You and them are so out of touch with reality that you both think playing the old political game represents “standing in the way”. Blocking the SAVE act doesn’t do shit when your opponent is gerrymandering the maps in their favor. People will still be able to vote, they’ve just rigged the system so that who votes where will reliably favor them. And in places democrats control they’re playing the same game in their favor instead of fighting to eliminate the concept altogether. Blocking funding for the ballroom isn’t going to stop him from building it, it’s just going to force him to do it illegally, as he done with so many other projects, at which point they resort to grandstanding condemnation and strongly worded letters. They might have prevented abolishing the Department of Education but they have spent decades allowing it to become a tool in the dumbing down of America’s youth to the point it’s now run by a WWE exec, and frankly I’m not sure allowing it to exist in that condition is the better option. Blocking legislation that codifies anti-trans and life at conception beliefs is showmanship when you do nothing to stop the illegal enforcement of those beliefs by jackboots who deny access to healthcare. MAGA is running on action first, normalizing the violence and denial of rights illegally, then trying to make it the legal standard after and Democrats are acting like blocking the legislation somehow prevents what is currently happening from occurring.
Blocking ICE funding doesn’t block ICE. The goon squads weren’t pushed out of communities by press conferences and letters to the president. They were blocked and pushed out by citizens who put their safety and lives on the line, sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice, in defense of strangers. Meanwhile Democratic leaders postured for their next campaign run and took to trolling the regime on social media with witty memes. Your leaders have risked nothing and therefore achieve empty victories while the people they supposedly serve are arrested, beaten, disenfranchised, denied rights, dehumanized, raped, molested, and murdered by a regime that doesn’t give a fuck that what they’re doing is illegal because the legal system is in their hands and standing up to them requires more than saying “no” because they don’t respect personal boundaries. You literally have to block them with force equal to or greater than what they’re coming at you with, just ask Alex Periti.
Like I said, this isn’t the Regan or Bush regime that nominally had some sort of respect for the game of power trades, this is fascism. It’s going to walk over us all whether it has the legal justification and funding to do so or not.
So there is literally nothing that the Democrats could do that would satisfy you short of lining up Republicans and shooting them?
Following the law isn’t “playing a political game”. Giving Republicans an excuse to remove Democrats from power wouldn’t help anyone. Did you even know that there are no more US deportees in Salvadoran prisons? That is because Democrats fought for their freedom. Those people were helped and that’s not nothing. Real resistance isn’t charging in guns blazing. It is showing up every day and saving who you can. Martyrs don’t save anyone.
So there is literally nothing that the Democrats could do that would satisfy you short of lining up Republicans and shooting them?
At this point, no. We’re in the final stages of a game that started in the Nixon era. They’ve had their opportunities to thwart the rise of this and instead have played good bourgeoisie/bad bourgeoisie while making damn sure anyone left of their neoliberal centrism was isolated and neutralized. Yes, I expect our elected representatives to leave their halls of power and put themselves shoulder to shoulder with common folk protesting ICE facilities and in the whistle brigades tracking their movements. I expect them to put themselves between tear gas bombs launched at infants, to take the rubber bullets that would blind teenagers, to take down the grown men that jump out of their trucks to assault a squad of teenage girls, to take the billy club blow directed at a priest, and to eat the bullets unloaded into single moms dropping their kids off at school and off-duty nurses filming the carnage.
I don’t doubt that there’s ICE reckless and emboldened enough to shoot Gavin Newsome or someone like him in the face, but there’s still enough of a risk doing so would spin the situation out of control. Their physical presence at scenes of conflict would turn these confrontations from inconsequential brutality to “FAFO”. Instead we get rescheduled ICE facility inspections with a full camera crew documenting the staged approach, denial of entry, and arrest that is sold as “they tried!”. No they didn’t, they told them they were coming knowing full well what the outcome would be and were politely cuffed without incident. It’s the people in frog costumes that get pepper sprayed up the ass that try without knowing if today’s the day they’ll be brutalized.
There would have been no US citizens to rescue from El Salvadoran prisons in the first place if they hadn’t fucked around for the past 50yrs playing politics. Cleaning up a few drops of blood when their previous inaction is exsanguinating the most vulnerable members isn’t heroic, it’s a PR stunt. Not to mention that regardless of whether someone is a citizen or here legally, the rest of the people rounded up by ICE and shipped to foreign hell holes benefit nothing from these too little, too late “heroics”.
Nobody is going in “guns blazing”, we’re just getting blazed for standing between the day to day, street level violence of the regime. ICE doesn’t care if they’re funded or not, just like lunch mobs didn’t do it for the pay. They’re brutal for the thrill, pay is a bonus. Kill a single mom and call her a “bitch” and your fans will crowdfund you a million bucks. People wouldnt be getting martyred if our leaders hadn’t played politics with our democracy until one side called their bluff and started serving unambiguous fascism that the people in power oppose with lip service and photo op’s. They risk nothing but polling numbers while the people risk their lives and freedom.
I’m at the point where honestly, I don’t think there’s a non-violent solution out of all this. Even if the Dems win, there will be so much violence from the reactionaries that it’ll make the neo-liberal elite’s head spin. They won’t be threats anymore, they’ll be packages and shootings. Every leftist in this country needs to arm themselves. There’s a reason disarmament is one of the first things authoritarian regimes do, it’s hard to take out guerilla fighters if it’s their own ground.
