The alleged officers detaining hundreds if not thousands of people each day in California and across the country are often masked. They sometimes refuse to answer questions, including which agency they represent. They threaten force — and even use it to make arrests of bystanders — when they are challenged.
In the first video I watched, a man in an unmarked car detains another man sitting on a bus bench in Pasadena. The man presumed to be a federal agent has on a vest that simply says “Police” and a cheap black ski mask that covers every bit of his face — the kind that looks like it was purchased on Amazon and that we have previously most associated with criminals such as robbers and rapists. A few of his colleagues are in the background, some also seemingly masked.
If these men approached me or one of my kids dressed like that, I would run. I would fight. I would certainly not take his word that he was “police” and had the right to force me into his car.
In the second video, another presumed federal agent jumps out of his unmarked vehicle and draws his weapon on a civilian attempting to take a photo of the license plate.
Yes — he points his gun at a civilian who is not threatening him or committing a crime. Folks, maybe you consider it a bad idea to try to photograph what may or may not be a legitimate police operation, but it is not illegal. This alleged officer appears to have simply not liked what was happening, and threatened to shoot the person upsetting him. The man taking the photo ran away, but what would have happened had he not?
These actions by alleged authorities are examples of impunity, and it is what happens when accountability is lost.
You can’t punch a Nazi in the face if you don’t know who they are in their down time.
The desert camo is fucking childish, too.
The masks symbolize a lack in confidence their team will remain in power. They fear the backlash if maga falls.
People need to start dressing up like ICE thugs and abducting/robbing wealthy white conservatives. When they insist they’re citizens, dismiss their documents as fake. That’s the only way this will end. The powerful need to be just as terrorized as the rest of us.
Impersonating police or military is usually a very high risk thing to be doing.
A bunch of ICE are neither, they are just bounty hunters
Failure to act, not doing things while you still have time, also has a very high risk.
Its a very, very common mental miscalculation to only look at the risk on one side of the balance sheet.
When it becomes high risk to simply exist, that might finally be the tipping point.
Historical anecdote: Germany never had a tipping point. The people effectively folded.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free
In 1953 Mayer interviewed ten male residents of “Kronenberg” (in reality Marburg) to understand how ordinary Germans felt about Nazi Germany.[2][3][4] The town, located in Hesse with a population of 20,000 and a university, was controlled by the United States during the postwar period of occupation.[5] The interviews occurred during Mayer’s term at Frankfurt University’s Institute for Social Research as a visiting professor.[6] All ten were in the lower middle class.[4] The author was not a German speaker and the men did not speak English.[7]
The interviewees had the following occupations: baking, cabinetmaking, clerking at a bank, collecting of bills, police, sales, studying, tailoring, and teaching. Walter L. Dorn of the Saturday Review wrote that the interviewees were from a pro-Nazi bloc that was the “anti-labor, anti-capitalist, and anti-democratic lower middle class”.[5] The tailor had served a prison sentence for setting a synagogue on fire, but the others were never found to have actively attacked Jewish people.[5] Mayer read the official case files of each interviewee.[2]
The author determined that his interviewees had fond memories of the Nazi period and did not see Adolf Hitler as evil, and they perceived themselves as having a high degree of personal freedom during Nazi rule,[8] with the exception of the teacher. Additionally, barring said teacher, the subjects still disliked Jewish people.
Your point?
The political climate in America is deeply imbalanced. Right-wing violence is so common because it is tacitly or openly sanctioned by the state—it aligns with existing power structures. This is why, historically, regular Germans didn’t rise up against the early Nazi movement: the violence was coming from those the state favored. When left-wing groups try to mimic these tactics—like impersonating secret police or kidnapping elites—they invite swift and deadly repression. The government does not treat both sides equally. One is shielded; the other is crushed.
Honest question, what’s a solution that doesn’t carry risk?
People also need to carry pepper spray.
They will simply escalate violence with more violence. Our security apparatus has two decades of experience with counterinsurgency to snuff out people who choose this.
This is not a “violence isn’t the answer” post, more of a clarification. Expecting to break the enemy’s will through terror is always a fool’s errand when doubling down/locking in is an option. This will end when one side has killed a sufficient amount of the other side to where they can no longer complete their objectives.
You do realize we are at war, right? The conservative Christian portion of the population has declared open armed warfare upon the rest of us. That needs to be how you center you’re thinking. We are at war. Start acting like it.
…yeah, I think the part where I said “we will need to kill enough Nazis until they are physically unable to carry out Nazi shit” painted that picture.
We tried to control Afghanistan and Iraq for like 2 decades and look how that turned out…do we really have that much experience? If so, we didnt learn a whole lot.
