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For some it'll probably take til his fourth
We did just have the largest protest in the history of the nation... I think some of us are aware.
.... I love the protesters... I love the protests... but the mere fact youre coming at me like that meant anything other than we marched in the street on a Saturday tells me youre not taking this seriously.
You just wait until the 2A nuts come out. We all know they hate nothing more than a corrupt government, and the only reason they stockpile guns is to fight the government. Right?
The protests were baked into the Project 2025 plan from its inception. They've changed nothing.
Pull ICE masks, I would let them shoot me just to protect the person they're abducting, fckn nazi's, u wanna shoot an american citizen and make me a martyr? be my guess and see what'll happen
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.
Am from Seattle.
Yep, this happened in Seattle and Portland multiple times, just basically black bagging people into unmarked vans by... presumably, plain clothes / "off duty" / half kitted out, face obscured, no visible ID cops.
They typically did this black bagging to people who had not actually broken any laws, but were so effective at keeping protester morale high, and/or were simply causing overwhelming masses of people to defend them from, in many cases, literally entirely unprovoked police assault/brutality.
Most of these were the people they wanted to removr but knew that no charges would actually stick because they had nothing, and then release them 24-72 hours later.
Sometimes they'd black bag / white van people who had actually crossed the threshold into doing something they could actually charge you for, but most of the time, nope.
I know that in Portland the cops actively decided to act as body guards for fascists, and look the other way when they attacked people.
In Seattle, ... the cops intentionally started so much shit, assaulting nonviolent people, well we uh... we literally forced them to abandon their major police office in Capitol Hill.
As in, we seiged them. Surrounded the building for days. Eventually they burned a bunch of records and made a stealthy withdrawal in the dead of night.
That police center is only a few blocks from where the 'CHAZ' would be set up.
Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
As in, we literally drove out the local police and are thus now autonomous.
... We've still never seen the all the actual communications between the police chief and mayor, other internal police records... because the police destroyed them. They destroyed them because they almost certainly outlined numerous violations of the law in terms of orders issued, tactics used, illegal arrests/detainments, bullshit 'overtime' overpayments and other financial shenanigans, crimes committed by the police and probably all the way up to the police chief and mayor engaging in a criminal conspiracy.
I feel like this isn't talked about enough... You guys are badasses for that shit.
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!
THIS. Everyone who's feeling hopeless needs to get out of the Lemmy echo chamber and find people building the resistance in the real world. It's actually not hard to do. Go to a protest and talk to people. Look online for a local resistance organization and show up at a meeting. Spend your money at companies that don't support fascists. Whatever you do, just don't give up because that's exactly what the fascists want.
Is your goal that we should just.. not say this is illegal? Not argue that it's not okay? Literally fold and accept fascism?
Because that seems to be the narrative you're pushing, which is the polar opposite of constructive in this situation.
Super weird and suspect that every thread seems to be full of people saying this is normal. That this is just how it is, that it's been going on forever, and that anyone who has an issue with it is being unrealistic. Really, really weird. Almost like they're cryptofascists.
HMMMMMMMM.
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.
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.
To be fair, you're not supposed to accept it. But the fascists sure would like it if you did.
I think a lot of people realize that trump is increasing the power of the govt, but the word fascist means different things to different people. Everyone thinks Hitler was a fascist, that Mussolini was one, but theres tons of people who oppose trump and think he fits into a different description that doesn't involve fascism. And ofc the people who do support him don't think he is and the ones that do are chill with it.
Everyone thinks Hitler was a fascist, that Mussolini was one, but theres tons of people who oppose trump and think he fits into a different description that doesn’t involve fascism.
And they would be wrong and they are failing to remain vigilant
Third term? I'd be glad if we came to terms with it by his 6th term.
I am fully prepared for writing off this entire fucking generation.
We're going to enter dictatorship, tyranny, wars without end, mass waves of poverty, degradation of all our comforts and rights, and techno-feudalism and the average American literally- Does. Not. Care.
This is the way the pendulum swings sometimes. A massive group of people have to literally fucking rot in misery for no reason before their kids grow up and start anew with renewed energy and drive. I know this generation certainly doesn't have it. Let's not be fooled by millions of people turning out for celebratory marches on a single weekend. We all know that won't do anything and it will be a miracle if we can muster up enough group momentum to even get that again.
The top 10% with an absolute absurd amount of the wealth are the ones that don't care. Their miney, therefore their lifestyle seems safe.
The poorest idiots care deeply but think Trump is on their side and will come down to sweep them up right before it gets really miserable cause he needs to break standards of living for all the rich for them to rise up.
What will get people to finally pivot is unknowable. It will be when there is nothing left to lose, probably. If that ever happens without help from the outside, I dunno. It's not like Germans could Stop Germany from the inside or Japan it's fascism, or any other group.
But I think it's wrong to say the average American doesn't care. The over represented, as always, dont care, which includes out government. The average American agrees deeply we just don't have much power and all disagree on the solution.
You may be prepared to give up, but the rest of us aren't. I hope you find your hope before it's too late.
going on a half-century and seeing everyone make the same stupid mistakes over and over, seeing generations not only not pass down wisdom but actively abandon the next generation over and over, it makes it hard to have hope.
I respect and support anyone trying to make change, I will continue to do what I can in my situation, but I don't have expectations anymore. At a point I'll be retreating to the woods with my loved ones to close out the world and spend more time gardening than scrolling.