GUEST POST by Webstir
In this time of police brutality, who can we depend upon to police the police? Who can we depend upon to police the prosecutors? The judges? Our lawmakers? You. That’s who. It’s your job. More than that, it’s your duty to your fellow man. And it’s not really even very difficult. All it takes is a little creative thinking.
Know this: If you’re protesting, you’re being surveilled. But to protest effectively, you must come to the protest organized. To do so requires that you surveil. To surveil effectively you must preserve your anonymity. If you don’t, anticipate a retaliatory response that will attempt to destroy your life. Or, even take it.
A smart first step is to hire a lawyer. The lawyer is your public face. They are ethically bound to preserve your anonymity so long as you aren’t using their services to commit a crime. But lawyers aren’t cheap. The way around this is to gather as many people you trust as you can and pool your resources. Send one of your pool to hire the lawyer and have them issue a Freedom of Information Act request to your local law enforcement agencies. Have them seek names, ranks, and badge numbers of every officer in the agency’s employ. Hell, if you’re enterprising, you can have the lawyer seek disciplinary records as well.
And remember, that same lawyer will also help save your bacon should you find yourself locked up – which you very well may.
Next, enrich the information you’ve gathered. Start plugging the names into public information web sites like Intellius, TruthFinder, Spokeo, or BeenVerified. These sites are a wealth of information. They will likely tell you email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, criminal histories, debts, relatives, and close associates. Other resources are county property record web sites and the Secretary of State web sites. If these require personal identification to access, use your lawyer. Take the data you found and then track down their social media profiles. Download the pictures of them from the social media sites in their civilian capacities and record any posts that appear useful.
Now it’s time to put the information you’ve gathered to use. Assemble a packet of each and every officer with a plain clothes face picture. Use your pooled resources to print hundreds of these packets and distribute them among your pool and among protestors. Make an electronic copy and distribute it to your associates online. Remember, you’re being surveilled. There are black hat cops among you and you’re going to want to be able to identify them. If someone is advocating violence and you don’t know him or her, check the list.
At the protest, use your information. Buy a bullhorn. When the cops get close, start calling them out by name. Tell them what you know about them. Tell them you know where they live. Tell them you know who their family members are. Tell them you know how much they’re in debt. Tell them about their latest post on Facebook.
The police rely on fear to control you. Being just a badge number instead of a human allows them to do that. Destroy their illusion of anonymity. Make them scared. Think about it. What would you do if a crowd of angry protestors were telling you they know everything about you down to your latest social media post? Me? I’d begin worrying about my family. I might also begin to think about a career change. Think too, about the likely response of the law enforcement agencies once they know all their information is out there. A likely response is to assign some of their resources to protect their dwellings and families. These are resources that aren’t hitting you upside the head with a baton or spraying mace in your eyes. That’s a win.
Also, take pictures of badge numbers when you find yourself in the thick of it. Once home, track them down on your database and distribute widely on social media. Tell the story of what you saw the officer do and post pictures and video of them if you have it. Tag them in the post. Let them know you’re watching their every move.
Finally, this tactic doesn’t have to be restricted to the police forces alone. Prosecutors and elected officials are often every bit as complicit as the cops themselves. Remember who is giving them the green light. Use the same tactics on them. Know your enemy. And remember, “[t]hose who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Stay peaceful, but be prepared to fight power with power. Knowledge, is power. Exercising it is your duty. Go forth, and sow fear among your oppressors.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
fellow worker
Hard pass on this. The advice given by webstir seems to derive from some \”West Wing\” fantasy world of how how power operates, who holds it and how power is wielded.
\”The police rely on fear to control you.\” – no the police rely on the state\’s monopoly on violence to control you – it is different!
\”Stay peaceful, but be prepared to fight power with power. Knowledge, is power. Exercising it is your duty. Go forth and sow fear among your oppressors.\”
No, sorry, knowledge is not power. The ability to impose discipline and control is power.
The idea that calling out individual bad actors will somehow \”reform\” systems is an enduring delusion of this type of thinking. It is divorced from real world analysis of the power dynamics involved. The problem is not \”police\” singular. The problem is \”policing\” as an institution.
Sound, thoughtful real world advice on this topic from sources as diverse as https://www.nlg.org/ to https://crimethinc.com/ is widely available. It comes from people engaged in actual struggle. Not blogger fantasy.
