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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.