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It seems that way in context too.
What pic are they referencing?
All of them. Every picture of ICE agents and many law-enforcement personnel in the US are now hiding their faces as standard practice and we all just kinda shrugged and took it as given, because the dudes on the cover of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 83 wear face masks so it's just what badass dudes do, right??
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.
Can the police do anything when they show up? Aren't ICE federal agents and above the local police's jurisdiction?
When local police show up, they'll make the ICE agents identify themselves.
Shoot first, ask questions later
Finally, some thing they are good for!
Third term? I'd be glad if we came to terms with it by his 6th term.
I am fully prepared for writing off this entire fucking generation.
We're going to enter dictatorship, tyranny, wars without end, mass waves of poverty, degradation of all our comforts and rights, and techno-feudalism and the average American literally- Does. Not. Care.
This is the way the pendulum swings sometimes. A massive group of people have to literally fucking rot in misery for no reason before their kids grow up and start anew with renewed energy and drive. I know this generation certainly doesn't have it. Let's not be fooled by millions of people turning out for celebratory marches on a single weekend. We all know that won't do anything and it will be a miracle if we can muster up enough group momentum to even get that again.
You may be prepared to give up, but the rest of us aren't. I hope you find your hope before it's too late.
going on a half-century and seeing everyone make the same stupid mistakes over and over, seeing generations not only not pass down wisdom but actively abandon the next generation over and over, it makes it hard to have hope.
I respect and support anyone trying to make change, I will continue to do what I can in my situation, but I don't have expectations anymore. At a point I'll be retreating to the woods with my loved ones to close out the world and spend more time gardening than scrolling.
and seeing everyone make the same stupid mistakes over and over
Propaganda has improved. People don't have communities. It's worse. People have to be more clever than before to compensate.
The guys so old, I'm not sure hell make it through this term. He's clearly not well, but that's what makes this all crazier. Dems at least knew to kick out their senile old man, how the Republicans are okay with this is wild.
They’re okay with it bc Trump has a cult and many of his cult members are the ones voting the other republicans into office. If they kick out trump, they kick out a bunch of their voter base. Because unfortunately there’s a larger amount of non-cultist republicans that will still vote republican but just not for trump bc “there’s a difference” between the guy doing the bad things and all his best friends “begrudging” helping him do the bad things apparently. Basically they’re delusional about how politics actually work
Sigh
The same way they have been in denial until now. Why did you wait for trump to comes to terms with it?
Before we elected Trump, the fascism was still nascent. Ur-Fascism as Eco called it.
It's dishonest to pretend that this is the same level of fascism that we've been experiencing for decades. It's not. Trump and the Heritage Foundation kicked it into overdrive.
Being relatively a child, mostly. Add to that the apparent social progress of Obamas presidency.
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.