I’m also seeing other countries doing lip service resistance as well, when he first talked about killing NATO that should have been their sign to arm up more. It’s too late now for them. Even I’m guilty of underestimating them in the past but not now. The reactionaries are an existential threat to humanity to me.
There’s no non-violent solution because violence is already occurring, it’s currently just single sided violence because one team has a blatant disregard for whether their actions are legal or moral and is backed by a system of power that has long enjoyed the privilege of immunity from consequences and is now under the command of a leader who indulges their ruthlessness. And it’s not just Americans who suffer, the regime is running wild internationally killing fishermen, kidnapping government officials, and starting wars while the folks we’ve given the power and resources to blame factors that they abused in the past when it favored them and their current state for doing nothing, but promise if we just struggle a little longer, next election they’ll bring about sweeping change. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but the people being incarcerated, killed, and abused in the interim are an unacceptable price to pay while we wait for that to happen.
I suspect that the next election will not bring about any change because we’re watching the set-up for it to be rigged in the favor of the opposition real time. They’ll win, it’ll get challenged in courts (that they control), and while a few might get ruled illegal, the time they have inbetween will only entrench them deeper and be used to codify their new rules. The Nazis followed a legal path to power, got it, then rewrote the laws in their image. The constant appeal to “trust the process, trust the system” is going to damn us all when the system is legally Christofascism. Appeals to the Constitution don’t mean anything when the Court that weighs the arguments can decide it means whatever they want it to mean.
Trump told us exactly what he was going to do to “illegal immigrants”, and we knew that meant actual illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, immigrants who’d gained citizenship, and any natural born American citizen a shade darker than milk. And he’s done it with gusto. Our leaders tolerated it and those of us who stood against it have done so at our own peril. Now he’s promising to come for the trans, the antifascists, and the anarchists. People who think that isn’t the entirety of LGBTQ, protestors, vocal opponents, and anyone Bernie level left or further is going to be in for a shock.
I also don’t think we’re going to put up much of a revolution if the police forces of this country get unleashed on us. It won’t require the military, the cops can crush us if allowed. We’ll just be fighting to protect our own until, at some point, someone with the power we’ve given them uses it to organize and clap back at a level that matters. Or we’ll die like John Brown, mouldering in the grave, but glory, hally, Hallelujah; ours souls are marching on.
This was all avoidable, we tolerated the “progress is a slow, hard struggle” narrative until it became too slow and now it’s about to be very hard.
Like I say to everyone who thinks this, you first. Grab a rifle and head for DC. Go sacrifice your life if you are so sure there is no other option.
We’re in the final stages of a game that started in the Nixon era.
More like since the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands died and it didn’t fix things. You can’t kill your way to utopia. Real, lasting change takes long, slow, hard work.
I am not an elected official who has been empowered by the people I represent to use the resources of office to protect them when shit hits the fan. I cannot summon the National Guard to protect my people from the illegal activities of ICE. I do not have access to the funding and legal resources of that office to figure out how best to undercut and defy the regime in ways that actually hurt them to their core. I am not a public face of power that can go stand in front of a masked thug and both of us understand that if they shoot me the consequence of doing so escalates the conflict to a level even their masters would have to face. I’m just a dude who knows that a one man stand as a nobody is an invitation to annihilation and that I’m up against a hydra, not a snake. At best such actions might take out one head, but I’d die and the head would easily replace itself. For people such as me the significance of violence will arrive when it does and the choice is upon me to act in defense of others or not. That’s why I demand more of those who have put themselves in positions of leadership and authority to do more. Our enemy is not restrained by questions of legality or morality, they do as they please, when they please, and eventually if they go too far, they are the immunity qualified “law enforcement”, the judicial system, the legislative branch that will make it legal after the fact, and the executives ordering the action. Leaders who continue to play it safe and play by the rule book do so at our peril.
Reconciliation hamstrung any progress that might have been made after the Civil War. Confederate leaders were either mildly scolded, then allowed to become figure heads of the Lost Cause narrative, or slapped on the ass and told “good game”. The progress of the last 125 years, women’s suffrage, civil rights, the right to bodily autonomy, equality, queer rights fought long hard battles against conservatism, but after each victory came the mythology that achieve change one must suffer nobly, turn the other cheek, accept the violence and to fight back invalidates the win. Now we fight regressives, who not only want to halt progress, they’re undoing a century plus of gains that people struggled to achieve, both with peaceful protest and by meeting violence with violence.
We’re not fighting for utopia. The long, slow, change you value that has taken over a century to achieve is being undone on the daily. They already destroyed abortion rights, now they’re re-enacting Jim Crow. They disregard due process and legal protections immigrants, illegal or legal, have. They arrest without warrants, they beat and kill for exercising your freedom of speech and assembly. They’ve gone so far beyond their norm they argue against the rights of the Second Amendment. That this is all being done illegally doesn’t stop women from dying in hospitals during miscarriages that should but can’t be medically dealt with, isn’t going to stop them from rigging the next election in their favor now and ignoring the lawsuits after, not to mention the damage they will do in the interim. It’s certainly not stopping them from murdering fisherman, starting a war with Iran, and kidnapping foreign leaders.
You don’t kill your way to a utopia, but they’re killing their way to a dystopia. If you see someone assaulting someone, do you wait for someone else to help, or do you accept the risk to yourself to limit the harm to the victim even if you know you’re going to get harmed in the process? I expect leaders to recognize the times they are living in, adjust their methods accordingly to protect their people from an increasingly violent and lawless aggressor, and expend every resource at their disposal to protect their people up to and including putting their lives on the line. They’re our leaders, we have them power and resources for a reason.
