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.

Sacramento Police department has a helicopter, Air One, that the department is super proud of. I live in a not-rich neighborhood where Air One likes to hang out and help which sometimes includes shouting inaudibly on the PA. Air One has its own webpage which is sometimes current about what it's doing, but not always.

Air One also likes to fly low enough that we can hear the thumping of the rotors through our apartments. At 11pm on a school night. We know it doesn't have to because the rescue choppers zing by quietly on their way.

And lately Air One has gotten, whinier. This loud screeee! that wasn't their before that makes me thing something in the rotors is not sufficiently oiled, or something is about to fall apart. I wonder if Air One is soon going to make an unscheduled landing in my neighborhood.

Is that her face?

Is that the sound of fast-approaching leopards?

Is it face-eating season?

Well, I needed an example.

In Surviving Mars, I had a similar problem.

SM unlike the usual city builders, builds a command economy and starts with no colonists (just drones) and then they show up ten or twenty at a time. There are no higher salaries or higher standards of living; what they make for the community is there for everyone.

And then I directed them to build a university. Education was open to everyone. PHDs for everybody!

But then everyone wanted to be a scientist or engineer. It wasn't enough to be smart yet stuck with the job of grocery operator, or in freight inventory management. They wanted to use their newly developed skills, and explore strange new worlds and seek out new life and civilizations (even if in the lab rather than by starship)

Underemployment was a factor, and my custodial staff empowered with degrees in philosophy would lose morale and eventually go renegade (turn to crime) when I forced them to just continue to work the cranes and stock the grocery shelves.

The saddest trombone.

Isn't this like every guy at the Unite The Right rally of 2017? Maybe crossbred with Michael Douglas in Falling Down

I saw the President sitting down and being all frumpy rather than standing on a platform and saluting the troops as they walked by.

This is actually the dark side of the social contract. When enough of the plebians have access to bread and circuses, they're content not to stand against empire.

What happened was too many people stopped getting theirs, and voted for King Heron (the fascist autocrats) instead of King Log (the neoliberals).

If the status quo is a crisis for you, and your options are only to vote for more of the same or put everyone in crisis, it makes sense to vote Heron over Log.

That's how we got here in the US. And many industrialized nations are facing similar paradgms. In fact, the current push towards liberal representatives outside the US is because Trump and MAGA serve a stark reminder how bad it is.

Which isn't how bad it's going to get unless we can, by a sociological miracle, get organized enough to general strike.

Then we'll see regime change and reform...provided we demand it.

There will be blood, just hopefully in the tens of thousands rather than tens of millions.

So did the Brevard County sheriff's department murder anyone today? Or beat them brutally? Or otherwise dispense unjustified violence?

GIMP. I practiced!

Um, a lot gets done without violence, including regime change. In fact, nothing swells the numbers of a movement like state brutality on peaceful protests, and that is amplified with the ubiquity of the cell-phone camera and the internet.

This is not to say a movement by violence is bad, just that it can detract sympathizers.

But don't worry, when the regime has to choose between giving up (say in the face of a general strike) and sending out the goons, they'll always choose the latter. No one tosses the One Ring into the fires of Mt. Doom. It's the same paradigm that leaves us with senile geriatrics unwilling to relinquish the power of office until it is pried from their cold, dead hands.

Usually, by then, the military has realized the regime is illegal and as luney as Aerys II Targaryen (The Mad King, who Jamie slew, SoIaF) and is willing to do the wet-work. By artillery if necessary.

Then again, destruction of property like burning the Waymo cabs, is a common necessity. That wasn't the act of rioters, but saboteurs. Waymos are snitches and have been reporting to ICE the location of targeted civilians.