Mandos
Mustn’t lose sight of what this is all about: the fact that very many people believe that black people are animalistic, of “lower IQ”, dangerous, etc etc, and that the police are necessary to protect the nice white people from black people *of all types* by distributing terrorizing violence. Can’t separate education discrimination, the history of redlining, etc, etc, from police violence.
Ché Pasa
Most of the police acting out on the streets these days are sad little cowards and are terrified of you or anyone who would expose them publicly. That’s one reason why they hide their identities when out and about doing crowd suppression and no knock warrants and so on. They’re scared to death, and they often claim it’s because the rabble they’re sent to control are “better armed” than they are.
It’s bullshit, of course, but in many people’s minds, if a cop says it, it’s true.
Course given the behavior we’ve been seeing these last few days of police murder and civil unrest, and the routine lies the police, prosecutors and too many elected officials tell, traditional belief systems are shattering. It’s undeniable, some police don’t tell the truth, they murder, they’re sadists, bullies, and cowards, and so far, they can get away with it most of the time — as long as they serve and protect the people who matter…
Problem is, they’re not so sure who those people are any more.
Sad to say, a lawyer won’t necessarily protect you if you’re going after police, prosecutors, judges or elected officials. They’re officers of the court, not your servant, and their instinct is to protect themselves first and foremost. Unless you can demonstrate you wield enough power and money to protect them, don’t expect much.
The recent explosions of arbitrary police violence — supposedly in response to the riots, but realistically, it’s more like release of their long pent up rage at having to put up with people they believe don’t matter — are winning them few friends anywhere. Targeting the media as they have done may be their biggest mistake amid all the chaos. Their bubble is so tight, they seem to believe they can get away with it because… well, “enemy of the people’ and all that.
The last protest I participated directly in was against police brutality — the police murder of James Boyd in Albuquerque. There were many other routine police murders, but Boyd’s murder crystallized enough opposition that things slowly began to change. APD is still very troubled, but they don’t kill quite as many people annually as they used to. So there’s that.
Civilian review boards and such serve too often as another layer of protection for police and The System. Elected officials are often scared of the police and police unions. We the people can make a difference, but it takes a very long time and requires constant oversight because the police will backslide again and again.
Direct confrontation with individual officers rarely turns out well, but in some circumstances, the only thing that will lead to the ouster of bad officers is discovery and revelation of sexual improprieties. I’m not kidding. They’re immune from just about any accusation but that.
Of course they’re protected by layers and layers of legal immunity for actions on duty. Even when they egregiously and openly murder. So George Floyd’s murderers might still get away with it. And be reinstated in their jobs.
Disbanding and quarantining/detaining rogue police forces — such as that of Minneapolis — is probably the only thing will work to change the culture of impunity and killing that’s ingrained in too many police forces. But we’re not ready for that.
krake
The contradictions are exposed.
Even admittedly better than average mayors and governors (Atlanta’s Bottoms, MN’s DFL governor and AG) and opportunists committed to a “progressive” political narrative (Deblasio) side instinctively and institutionally with property’s enforcers. This isn’t mysterious. They ran for offices that serve a warmaking, wage-slaving, racist, ecologically devastating carceral machine. Those offices, even in the hands of well-intentioned meliorists, rest entirely on the threat, projection and use of violence (much of it in the form of scarcity, austerity and precarity). America is a captive-making project. There is nothing to salvage about it, you know, except for a career and a step up in status.
Cop gangs are aware of their special function. They know how an entire culture valorizes them. And that even reformers need them for legitimacy, and protection. The police aren’t afraid, any more than Prussian Junkers or Teutonic Ritters were fearful of the serfs, pagan slavs and peasantry over whom they ruled with impunity.
So what happens if you doxx the cops?
The rest of that machine will spend its immense treasure and captured labor hours to reprove its power, its claim to the monopoly of force, and it will use the cops – ever more motivated by your disobedience coupled to an admission of weakness – as shock troops against you.
Nah. Ef that.
You don’t doxx an overseer. You tear him from his mount and you remedy the contradictions with the business end of a misericorde.*
(* – MISERICORDE, n. A dagger which in mediaeval warfare was used by the foot soldier to remind an unhorsed knight that he was mortal. ~ Ambrose Bierce
If that makes you queasy, you can at least sleep at night in the certainty of knowing what side you are really on.)
StewartM
CP
Direct confrontation with individual officers rarely turns out well, but in some circumstances, the only thing that will lead to the ouster of bad officers is discovery and revelation of sexual improprieties. I’m not kidding.