Keep in mind that the primary thing we elect people to do is to show up and vote. You don’t think that the right is itching for any excuse to throw Dems into jail so they can’t show up to the legislative session and vote?
Lamonica McIver, a NJ state rep, was arrested during inspection of an ICE detention facility. Texas Dem reps had arrest warrants issued after they filed the state to block a vote by denying quorum through their absence. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested protesting ICE. Angie Nixon, a Fla rep, was arrested protesting gerrymandered maps just the other day. Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested for “concealing a migrant”. Calif Sen Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a press conference for asking questions. NYC Comptroller Bead Lander was arrested for asking ICE for a warrant. There are more.
Lots of reps are using their power. As lawless as the right seems, that is mostly at the top. They can be tripped up at the lower levels using the laws and that is what is being done. They could always do more, but every escalation comes with a cost.
Keep in mind that the primary thing we elect people to do is to show up and vote.
Governors, attorneys general, sheriffs, judges, and coroners don’t primarily vote. Different elected officials have different responsibilities.
I do think you’re correct that a lot of legislators do phone in the bare minimum of their duties and primarily vote, but the legislative branch writes the legislation they’re going to vote on, controls the budget, and very importantly, is the check to the executive branch. They control investigations, they have the power of impeachment.
You don’t think that the right is itching for any excuse to throw Dems into jail so they can’t show up to the legislative session and vote?
Democrats had power in previous years to address the practice of gerrymandering. They didn’t because they played the game when it was in their favor. Soon there will be so few Dems their votes won’t matter anyway. And presently, they’re often arrested, refused to be allowed sworn in, and denied access to secret sessions. The executive branch is legislating by executive order and the judicial branch is legislating from the bench, neither of which are how the system is supposed to work but the system has been corrupted.
I’m sure you’re familiar with “First They Came" by Martin Niemöller. Yes, MAGA would love to come for its political enemies. But they don’t need an excuse, victimizers never do. Stand up when it might make a difference or wait for them to consolidate even more power and eventually have the ability to drag elected officials out of their homes in the middle of the night with no consequences.
Lamonica McIver, a NJ state rep, was arrested during inspection of an ICE detention facility. Texas Dem reps had arrest warrants issued after they filed the state to block a vote by denying quorum through their absence. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested protesting ICE. Angie Nixon, a Fla rep, was arrested protesting gerrymandered maps just the other day. Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested for “concealing a migrant”. Calif Sen Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a press conference for asking questions. NYC Comptroller Bead Lander was arrested for asking ICE for a warrant. There are more.
Yup. That’s an example of how corrupt our law enforcement, courts, and executive branch is. But if you think being blocked from a vote or removed from a press conference is bad, I assure you that after listening to the dehumanization of migrants during his campaign, witnessing the brutality of ICE on the streets, the flaunting of Aligator Alcatraz and El Salvadoran hellpits, what the people picked up by ICE are experiencing is far, far worse than being politely arrested in front of a detention center then booked and released to go back to your home. We know what’s going on in those places, and going in to “inspect” achieves nothing if all one does is go back to discuss what they saw in a committee, a committee that even if it attempts to take action is going to be ignored by the executive branch, dismissed by judges, and the local cops aren’t going to do diddly fuck even if instructed to because they’re on ICE’s side.
As lawless as the right seems, that is mostly at the top.
ICE murdered Alex Periti and Renee Good in cold blood, on the streets, while being video taped, and walked away. Economics don’t trickle down by when the power at the top tells their bottom level goons “do what you want, we’ve got your back”, the lawlessness bleeds out into the community.
They can be tripped up at the lower levels using the laws and that is what is being done.
You just provided a laundry list of the efforts of elected officials trying to trip up the system at lower levels resulting in their arrests, removal, and being ignored. Their current efforts to trip it are pushed aside at every step. That’s the point I’ve been trying to drive home. Their methods are not working, continuing to go down that same path over and over and getting the same result isn’t “doing” something, it’s either optimistic foolishness that “this time I won’t be stopped” when history and evidence points to the contrary, or it’s performative; “look at me, I got arrested in front of an ICE center that I knew beforehand they’d never let me into and we’re all well aware of what horrors occur inside”. If someone being arrested for “concealing a migrant” doesn’t scream these are fucking Nazis and are going to have to be dealt with like Nazis, I don’t know what will. How many times do they have to break the law, violate the Constitution, defy courts, and how many lives have to be destroyed in the process before people start looking around and accepting “our system is not protecting us”. Every day this is debated and discussed in the comfort of a congressional office, human beings are being kidnapped, beaten, raped, imprisoned, and murdered by a regime that doesn’t care if the committee finds them at fault, the committee has no power to force the regime to stop.
They could always do more, but every escalation comes with a cost.
I know. I’m prepared, are you? When they are satisfied with what they’ve done to the immigrants and change gears to come for the trans, the antifascists, and the anarchists, the “undesirables” who couldn’t be as easily rounded up under anti-immigration rhetoric, what’s the plan? Keep hoping leadership will legislate their way out of it? Sit in a detention center and send up a little cheer when your rep bravely got themselves arrested out front? They keep escalating but we’re the ones paying the cost.
