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For real! People are just so fucking stupid.
Third term? I'd be glad if we came to terms with it by his 6th term.
Sigh
We aren't supposed to accept that law enforcement just does as it pleases, ignoring our civil rights and protections and donning standard identification markers so that each officer can be uniquely identified. But this is not all that new.
Most of the time we don't know we're being kidnapped by g-goons or the police are ignoring our rights until they're doing it, and we can only hope we get our day in court to challenge the arrest.
Since the development of DEA, the US courts have been carving out more and more exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments of the Constitution of the United States, and by even the 90s (with some big thanks to RICO laws / rulings) we are no longer policed by consent, but by force, because there's no one around with more firepower to stop them.
This was only noticed by minorities, especially in the 1990s with the crackdowns against street gangs and feral youths. At that point we were seeing ur-fascism feature #8 ( The enemy is both too strong and too weak ) where street gangs are described as feral youths who can't be negotiated with, while the same gang is an international organized-crime syndicate.
Then the 9/11 attacks happened, and the PATRIOT act was signed, and DHS was formed, and we noticed that some Americans, typically Muslim Arab-Americans, but sometimes Persian-Americans, sometimes Sikhs...really anyone who looked too middle-eastern, got disappeared by LGMs (dudes who look like cops but without personal or department identification, sometimes without the yellow POLICE plates), and rendered abroad to black sites to get tortured. But much of the US overlooked it because we were sore about WTC1 and WTC2.
(some of us screamed like Cassandra that this was a big move towards fascist autocracy, but I digress)
When Obama took over FBI was searching hard for terrorists in US borders but couldn't find many, and had to invent some (Remember Kellyanne Conway's Bowling Green Massacre? In the actual Bowling Green event no-one died but two refugees were gaslighted by FBI with a budget into doing some inoffensive para-terrorist work, and entrapped into terrorism charges. They're still serving time.)
By then, our massive surveillance state was in operation and all of the US' internet traffic went through NSA, and when there were Islamist militants who were thinking about a plot to suicide bomb an American asset, we'd send a predator drone to literally burn his village down: the CIA drone program killed 50 civilians -- including grandmothers and children-- for every person-of-interest neutralized. We learned that while video games don't make kids violent, making real-world warfare like a video game still meant the operator squeezing the trigger got PTSD. US drone programs had a turnover rate about as bad as German einsatzgruppen (death squads who mass executed villages for betrayal or harboring Jews).
So in 2016 when Trump won, Cassandra over here screamed about the Obama administration disabling all the mass intelligence state and surveillance state assets before Trump could get a hold of them.
We got a break, as Trump pissed off CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, so they weren't talking for a while, but then, somehow, when he had a Heritage Foundation plan and staffers who knew what structures were in place, we elected him President of the United States for a second time. Even despite his insurrection charges (which were stalled until moot).
So yeah, the previous administrations, knowing this was going to be a problem gave the Trump regime is very own SS / Brownshirt secret police (who behave a lot like the Sicherheitsdienst under Reinhard Heydrich) complete with a concentration camp system that is overflowing due to purge quotas.
During the 2020 George Floyd protests, there was a move to abolish ICE who had been hunting undocumented folk and were sent in to brutalize the demonstrations, which only pissed off more Americans, and there was a movement to Abolish ICE (what was always just a paramilitary department to serve the will and interests of the current administration, id est, a secret police).
We are now suffering the consequences of having failed to follow through.
It's not even new. They did this to people during 2020 protests. They drove up in mini vans jumped out, grabbed people and pulled them into the mini van and drove off.
There used to be footage of it but I haven't been able to find it. I think it was happening in Portland and Seattle. At the time there was live stream footage. And it usually happened later in the night as people were cooling off and dispersing.
America hasn't been what it preaches for half century at least.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/feds-unmarked-vans-portland/
The video snopes talks about I saw. Possibly even live streaming at the time because I was hooked on watching all that. Iirc it was a bronze gold colored minivan and the sliding door opened and 1 or two guys got out masked and just grabbed the person and pulled the protestor in and drove off.