Ditto that. About the only time I see a police officer prosecuted is when he is found to have drive full of child porn. To show how nutty our values have become, murdering someone in public while being videotaped, and even afterwards being shown to have planted “evidence” on the dead suspect (a weapon, etc) to justify the murder appears quite safe.
I thought Webstir’s post interesting, but I wonder if it requires too much knowledge and money to be effective. Just looking at the protesters, I doubt they have the money to hire lawyers.
I also think that Cenk Uygur was right on the video Ian posted earlier–cops act like this because they’re *trained* to act like this. Moreover, we hire people with the wrong backgrounds for the job. The fact that Derek Chauvin was a *bouncer* before he was a policeman virtually screams that he wanted a job where he could beat people up with no retribution. I have thought that perhaps the the qualifications for any police officer should be some sort of social or volunteer work where he/she actually had to spend helping people instead of hiring people who get enthusiastic about employing force.
Willy
@fellow worker, in a normally functioning liberal democracy, the state is supposed to be “We The People”.
Instead we have an overclass who view us as sheep who must be shepherded while they rationalize away any and all harm they cause while enriching/empowering themselves. That’s more like an oligarchy/kleptocracy, with most oblivious police “just doing our job ma’am”, and others being sociopaths who know full well they’re taking advantage of a good power food chain thing.
Do these places have practical ideas for restoring a liberal democracy, or are they just more anarchist woo?
krake
“I also think that Cenk Uygur was right on the video Ian posted earlier–cops act like this because they’re *trained* to act like this. Moreover, we hire people with the wrong backgrounds for the job.”
Why do we need police? Why do we need to hire property enforcers? Why is the entire Western world organized around the need to enforce class hierarchies, centered on control of property, bodies and capital, such that full-time, armed enforcers are essential to the flow of goods and people, and, as significantly, to the obstruction and punishment of all the flows of goods and peoples which do not profit those who rule these hierarchies?
What is so wrong with us that everywhere we go, we leave behind wounds and degradation so traumatic and severe that cargo cults of emiseration, punishment and austerity become inevitable – become the only way of existing that people can believe in?
krake
“Do these places have practical ideas for restoring a liberal democracy, or are they just more anarchist woo?”
No kind of liberalism can allow for democracy. This is why all liberalism, which is a discredited, bankrupt economic doctrine (not a kind of politics), produces both the republican governments that protect capital while it undermines the commonweal and the reactionary elements that inevitably overwhelm republics once the commonweal has been pillaged and more direct forms of capture and control become necessary.
Republics, liberal or otherwise, represent the material tension between arisocracy/elites and those whose bodies they seek to control. When that tension is gone, usually because elites are always better positioned to capture republics and use them to discipline the mass of people, republics go through a brief and very public kind of death as the institutional restraints on elites are turned outward as the militarization and then abolition of the public estate. This process has never yet proven reversible.
What then is “woo”, here, other than misplaced faith in liberalism and the corpse of a republic that cannot be reanimated? A republic which only ever, at best, preserved the tension between the haves and a small, mostly white, segment of the have-less-es?
Stirling S Newberry
Αφα
Manifestations nationwide
Police mendacity brutality
sparked gathering
photographs widely shared
on the on social unsocial media
entrance demonstration diminished.
Navigate a means of mental barricades
obscured by entry and exit.
Knocking spring meeting arrests.
Territory does not believe mailing
Blue shirts and sergeants,
windbreakers saying legal
but doing illegal instead instrument.
Say her name
call and response demonstrators Atlantic Avenue.
Then the violence came in flurries
shiny glass walls
with splayed across them.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-local-correspondents/a-weekend-of-anger-and-defiance-across-new-york-city-george-floyd-police-protesters
Willy
This process has never yet proven reversible.
Polybius and Michels? They claim it’s cyclical, but a very slow one at best where the sheep have to hit bottom before enforcing cultural change. I seek new social technologies hoping to at least speed things up so that we can all move to the next cycle of anacyclosis as painlessly as possible.
I took a brief look at fellow worker’s links. It seems that the disbanding of the police force has already been tried. In Somalia.
I’d rather not preach nihilism. If that becomes the inevitable way then I’ll be spending my time posting videos of my fart pranks at my new Youtube channel instead.
anon
Good advise though very unlikely that most protestors who are young, not well-educated, and/or poor will do this type of legwork. A lot of these protests and riots are out of righteous anger and frustration, not well planned teams of people with money and resources who will do their homework beforehand.