That’s the point I’ve been trying to drive home. Their methods are not working, continuing to go down that same path over and over and getting the same result isn’t “doing” something
I’m not ready to say that the methods aren’t working. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is back in the US a free man. Alligator Alcatraz is being closed. ICE hasn’t come close to their deportation goals and they were largely blocked from their operations in major cities. Virginia redistricting by the GOP was blocked, but California redistricting by Dems passed. All probably indicates that Republicans will lose control of the House in the midterms.
Yeah, it’s a new horror every day. But there is so much that has been stopped or mitigated. Between Iran and the economy, the right is losing power fast.
I know. I’m prepared, are you?
I don’t think anyone is prepared. Are you prepared for nukes landing on US cities? Are you prepared to kill your neighbor? Are you prepared to eat your pet? Do you know how to amputate a limb without anesthesia? Do you have a stockpile of seeds and antibiotics for when the supply lines collapse? What is your defense plan for drone bombs?
A second civil war would be worse than we can imagine. I want to do everything possible to avoid it.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is back in the US a free man. Alligator Alcatraz is being closed. ICE hasn’t come close to their deportation goals and they were largely blocked from their operations in major cities.
Kilmar should never have been in the position he was in in the first place. Even the people who are here illegally and caught should not be in those places, they still have the right to due process. Getting him out is great, why did the leaders that came before fail to stop it from getting to this point in the first place?
Virginia redistricting by the GOP was blocked, but California redistricting by Dems passed.
This is the kind of bullshit that has allowed us to get where we are. Both sides do nothing to end gerrymandering then play with our population for their party’s gain. That’s not representation, that’s stacking the deck. Sometimes it pans out in your team’s favor, other times it doesn’t. Meanwhile it’s your constituents who bear the burden of the fallout.
All probably indicates that Republicans will lose control of the House in the midterms.
Primary results today are painting a different picture. Massie is a libertarian that votes with Republicans 90% of the time (his own words), but he’s been for releasing the Epstein files; lost to a Trump pick. Same for Bill Cassidy, another Republican critic. Brad Raffensberger, the Georgia Secretary of State who defied Trumps calls to overturn the election got primaried in favor of a Trump pick. McConnell’s replacement nominee is a Trump pick.
In my state the presumptive Republicans won, but what’s concerning is that the unabashed white nationalist who challenged our governor pulled 30% of the vote. And honestly, it’s probably more because a lot of us here register Republican so we can vote in their primary. Today I voted for a man who’s stripped women of their rights to healthcare and signed into a law that makes using a restroom designated for one gender a felony if your birth certificate lists the opposite, because that’s currently the lesser of the two evils. That gerrymandering you think is a win in California is going to destroy the blue districts in red states because they’ll keep challenging it until they get it in front of one of their judges and it’s allowed. Or they’ll just ignore it’s been ruled illegal and on voting day do what they want; who’s going to stop them?
Yeah, it’s a new horror every day.
Not if you’re not the one living it. ICE might not be meeting its quotas but for the people they have caught, that’s a horror. The abuse, the destruction of their lives, the loss of their homes, their possessions, their pets, separation from their families. These aren’t numbers, they’re human beings. Whoever they were before this, there’s no going back, that’s gone, they’ve been horrifically victimized. Alex and Renee are dead.
But there is so much that has been stopped or mitigated. Between Iran and the economy, the right is losing power fast.
Trump is losing popularity with some of his constituents, but for the wrong reason. He promised them they could be racist and prosper. Currently he’s just delivering on permission to be racist. They’re grumbling because prices are up, but they’re not going to abandon him.
Are you prepared for nukes landing on US cities?
I grew up during the Cold War, they started drilling us for that potential when I was in kindergarten. That was a feel good exercise. If they’re going to start nuking their own cities, well, that’s that. No amount of preparation will be sufficient to weather the nuclear holocaust. But of all the scenarios, the US nuking the US is pretty low on my list of concerns. That they’d turn our militarized police forces and the redneck militias loose on us? That’s more likely. They gain nothing if their win condition is nuking their homeland. They’re cruel, but they’re not stupid.
Are you prepared to kill your neighbor?
Prepared how? Like, do I have the equipment, or am I mentally and emotionally prepared for the escalation of conflict and comfortable with extreme interpersonal violence? Or both? Whatever it is, I’m not going to give a definitive, because that’s a hard question to answer without incriminating yourself or sounding like you’re full of tough guy bravado. I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve been a victim of violence as well as have given as good as I’ve gotten. I’d love it if people could live in a violence free world, but that’s not the world we live in. I have an idea of what I would do and am capable of when put into a life or death situation, whether that’s my own or in defense of another. Guess we’ll see if it comes to that.
Are you prepared to eat your pet?
What to do with my pets is something I have planned for. One of my dogs would not do well in survival mode, if the world really went to shit. If I went off the fight I have people who are not fighters but are planning on laying low and just trying to get by under the radar who’d take her. But if I thought there was no way she could be safe, I would spare her the misery. My dude? We’ve already been through some shit and hard times. Live together, die together. I’ve been homeless before and survived off scavenging. Humans and dogs can eat just about anything to survive. It’s not pleasant for either of us, but eating your dog is convenient. There’s other protein to be found on the battlefield.
Do you know how to amputate a limb without anesthesia?
Yeah. It’s not pretty but I’m a trained vet tech who has enough of an understanding of anatomy, triage, and field medicine to make do in a pinch. Plenty of Civil War soldiers survived the muscle powered bone saws. Lucky us, we have solar charging and battery powered reciprocating saws 😬
Do you have a stockpile of seeds and antibiotics for when the supply lines collapse?
