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Fears mount over Kash Patel’s use of FBI to persecute leftwing protest groups
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2025
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The solution is more left-wing protest groups. Especially now that their manpower is down. (Edit: they're their)
That can defend themselves. Not many will openly protest otherwise if the leaders get picked off like snacks at a buffet.
I don’t think that comes naturally to most USA leftists, most of whom only experienced how it used to be in the last 40 years.
It will take a while to learn again. Should look to see how the civil rights movements protected themselves and labor before that
How?
I understand this is a "guns are the answer because MURICA" dogwhistle but even if you do brutality matches every single weekend and train with nothing but a tricked out ar-15 with green tip bullets constantly AND have 20 other people who do the exact same thing and spend your weekdays training like SAS?
America has drones and missiles. And if you actually are the kind of threat the FBI can't stop they won't hesitate to tell every news network in the country to villify you worse than Barack Saddam Bin Laden himself.
This is the real problem once you get past the larpers who play call of duty and think that makes them an activist. Increasingly, by protesting you are making yourself the enemy of a state with the largest military on the planet whose entire country is already mostly covered by surveillance equipment (and even twitter tech is sufficient for analyzing the gaps to figure out where you are hiding).
So the issue is that small groups are vulnerable. We need large movements. And we need those movements to get a foothold before they get mowed down by a fat white kid who wants to shoot some n****rs.
But the second amendment? That shit is worthless. If it ever had ANY utility in posing a threat to a government (rather than being a backdoor way to speed up drafts) it would have been repealed instantly. Rather than being the rallying cry of the fascists themselves.
And just another thing that REALLY pisses me off:
Everyone loves to talk about how The Black Panthers were heavily armed and heroes and are WHY we have gun control laws. And parts of that are true. But it also drastically undersells the various militant groups involved in the Civil Rights struggle and the Black Panthers in particular.
Because it wasn't guns that held off the government. It was genuine outreach programs like the People's Free Food Program. Their efforts weren't "Let's all live on a ranch with guns". It was about organizing the people so that any force coming after them would have to wipe out entire cities in the process. AND it was about making sure those cities would side with (among others) The Black Panthers.
The revisionist history about how it is all guns, at best, ignores the actual genius organizing that went on. And, tinfoil hat, it is a great narrative to play to the Call of Duty generation and to alienate those activist groups.
I've seen this same argument spouted over and over online. People like you apparently think that there are enough drones, drone operators, and assorted missiles to target every person who could dare resist. It shows a general misunderstanding of the concept of drones and their usage. Also if the US Military began launching missiles at protest groups then shit would be way beyond hitting the fan, that would be overt war on our own country.
Each drone mission requires quite a bit of careful planning and skilled operators. The USA had somewhere in the neighborhood of 11k drones held by the military as of 2023 reports. A large portion of those are likely deployed abroad, along with their pilots.
Basically the situation seems to be quite different in reality than the spooky idea that magical drones can instantly show up anywhere to kill anyone.
The 2A is there for a reason. This is the first time it's legitimately been needed.
Unfortunately the majority of its users appear to all be brownshirts in waiting.
Not all. And there are plenty of ways to defend a protest from the police without guns.
Yeah that's why I made sure to say "majority," but even that could just be my confirmation bias since the loudest 2A supporters are right wingers; I've never looked into how many left leaning people are also gun-owners but yes, I know they exist (and I have been thinking about becoming one of them).
Again, if the second amendment was ANY threat to the govenrment, it would have been repealed.
Again, what are your assault rifles, your NRA training, and your screaming of "WILDCATS" going to do against drones? Or a police force that literally have tanks?
I mean, our government's track record fighting guerrilla insurgencies isnt spotless.
I'm not sure it'll happen, but civilians could absolutely be a significant threat to both LE and military regardless of the gap in arms/tech.
Ah. I see. So you and your militia buddies are going to escape to the mountain caves of... Chicago?
Also, we hunted and murdered many terrorist cells based on something as simple as a magazine on a desk. There is an entire genre of Influencer built around playing "geo guesser" to track things to within a 5 meter radius based off a single picture.
And that all ignores just how many cameras there are in this country. They won't need to wait until a satelite is overhead to have Abby and McGee hack your location. They'll just run a simple algorithm that will track you via all the traffic cameras and then tell Ubiquiti and Google to give them doorbell cameras to track you back to your house in the suburbs. This is why basically anyone with half a brain is strongly opposed to police chases. All it does is escalate the situation and increase risk to civilians. Instead? Just track them and roll up on them when they go to sleep that night.
At which point, we are back to what the "right to bear arms" actually gets you. Time for a bit of a history lesson!
Back when the Constitution was written, muskets were the name of the game with the new hotness being rifled barrels that gave a bit more precision to those. And, as America learned first hand, a well trained military could borderline handle an order of magnitude more poorly trained farmers (the opening battles of the US Revolutionary War are actually really fascinating for how unstoppable the Redcoats were). So if a group got too uppety? Send in the military and they would break.
Fast forward to The Wild West where people had revolvers, lever actions, and even some semi auto weaponry. That was incredibly useful for letting law enforcement ignore large swathes of the country ("You have the right to bear arms. You defend yourself") and had the added benefit of giving Pinkertons and the like legal justification. And, again, when people got too uppety: Heavily armed "US Marshalls" and the military were called in to put them down.
There WAS a brief window where small groups of (generally military trained) individuals with Thompsons and BARs were a significant threat. But shortly thereafter the modern AR-15 style assault rifles were "invented" and trained military (and snipers) once again could dominate any actual clash.
Because people think this is going to be Die Hard where they walk up to the leader of the fascists and exchange quips before quick drawing, killing one guy, and winning the war. The reality is that we are looking at police tanks ramming through walls, buildings getting riddled with machine gun fire, and explosives raining down if things get too "risky".
People think of when those rednecks took over Malheur a few years back and think that is how it will play out. That only worked because it was white people that the cops like. What they SHOULD look at is things like Waco where the government decided "Fuck it, we ball" and unloaded and massacred dozens of children while showing just how little the second amendment matters.
I'm not sure if you know this, but the left looks the same as the right. And as Canadians. If you think they will be able to find all of us, let alone kidnap and kill us all, you're sorely mistaken. People can perform partisan actions and disappear into mist. Sure they find sole actors now after a while and a lot of concerted effort, but now imagine there are a few hundred of those events all over the country? If you think they would win or even be able to fight a true guerilla war on American soil, you're delusional. Even with the brown shirts who would be willing to help, you'd have just as many that refuse and possibly switch sides.
We can look to the French for how crowds surrounded individuals who physically fought back, preventing their capture by authorities. That was a vid I saw on the old site. Dude walloped some cops and then people pulled him into their ranks and made a wall.
Then the cops found out who it was days later and charged him