Is it legal in the US to shoot people who are trying to kidnap you?
I mean, anyone can go around claiming to be law enforcement or ICE or whatever, but with no badge or ID, how are people supposed to know that this isn't a gang trying to trafic them?
In vast majority of states there is a stand-your-ground law in place, which means you're explicitly allowed to use deadly force if you reasonably believe that you're defending yourself from a violent crime, and in minority there is a duty to retreat while outside of your home or workplace, which means that you still are allowed to use deadly force, but you have to try to retreat first, and only use force if you are reasonably sure that you can't run away.
Kidnapping by a group of people in plain clothes in an unmarked van is explicitly stated as an example of a case where use of deadly force is permitted by law.
you're almost there
Cracks me the fuck up the rest of the world thinks this now.
This has been the case since Bush passed Citizens United and it was even happening before that. RIP Rosenbergs.
I would say the US has an executive with aspirations to implement aspects of a fascist state. As long as millions of people are protesting in the streets, the courts are ruling against the executive on points of law and people are standing their ground it is still a long road for the executive to get where they want to go. If the country really was full fascist you would be totally fucked and being shipped with your family to a concentration camp for disloyalty to great leader right now.
Unlike some other countries where law enforcement and prisons might be state run on principle, the US has a history of privatizing such functions. They had the union busting Pinkerton thugs, for profit prisons and bounty hunters. A society that didn't cry out when the Pinkertons were busting the heads of working people or kids were being railroaded into for profit prison slavery shouldn't be surprised when thugs are clearing the streets of immigrants. That is just America sadly. That nastiness has always been there.
If you see Ice agents covering their faces, call 911 and report a masked man with a gun.
Please forgive my ignorance but isn't the police force in USA known for its violence and profiling? Wouldn't they be "in" on it, too?
ICE isn't alerting local law enforcement of what's happening. They get a call about a masked gunman and they'll show up.
What may have been the largest organized protests in American history were just a few days back, the president has record-breakingly low approval, even his own party's talking heads are turning against him. If you're not going to be satisfied by anything short of armed uprising then at least be brave enough to say as much, but pretending that Americans just don't see anything wrong and aren't doing anything is an act of wilful and blatant ignorance.
You know what Hitler did when he had low approval? He made disapproving illegal.
Just wait for it.
I wouldn't rest on your laurels just yet. You'll know when you've begun to turn the tide because the beast will lash out. The restraint we are seeing right now just means they've got a whole lot more in the tank.
You dont have to look further than last October to see this same type of hubris play out. Kamala had momentum and there was 100% a point where if the vote happend then she would have won. For what ever reason they backed off on the "weird" stuff and started rolling out the neocons. The DNC is going to fuck you and you wont even see it coming.
You're only proving that you don't actually have any idea what's going on here, acting like we're resting on our laurels because there was a big protest. Nobody here is thinking "Yeah we made ourselves heard, job's done!" Nobody here says the fight is won, but you're out here acting like nothing is being done at all.
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.
There's gotta be ~~criminals~~ non-ICE who exploit this. Like it must be so easy now for ransomers to kidnap somebody.
Did you not see the security company guy who dressed as a cop and murdered a state senator, her husband, and shot another state senator?
I mean America is a fascist regime. And you know who support fascism? Fascists. So I guess most fascists are kinda OK with what's happening.
That's not denial, that's full endorsement.
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!
How long will people
The Gestapo could be hauling them away in cuffs and putting them away in camps and some will just go "why is this happening to me? there must be some mistake"
Anyone who is still on the fence is either only tuned into propaganda or is incapable of reasoning.
Generally people in America don’t get organized until there’s a disaster. That’s one of the lessons of the Great Depression/New Deal. Not the most optimal way to maintain democracy. It’s not really “maintenance” if you wait for the thing to break and then fix it.
funny how you never hear from the "cold dead hands" guys when tyranny actually happens
Are people in denial? It just seems like a commonly understood thing. I've talked to straight CNN consuming boomers and even they see it for what it is.
For the record I'm in Canada so maybe it's just hard to see from the inside.
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.
Me?
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the context of the image. Are you agreeing with the people in the image or saying they're in denial by acting as though ICE should be held to the law?
Im just trying to rile up anti-trump sentiment, so which ever makes you more upset I guess.
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.
I think the line between a liberal democracy and fascism is much blurrier than most people think. I suspect the transition from one to the other, going in either direction, is entirely dependent on how much internal forces threaten the ruling capitalist class.
Right now, I think the US is on the decline but hasn’t yet experienced a crisis which really threatens the power of the capitalist class. Fascists seeking power therefore need to manufacture crises in order to accumulate power. That’s where I think the US is at right now.
However, I’m not sure how well it will really work. Democratic state leaders are effectively demonstrating that the existing law enforcement structures are perfectly capable of violently cracking down on dissent. So if you’re a wealthy capitalist, why would you push your bought and paid for judges and politicians to make Trump president for life? It seems like a needlessly risky move in my opinion.
That said, we can only say that the rich will operate rationally to protect their own interests on average. Individually, they can be wildly erratic like Elon Musk has proven to be. As such, the more wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, the less predictable the outcomes are.
Apt
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
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