Yes. For the last decade I’ve been honing my gardening skills and stockpiling both for bug in and bug out. I live in an urban area, Boise, but I grew up in Idaho, where there’s millions of acres of wilderness a few miles out of city limits. My grandpa was a dirt poor kid from Appalachia who moved west and taught me bushcraft. My parents were an-cap libertarians who bridged the gap of live modern/know your exit strategy; don’t trust the government. I might have shifted to the left of their values, but I feel reasonably confident in my approach. Also been accused of being a fatalist. Maybe 🤷♂️. If you do you do, if you don’t, you don’t.
What is your defense plan for drone bombs?
If we’re discussing kamikaze quadcopters; Benelli 12-gauge semi-auto shotgun. MQ-9 Reapers? I got nothing.
A second civil war would be worse than we can imagine. I want to do everything possible to avoid it.
You and them are so out of touch with reality that you both think playing the old political game represents “standing in the way”. Blocking the SAVE act doesn’t do shit when your opponent is gerrymandering the maps in their favor. People will still be able to vote, they’ve just rigged the system so that who votes where will reliably favor them. And in places democrats control they’re playing the same game in their favor instead of fighting to eliminate the concept altogether. Blocking funding for the ballroom isn’t going to stop him from building it, it’s just going to force him to do it illegally, as he done with so many other projects, at which point they resort to grandstanding condemnation and strongly worded letters. They might have prevented abolishing the Department of Education but they have spent decades allowing it to become a tool in the dumbing down of America’s youth to the point it’s now run by a WWE exec, and frankly I’m not sure allowing it to exist in that condition is the better option. Blocking legislation that codifies anti-trans and life at conception beliefs is showmanship when you do nothing to stop the illegal enforcement of those beliefs by jackboots who deny access to healthcare. MAGA is running on action first, normalizing the violence and denial of rights illegally, then trying to make it the legal standard after and Democrats are acting like blocking the legislation somehow prevents what is currently happening from occurring.
Blocking ICE funding doesn’t block ICE. The goon squads weren’t pushed out of communities by press conferences and letters to the president. They were blocked and pushed out by citizens who put their safety and lives on the line, sometimes making the ultimate sacrifice, in defense of strangers. Meanwhile Democratic leaders postured for their next campaign run and took to trolling the regime on social media with witty memes. Your leaders have risked nothing and therefore achieve empty victories while the people they supposedly serve are arrested, beaten, disenfranchised, denied rights, dehumanized, raped, molested, and murdered by a regime that doesn’t give a fuck that what they’re doing is illegal because the legal system is in their hands and standing up to them requires more than saying “no” because they don’t respect personal boundaries. You literally have to block them with force equal to or greater than what they’re coming at you with, just ask Alex Periti.
Like I said, this isn’t the Regan or Bush regime that nominally had some sort of respect for the game of power trades, this is fascism. It’s going to walk over us all whether it has the legal justification and funding to do so or not.
So there is literally nothing that the Democrats could do that would satisfy you short of lining up Republicans and shooting them?
Following the law isn’t “playing a political game”. Giving Republicans an excuse to remove Democrats from power wouldn’t help anyone. Did you even know that there are no more US deportees in Salvadoran prisons? That is because Democrats fought for their freedom. Those people were helped and that’s not nothing. Real resistance isn’t charging in guns blazing. It is showing up every day and saving who you can. Martyrs don’t save anyone.
At this point, no. We’re in the final stages of a game that started in the Nixon era. They’ve had their opportunities to thwart the rise of this and instead have played good bourgeoisie/bad bourgeoisie while making damn sure anyone left of their neoliberal centrism was isolated and neutralized. Yes, I expect our elected representatives to leave their halls of power and put themselves shoulder to shoulder with common folk protesting ICE facilities and in the whistle brigades tracking their movements. I expect them to put themselves between tear gas bombs launched at infants, to take the rubber bullets that would blind teenagers, to take down the grown men that jump out of their trucks to assault a squad of teenage girls, to take the billy club blow directed at a priest, and to eat the bullets unloaded into single moms dropping their kids off at school and off-duty nurses filming the carnage.
I don’t doubt that there’s ICE reckless and emboldened enough to shoot Gavin Newsome or someone like him in the face, but there’s still enough of a risk doing so would spin the situation out of control. Their physical presence at scenes of conflict would turn these confrontations from inconsequential brutality to “FAFO”. Instead we get rescheduled ICE facility inspections with a full camera crew documenting the staged approach, denial of entry, and arrest that is sold as “they tried!”. No they didn’t, they told them they were coming knowing full well what the outcome would be and were politely cuffed without incident. It’s the people in frog costumes that get pepper sprayed up the ass that try without knowing if today’s the day they’ll be brutalized.
There would have been no US citizens to rescue from El Salvadoran prisons in the first place if they hadn’t fucked around for the past 50yrs playing politics. Cleaning up a few drops of blood when their previous inaction is exsanguinating the most vulnerable members isn’t heroic, it’s a PR stunt. Not to mention that regardless of whether someone is a citizen or here legally, the rest of the people rounded up by ICE and shipped to foreign hell holes benefit nothing from these too little, too late “heroics”.
