltimore, in particular, and we’re living under the thumb of this enormous machine. And we need to stop it.

And I’m standing on the merit of my own positions, being that we should stop these systems, that we should roll them back. We need to start defunding, dismantling and, you know, pushing back against this gigantic, whirling death machine that we call the government and we call the state. And it’s at all levels—you know, local, state, federal and, beyond that, the supernational agencies.

chelsea manning,
democracy now, 
march 27, 2018.