I agree, and I’m so proud of my countrymen for the risk they’re taking on to protest like they are. Every video I see where horns are blaring and ICE is clearly flustered feels like progress.
Minnesotans are amazing. It’s crystal clear that Trump/Noem/Miller are trying their hardest to spark a violent response, but the protesters are continuing to be entirely peaceful. Which makes me worry that they’re going to try and pull an Andor/Ghorman massacre gambit (in the show, during a protest, Imperial agents target Imperial troops, killing them with gunfire, in order to spark the troops to respond with gunfire and incite a broad massacre).
With the threat of invoking the Insurrection Act coming from the White House today and the threat to Gov. Walz and Mayor Frey by Todd Blanche, I fully expect by Monday the Act will be invoked, troops will start to take over Minneapolis/St. Paul and Walz and Frey will be taken into custody.
Convince me this won’t happen.
I say: Bring it on.
This is the perfect time for the enemy to overreach. Trump was literally falling asleep in front of little kids as Traitor Kennedy babbled behind him about children’s nutrition:
As in “can’t keep his eyes open for five minutes-level old, sick, demented, and dying.”
The nazis can’t win this. The military will do no better than ICE, which at least is sociopathic enough to attack and kill people. Trump is probably on course already to have a national uprising to handle; invoking the Insurrection Act will seal the deal.
This will be awful for the citizens of Minneapolis and Minnesota elected officials, and exceptionally bad for everyone in the short term, but there’s a big part of me that thinks we need this. We need massive overreach to get more people shaken out of their inertia and complacency.
For all the talk about peaceful protest, the reality is that major change almost never comes from peaceful actions alone. There needs to be some serious disruption.
Fuckin’-A, you said the same thing! This is in the AIR people: the feeling that we are READY to take these mutherfuckers on and OUT.
I’m not eager for this to escalate, as people will get hurt and/or killed. But I guess that’s already happening. It would also cause a level of disruption in the daily lives of Americans that we haven’t seen since the pandemic.
But, it’s probably inevitable and a necessary evil to shake off the complacency we are seeing in DC letting things fester.
Yeah, that’s the feeling: this country is cooked–but the People are not. The revolution is already in progress.
I agree, reluctantly, that escalation may be the only way to shake the country out of its baffling complacency. I really, really hate feeling this way, and I feel tremendous guilt, because I’m an American living overseas and I’m almost entirely insulated from the risk of consequence. I can make this statement from almost complete safety; I’m very aware of that fact, and it’s why I don’t express the thought more assertively, because my perspective is skewed. There’s no chance my blood will be in the street, so it’s easy for me to call for it.
But watching what’s happening, watching as the sleeping giant of the American public is being roused with agonizing slowness to anger, it’s hard not to think that blood in the streets will be a necessary price to have even a chance of ridding the country of these fucking monsters. The civil rights warriors of the 60s knew they had to allow themselves to be brutalized so the shocking footage would penetrate the mainstream bubble. And right now, we have the astonishing “they’d mock it in fiction” parallel with Iranian protesters rising up against their own regime, and because that government knows the value of that kind of imagery, they’re desperately trying to quash the coverage. Imagine if even a fraction of that kind of violence were widely viral among American internet users.
This is a disorganized, stream of consciousness comment, and I apologize. I’m just brain-dumping anger and shame and frustration without much structure. But what else can we do?
Well said, I’ve lived overseas for an extended period of well, so I can imagine how you feel. My own kid is in Japan, having fled the Trump madness.
Yes, we need to take out the “fucking monsters,” and with them the political and economic structures that gave them power in the first place.
Online, you are starting to hear that people are ready to die for this. I’m 54, and I am too.
Okay, I am not going to flood the thread with any more posts like this. I am worked up and pissed as hell.
My worry is that Wormtongue (Miller) is going to figure that the only way out of this domestic shit-show is to invade Greenland, even if it means killing NATO troops who are stationed there.
It might happen (either Insurrection Act and arresting Walz/Frey, or starting yet another war). But I think Trump will chicken out. Either way, the protests should and will continue until the federal terrorism against Minnesotans stops.
The baddies, possibly.
Highly relevant:
I just saw a report on CNN about the recruiting posters for ICE.
Unconscionable.
You know, I bet everyone is Minnesota has a gun or 3. (this is America, after all)
The rakes, shovels and snowballs ain’t gonna get it.
I’m being facetious of course. The agents better think though.
I saw the same report (got CNN on now). Yeah. I’d like to say that things are getting weird, but they’re now beyond weird. They’re frightening.
I thought of that scene in V for Vendetta near the end, where one of the Fingermen has been backed up against a wall by a crowd who has plainly had it with them and their terrorist tactics. Desperately, he shows his badge, identifying him as one to be scared of. And the crowd Just. Doesn’t. Care.
I think that’s going to happen before long. And it ain’t gonna be pretty when it does.
Yep. Check out the comments on the Krugman article: people are getting organized.
If the GOP wants to preserve the current power structures and their own political viability, they would impeach and remove Trump and Vance right now and make a deal of some sort with Democrats to normalize things. This is what they would do if they were smart–but they definitely are not.
I presume this is what you are referencing.
Sadly, past psychological experiments like the Milgram experiment and the Stanford prison experiment show that this type of behavior is all too common. Not to mention the very real-world example of all the lower-level Nazis who cried “I was just following orders!” after the war.
Yes, that would be it.