Nobody is going in “guns blazing”, we’re just getting blazed for standing between the day to day, street level violence of the regime. ICE doesn’t care if they’re funded or not, just like lunch mobs didn’t do it for the pay. They’re brutal for the thrill, pay is a bonus. Kill a single mom and call her a “bitch” and your fans will crowdfund you a million bucks. People wouldnt be getting martyred if our leaders hadn’t played politics with our democracy until one side called their bluff and started serving unambiguous fascism that the people in power oppose with lip service and photo op’s. They risk nothing but polling numbers while the people risk their lives and freedom.
I’m at the point where honestly, I don’t think there’s a non-violent solution out of all this. Even if the Dems win, there will be so much violence from the reactionaries that it’ll make the neo-liberal elite’s head spin. They won’t be threats anymore, they’ll be packages and shootings. Every leftist in this country needs to arm themselves. There’s a reason disarmament is one of the first things authoritarian regimes do, it’s hard to take out guerilla fighters if it’s their own ground.
I’m also seeing other countries doing lip service resistance as well, when he first talked about killing NATO that should have been their sign to arm up more. It’s too late now for them. Even I’m guilty of underestimating them in the past but not now. The reactionaries are an existential threat to humanity to me.
There’s no non-violent solution because violence is already occurring, it’s currently just single sided violence because one team has a blatant disregard for whether their actions are legal or moral and is backed by a system of power that has long enjoyed the privilege of immunity from consequences and is now under the command of a leader who indulges their ruthlessness. And it’s not just Americans who suffer, the regime is running wild internationally killing fishermen, kidnapping government officials, and starting wars while the folks we’ve given the power and resources to blame factors that they abused in the past when it favored them and their current state for doing nothing, but promise if we just struggle a little longer, next election they’ll bring about sweeping change. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but the people being incarcerated, killed, and abused in the interim are an unacceptable price to pay while we wait for that to happen.
I suspect that the next election will not bring about any change because we’re watching the set-up for it to be rigged in the favor of the opposition real time. They’ll win, it’ll get challenged in courts (that they control), and while a few might get ruled illegal, the time they have inbetween will only entrench them deeper and be used to codify their new rules. The Nazis followed a legal path to power, got it, then rewrote the laws in their image. The constant appeal to “trust the process, trust the system” is going to damn us all when the system is legally Christofascism. Appeals to the Constitution don’t mean anything when the Court that weighs the arguments can decide it means whatever they want it to mean.
Trump told us exactly what he was going to do to “illegal immigrants”, and we knew that meant actual illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, immigrants who’d gained citizenship, and any natural born American citizen a shade darker than milk. And he’s done it with gusto. Our leaders tolerated it and those of us who stood against it have done so at our own peril. Now he’s promising to come for the trans, the antifascists, and the anarchists. People who think that isn’t the entirety of LGBTQ, protestors, vocal opponents, and anyone Bernie level left or further is going to be in for a shock.
I also don’t think we’re going to put up much of a revolution if the police forces of this country get unleashed on us. It won’t require the military, the cops can crush us if allowed. We’ll just be fighting to protect our own until, at some point, someone with the power we’ve given them uses it to organize and clap back at a level that matters. Or we’ll die like John Brown, mouldering in the grave, but glory, hally, Hallelujah; ours souls are marching on.
This was all avoidable, we tolerated the “progress is a slow, hard struggle” narrative until it became too slow and now it’s about to be very hard.
Like I say to everyone who thinks this, you first. Grab a rifle and head for DC. Go sacrifice your life if you are so sure there is no other option.
More like since the Civil War. Hundreds of thousands died and it didn’t fix things. You can’t kill your way to utopia. Real, lasting change takes long, slow, hard work.
I am not an elected official who has been empowered by the people I represent to use the resources of office to protect them when shit hits the fan. I cannot summon the National Guard to protect my people from the illegal activities of ICE. I do not have access to the funding and legal resources of that office to figure out how best to undercut and defy the regime in ways that actually hurt them to their core. I am not a public face of power that can go stand in front of a masked thug and both of us understand that if they shoot me the consequence of doing so escalates the conflict to a level even their masters would have to face. I’m just a dude who knows that a one man stand as a nobody is an invitation to annihilation and that I’m up against a hydra, not a snake. At best such actions might take out one head, but I’d die and the head would easily replace itself. For people such as me the significance of violence will arrive when it does and the choice is upon me to act in defense of others or not. That’s why I demand more of those who have put themselves in positions of leadership and authority to do more. Our enemy is not restrained by questions of legality or morality, they do as they please, when they please, and eventually if they go too far, they are the immunity qualified “law enforcement”, the judicial system, the legislative branch that will make it legal after the fact, and the executives ordering the action. Leaders who continue to play it safe and play by the rule book do so at our peril.
Reconciliation hamstrung any progress that might have been made after the Civil War. Confederate leaders were either mildly scolded, then allowed to become figure heads of the Lost Cause narrative, or slapped on the ass and told “good game”. The progress of the last 125 years, women’s suffrage, civil rights, the right to bodily autonomy, equality, queer rights fought long hard battles against conservatism, but after each victory came the mythology that achieve change one must suffer nobly, turn the other cheek, accept the violence and to fight back invalidates the win. Now we fight regressives, who not only want to halt progress, they’re undoing a century plus of gains that people struggled to achieve, both with peaceful protest and by meeting violence with violence.