I was in Seattle during this. Word was people got snatched here but I don't recall seeing hard evidence myself. Portland though they for sure got caught kidnapping protesters
i remember this
What is anyone supposed to do? All the checks and balances that are supposed to safeguard against this are non-functional, by choice. The only option is censored from even being mentioned and it means possibly fucking dying.
it's america. if a masked random person attempts to abduct you, you fight for your life. and you do the same if you see it happening to someone else
All the checks and balances that are supposed to safeguard against this are non-functional, by choice.
Follow the money.
Aren't there a lot more civilian gun owners than law enforcement? I thought that was the idea behind the second amendment
Most gun owners are right wing.
Democratic jurisdictions had "may issue"* laws that allows cops to deny you a gun permit. The Democratic establishment keeps pushing out propaganda that "guns are bad".
This is a great way to discourage minority gun ownership while promoting gun ownership to conservative white men.
If ranked choice exist, I'd rank Democrats very close to last (only republicans and other right wing parties would be ranked lower)
*Since the 2022 Bruen decision, the US Supreme Court has struck down most "may issue" laws. Ironically the 6 right wing dipshits made a right decision. Broken clock, twice a day.
I thought that was the idea behind the second amendment
No, the idea was that a good militia is all you need to keep a country safe, and that a federal army is a tool for government oppression. That's what the writers saw all over Europe at the time, so they made sure the fix that in their new country.
And then everyone pretended that wasn't the case
The same way they have been in denial until now. Why did you wait for trump to comes to terms with it?
Being relatively a child, mostly. Add to that the apparent social progress of Obamas presidency.
Right , bombing the middle east and deporting thousands of inmigrants was progress apparently
Pretty much every other sign at the protests on Saturday openly called the situation fascism. "No fascist USA" was a common chant across America. LA erupted in civil unrest when fascists rolled up and starting trucking people out by the dozen, and people everywhere roared in protest.
Many of us have noticed. Many of us are working on it. We need to organize. We need to band together. We need to convince people that it's not hopeless, that it's not just more of the same and that it's not inevitable.
Together we can change things. We need to do everything we can to grind the wheels of fascism to a halt. Feel free to help!
The recipe has been in play for over a decade, probably more. People can't stand up if they have nothing to stand on. Everyone is struggling. What the fuck is fascism if you have to concentrate on just surviving. That's the whole play. They give us just enough to get by so we can live with no time to think. It's not denial, it's an orchestrated structure. The system isn't flawed, it's working as intended
Add to that several decades of constant far right propaganda disguised as news, and a massive rightward shift of the Overton Window, and you end up with brainwashed citizens willing to cheer this shit on.
Add to that the systematic dismantling of our public education system to ensure that people don't have the historical and political context to understand the implications of any of it.
They (The Heritage Foundation and their ilk, I guess) really learned a lot of lessons from the Third Reich... This is the culmination of decades of work for these people, and it is working as designed for the most part.
It's a very difficult trap to escape from. If not impossible.
To be fair, you're not supposed to accept it. But the fascists sure would like it if you did.
It seems that way in contact too.
How long? My guess is that masked unmarked people that don't even verbally identify themselves will be shot at (and killed?) by someone as they're walking down the street when law enforcement are attempting to take into custody. My guess is that this shooter will either be killed by the unmarked and masked law enforcement or that person will be arrested and charged.
This is the point when all of the "every day carry" gun folks (and there are a lot of these) will then be faced with the question when they could every use their gun to defend themselves and not be facing charges themselves through no fault of their own.
I think thats when it finally tips enough people into the category to be against trump's actions.
To avoid armed targets, they have been calling people into court hearings, then they drop charges which allows people to leave. On the way out of the courthouse feds will abduct them.
It's pretty brilliant. If people become too scared to show up to court, then they get a real judicial warrant which allows them forcibly go into homes.
In a year: "Why are all these people turning their backs on the law and embracing the mob?"
Some truly evil shit.