Unfortunately suppressing the domestic population is easier than trying to nation build halfway across the world. We can pretty damn effective at oppressing our own population.
But one thing you seem to be overlooking is that there are more of us than them. The population of a city, even just part of the population who do not support this, is more than almost every police station across the nation. You can’t suppress 100k+ people with a 10k-20k police force. The more you do, the more people who are going to resist. Add the military if you want, we still outnumber them.
You can point at the protests but those are peaceful. That’s not suppression, that’s keeping shit civil. Once bullets fly it’s gonna be harder to keep people in one self contained area, especially if you have people shooting from their windows.
Yea but they are going to escalate anyways.
There is some cost that will be too great for your enemy, and it need not be attrition.
The wealthy are few, and they have nice lives of safety and comfort because they can pay a subset of the workers to protect and serve them. Be that police, politicians, private security, etc.
There are 3 cost / benefit calculations in play in this scenario.
- For those with wealth there is a cost to squeezing the population, the benefit is increasing their share of the wealth. Resentment, social instability, etc. These things aren’t free, wealthy people have to pay for security, pay for media to keep the populace on their side, pay for politicians. If the cost to obtain wealth outweighs the benefit, it isn’t sustainable to continue pursuing it.
- Those that serve the wealthy. They get paid through salaries, benefits, access to power, and social status. They cost is that they work against the interest of the rest of us to protect the wealthy.
- The rest. Society at large is a game where the cost is giving up violence, allowing the state to monopolize that. The benefit should be that the state wields that in the interest of the common good. That contract appears to be broken. So now we have a new cost / benefit scenario playing out. The cost of action against the state has been made very high, you see the groups 1 and 2 know how to play this game. They will beat you, they will imprison you, they will kill you. When those groups start ramping up the costs you should realize it’s for a reason. The benefits of tearing down the state get higher and higher the more authoritarian it becomes. The state would like to have your obedient labor without providing anything back to you. At some point people realize that there’s more benefit in destroying or reforming that system, which generally ends up with the people in group 1 and 2 having less comfort and power.
Terror really isnt the thing group 3 should be focusing on. Cost is.
It should be expensive to be in group 1 or 2, so expensive that people don’t want to be a part of it anymore. That’s how you win this group fight. You can see that groups 1 and 2 realize this and so they want to make the cost of doing anything to jeopardize their groups as high as possible.
It remains to be seen if anything will come of it. Americans have proven to be incredibly willing to accept insanely high costs that only benefit the few wealthy. They will go into bankruptcy to pay for egregious healthcare. They will fund the police 100x over the social systems that would prevent crime in the first place.
We are at the end of a nearly century long project of the wealthy propagandizing the populace. So much that “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” a phrase intended to mock the idea by being plainly impossible is just a thing people unironically say.
On mobile, that thumbnail looks identical to the moth/oil lamp meme
I’m sorry for frying everyone’s brains
No harm no foul
Is the LA Times complaining now? I think this might be a leapordsatemyface situation:
Los Angeles Times editorials editor resigns after newspaper withholds presidential endorsement
The editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times has resigned after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris for president, a journalism trade publication reported Wednesday.
Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review in an interview that she resigned because the Times was remaining silent on the contest in “dangerous times.”
https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-times-editor-resigns-9199fa590f1fd7e850de31310a86770b
There’s a nice story i heard a while ago about why russian street infrastructure sucks so much.
Russia was worried about getting invaded by the US. Invasions (permanent ones especially) happen over the land, more than over the air. So they have to move a lot of land troops (soldiers, vehicles, tanks) over a significant distance. By keeping the russian infrastructure weak, any invader would face significant logistical difficulties, where they couldn’t move troops through the country quickly.
By the winter, the troops would get stuck, food re-supplies would be difficult, and they would starve.
Or so i was told. Maybe it’s a myth, but i like the idea: Invaders (especially if they have more soldiers, more weapons, more power) are best fought by disabling their biggest advantage: their flexibility and speed. Disable the street infrastructure. Make it difficult for cars to pass in and out of the area.
A nice analogy for today might be to not take on ICE agents directly (i.e. one-on-one fist fight or sth), but instead disable their mobility. Slash their car’s tires. Put obstacles in their paths. Park other cars in front of theirs while they are operating. They might be surprise-predators, but their biggest advantage is that they appear out of nowhere, abduct someone, and leave. If you can slow them down, make them stuck for an hour, bystanders / community has a chance to organize and fight back.
Here’s what i meant by “russian street infrastructure”, in case anybody finds it interesting :) (i do)
I believe Russia chose a different rail gauge for that explicit purpose. When the Germans invaded their trains had to stop at the border and get loaded into trains that could fit on Russian tracks.
Rail Gauge Map
could be