We’re not fighting for utopia. The long, slow, change you value that has taken over a century to achieve is being undone on the daily. They already destroyed abortion rights, now they’re re-enacting Jim Crow. They disregard due process and legal protections immigrants, illegal or legal, have. They arrest without warrants, they beat and kill for exercising your freedom of speech and assembly. They’ve gone so far beyond their norm they argue against the rights of the Second Amendment. That this is all being done illegally doesn’t stop women from dying in hospitals during miscarriages that should but can’t be medically dealt with, isn’t going to stop them from rigging the next election in their favor now and ignoring the lawsuits after, not to mention the damage they will do in the interim. It’s certainly not stopping them from murdering fisherman, starting a war with Iran, and kidnapping foreign leaders.
You don’t kill your way to a utopia, but they’re killing their way to a dystopia. If you see someone assaulting someone, do you wait for someone else to help, or do you accept the risk to yourself to limit the harm to the victim even if you know you’re going to get harmed in the process? I expect leaders to recognize the times they are living in, adjust their methods accordingly to protect their people from an increasingly violent and lawless aggressor, and expend every resource at their disposal to protect their people up to and including putting their lives on the line. They’re our leaders, we have them power and resources for a reason.
Keep in mind that the primary thing we elect people to do is to show up and vote. You don’t think that the right is itching for any excuse to throw Dems into jail so they can’t show up to the legislative session and vote?
Lamonica McIver, a NJ state rep, was arrested during inspection of an ICE detention facility. Texas Dem reps had arrest warrants issued after they filed the state to block a vote by denying quorum through their absence. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested protesting ICE. Angie Nixon, a Fla rep, was arrested protesting gerrymandered maps just the other day. Judge Hannah Dugan was arrested for “concealing a migrant”. Calif Sen Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a press conference for asking questions. NYC Comptroller Bead Lander was arrested for asking ICE for a warrant. There are more.
Lots of reps are using their power. As lawless as the right seems, that is mostly at the top. They can be tripped up at the lower levels using the laws and that is what is being done. They could always do more, but every escalation comes with a cost.
Governors, attorneys general, sheriffs, judges, and coroners don’t primarily vote. Different elected officials have different responsibilities.
I do think you’re correct that a lot of legislators do phone in the bare minimum of their duties and primarily vote, but the legislative branch writes the legislation they’re going to vote on, controls the budget, and very importantly, is the check to the executive branch. They control investigations, they have the power of impeachment.
Democrats had power in previous years to address the practice of gerrymandering. They didn’t because they played the game when it was in their favor. Soon there will be so few Dems their votes won’t matter anyway. And presently, they’re often arrested, refused to be allowed sworn in, and denied access to secret sessions. The executive branch is legislating by executive order and the judicial branch is legislating from the bench, neither of which are how the system is supposed to work but the system has been corrupted.
I’m sure you’re familiar with “First They Came" by Martin Niemöller. Yes, MAGA would love to come for its political enemies. But they don’t need an excuse, victimizers never do. Stand up when it might make a difference or wait for them to consolidate even more power and eventually have the ability to drag elected officials out of their homes in the middle of the night with no consequences.
Yup. That’s an example of how corrupt our law enforcement, courts, and executive branch is. But if you think being blocked from a vote or removed from a press conference is bad, I assure you that after listening to the dehumanization of migrants during his campaign, witnessing the brutality of ICE on the streets, the flaunting of Aligator Alcatraz and El Salvadoran hellpits, what the people picked up by ICE are experiencing is far, far worse than being politely arrested in front of a detention center then booked and released to go back to your home. We know what’s going on in those places, and going in to “inspect” achieves nothing if all one does is go back to discuss what they saw in a committee, a committee that even if it attempts to take action is going to be ignored by the executive branch, dismissed by judges, and the local cops aren’t going to do diddly fuck even if instructed to because they’re on ICE’s side.
ICE murdered Alex Periti and Renee Good in cold blood, on the streets, while being video taped, and walked away. Economics don’t trickle down by when the power at the top tells their bottom level goons “do what you want, we’ve got your back”, the lawlessness bleeds out into the community.
You just provided a laundry list of the efforts of elected officials trying to trip up the system at lower levels resulting in their arrests, removal, and being ignored. Their current efforts to trip it are pushed aside at every step. That’s the point I’ve been trying to drive home. Their methods are not working, continuing to go down that same path over and over and getting the same result isn’t “doing” something, it’s either optimistic foolishness that “this time I won’t be stopped” when history and evidence points to the contrary, or it’s performative; “look at me, I got arrested in front of an ICE center that I knew beforehand they’d never let me into and we’re all well aware of what horrors occur inside”. If someone being arrested for “concealing a migrant” doesn’t scream these are fucking Nazis and are going to have to be dealt with like Nazis, I don’t know what will. How many times do they have to break the law, violate the Constitution, defy courts, and how many lives have to be destroyed in the process before people start looking around and accepting “our system is not protecting us”. Every day this is debated and discussed in the comfort of a congressional office, human beings are being kidnapped, beaten, raped, imprisoned, and murdered by a regime that doesn’t care if the committee finds them at fault, the committee has no power to force the regime to stop.
I know. I’m prepared, are you? When they are satisfied with what they’ve done to the immigrants and change gears to come for the trans, the antifascists, and the anarchists, the “undesirables” who couldn’t be as easily rounded up under anti-immigration rhetoric, what’s the plan? Keep hoping leadership will legislate their way out of it? Sit in a detention center and send up a little cheer when your rep bravely got themselves arrested out front? They keep escalating but we’re the ones paying the cost.
I’m not ready to say that the methods aren’t working. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is back in the US a free man. Alligator Alcatraz is being closed. ICE hasn’t come close to their deportation goals and they were largely blocked from their operations in major cities. Virginia redistricting by the GOP was blocked, but California redistricting by Dems passed. All probably indicates that Republicans will lose control of the House in the midterms.
Yeah, it’s a new horror every day. But there is so much that has been stopped or mitigated. Between Iran and the economy, the right is losing power fast.
I don’t think anyone is prepared. Are you prepared for nukes landing on US cities? Are you prepared to kill your neighbor? Are you prepared to eat your pet? Do you know how to amputate a limb without anesthesia? Do you have a stockpile of seeds and antibiotics for when the supply lines collapse? What is your defense plan for drone bombs?
A second civil war would be worse than we can imagine. I want to do everything possible to avoid it.
Kilmar should never have been in the position he was in in the first place. Even the people who are here illegally and caught should not be in those places, they still have the right to due process. Getting him out is great, why did the leaders that came before fail to stop it from getting to this point in the first place?
This is the kind of bullshit that has allowed us to get where we are. Both sides do nothing to end gerrymandering then play with our population for their party’s gain. That’s not representation, that’s stacking the deck. Sometimes it pans out in your team’s favor, other times it doesn’t. Meanwhile it’s your constituents who bear the burden of the fallout.
Primary results today are painting a different picture. Massie is a libertarian that votes with Republicans 90% of the time (his own words), but he’s been for releasing the Epstein files; lost to a Trump pick. Same for Bill Cassidy, another Republican critic. Brad Raffensberger, the Georgia Secretary of State who defied Trumps calls to overturn the election got primaried in favor of a Trump pick. McConnell’s replacement nominee is a Trump pick.
In my state the presumptive Republicans won, but what’s concerning is that the unabashed white nationalist who challenged our governor pulled 30% of the vote. And honestly, it’s probably more because a lot of us here register Republican so we can vote in their primary. Today I voted for a man who’s stripped women of their rights to healthcare and signed into a law that makes using a restroom designated for one gender a felony if your birth certificate lists the opposite, because that’s currently the lesser of the two evils. That gerrymandering you think is a win in California is going to destroy the blue districts in red states because they’ll keep challenging it until they get it in front of one of their judges and it’s allowed. Or they’ll just ignore it’s been ruled illegal and on voting day do what they want; who’s going to stop them?
Not if you’re not the one living it. ICE might not be meeting its quotas but for the people they have caught, that’s a horror. The abuse, the destruction of their lives, the loss of their homes, their possessions, their pets, separation from their families. These aren’t numbers, they’re human beings. Whoever they were before this, there’s no going back, that’s gone, they’ve been horrifically victimized. Alex and Renee are dead.
Trump is losing popularity with some of his constituents, but for the wrong reason. He promised them they could be racist and prosper. Currently he’s just delivering on permission to be racist. They’re grumbling because prices are up, but they’re not going to abandon him.
I grew up during the Cold War, they started drilling us for that potential when I was in kindergarten. That was a feel good exercise. If they’re going to start nuking their own cities, well, that’s that. No amount of preparation will be sufficient to weather the nuclear holocaust. But of all the scenarios, the US nuking the US is pretty low on my list of concerns. That they’d turn our militarized police forces and the redneck militias loose on us? That’s more likely. They gain nothing if their win condition is nuking their homeland. They’re cruel, but they’re not stupid.
Prepared how? Like, do I have the equipment, or am I mentally and emotionally prepared for the escalation of conflict and comfortable with extreme interpersonal violence? Or both? Whatever it is, I’m not going to give a definitive, because that’s a hard question to answer without incriminating yourself or sounding like you’re full of tough guy bravado. I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve been a victim of violence as well as have given as good as I’ve gotten. I’d love it if people could live in a violence free world, but that’s not the world we live in. I have an idea of what I would do and am capable of when put into a life or death situation, whether that’s my own or in defense of another. Guess we’ll see if it comes to that.
What to do with my pets is something I have planned for. One of my dogs would not do well in survival mode, if the world really went to shit. If I went off the fight I have people who are not fighters but are planning on laying low and just trying to get by under the radar who’d take her. But if I thought there was no way she could be safe, I would spare her the misery. My dude? We’ve already been through some shit and hard times. Live together, die together. I’ve been homeless before and survived off scavenging. Humans and dogs can eat just about anything to survive. It’s not pleasant for either of us, but eating your dog is convenient. There’s other protein to be found on the battlefield.
Yeah. It’s not pretty but I’m a trained vet tech who has enough of an understanding of anatomy, triage, and field medicine to make do in a pinch. Plenty of Civil War soldiers survived the muscle powered bone saws. Lucky us, we have solar charging and battery powered reciprocating saws 😬
Yes. For the last decade I’ve been honing my gardening skills and stockpiling both for bug in and bug out. I live in an urban area, Boise, but I grew up in Idaho, where there’s millions of acres of wilderness a few miles out of city limits. My grandpa was a dirt poor kid from Appalachia who moved west and taught me bushcraft. My parents were an-cap libertarians who bridged the gap of live modern/know your exit strategy; don’t trust the government. I might have shifted to the left of their values, but I feel reasonably confident in my approach. Also been accused of being a fatalist. Maybe 🤷♂️. If you do you do, if you don’t, you don’t.
If we’re discussing kamikaze quadcopters; Benelli 12-gauge semi-auto shotgun. MQ-9 Reapers? I got nothing.
Yeah. Me too.