For those who are well-established with resources, they should have enough sense to remain masked and unidentifiable during protests, and do the research suggested lest they want to kiss goodbye to their jobs. I read about an Ivy League corporate lawyer and his friend, another lawyer, being arrested in NYC for throwing a Molotov cocktail at a police car. There goes their careers. You’d think they of all people would have known better to be more careful.
Acts of police aggression should be recorded, and yes, their badges and squad car number photographed or videotaped. This evidence is for media purposes and potential lawsuits against the police department. I’m paranoid when it comes to posting on social media so I’d personally would use a pseudonym and an account with an email address that has no connection to me and my identity when posting videos and photos. That clearly is not happening with videos I’ve seen clearly revealing the identities of protestors. People should really be more careful and there is no excuse not to wear a mask during a pandemic even if they don’t care about being identified.
Z
No worries, Sloppy Joe’s got this …
https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1267518144068935680
Z
Z
You’d have to imagine that there is a huge amount of coronavirus circulating through the police stations, jails, and courtrooms in the U.S..
If it heavily runs through the police, our rulers may lose their street enforcers.
As a cop, and you had a legitimate out, sick days, and health insurance would you want to go to work and deal with thousands of hecklers and irritants knowing one slip up and you can lose your job and possibly, under this environment, go to jail yourself? If you decided to take one for the team and work through it, are you really doing them any good by working with them when you have it?
Z
Z
It’s amazing watching the demo-zombies look to Barack Obama, Head PR Man for Point Zero One Percent himself, for leadership right now.
These people really ought to pull their head out of their ass, water it, give it some sunshine, and hope they grow a f*ing brain.
First of all, you don’t get leadership from a PR Man!
Second of all, no one should be asking the person who stomped on the Black Lives Matters and Occupy Wall Street protests and did absolutely nothing to address their underlying causes for any advice at this point on how to deal with the ongoing national wildfire of protests that were lit from these issues never being addressed. They should be demanding an apology from him!
Z
Mark Pontin
Z wrote: “(Obama) stomped on the Black Lives Matters and Occupy Wall Street protests and did absolutely nothing to address their underlying causes.”
Not only did Obama do those things, he and his administration collaborated very actively in Wall Street’s criminality and the greatest wealth transfer to elites in history. No shit.
In terms of government corruption and the active immiseration of the vast mass of Americans, someone else with a fuller grasp of U.S. history can correct me if I’m wrong. But I believe there’s nothing in U.S. history to compare it to. You’d have to go back to the Roman empire to find an equivalent level of corruption.
Dan
The transit union is refusing to transport arrested protestors. I hope this spreads like wildfire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rq6ml2s7Lh4
bruce wilder
I think the racial analysis that has become such a political cliche is a distraction. It prevents both clear thinking and effective collective action.
I do not particularly like the model of organization of process control that requires a boss and subordinates. I do not deny that it seems to work. One reasonable hypothesis about Minneapolis police is that that system of hierarchical control is not working well enough: better selection, better training, better supervision and discipline. It is somewhat encouraging that the police were wearing body cams. That could be an effective intervention of the surveillance state, if the political will exists to prosecute, which I wager does not exist.
Trinity
@anon, I agree but to me, being an Ivy League corporate lawyer has got to be one of the worst of all possible jobs for the education level. Maybe they found an out from their own misery. I mean, why would they even be out and about?
@bruce, hierarchies are not the best thing, but they serve a purpose by building in accountability. And that is what is missing pretty much everywhere at the top of the pyramid in the States. All risk has been pushed downwards, and all rewards go upwards. Hiring the so-called better people in a system that lacks accountability will not change anything.
AFAIK, the problem in Minneapolis is the police union. It cannot be a coincidence that one of the few remaining unions (with any teeth) in the US is for law enforcement.
Z
Webstir,
There’s information in the article that is potentially useful and it was a look at the situation from a perspective that I had never thought of before. Thanks for the info.
Z
Hugh
I was thinking about events in Louisville. A few months ago, four police cowboys burst into Breonna Taylor’s apartment late at night. Thinking it was a break-in, her boyfriend fired through the door, striking one policeman in the leg. The policeman unloaded on the house, striking the young woman standing in the hallway 8 times and killing her. Meanwhile the terrified boyfriend was on the phone to 911. Upshot? He was hauled off to jail for the next few months and charged with attempted murder of a policeman. The policemen were put on desk duty at full pay. Almost everything about the search warrant the police were serving was faulty: the grounds for it and the timing and manner in which it was carried out. Naturally, the police weren’t wearing body cams.
That’s where things stood until the Ahmaud Arbery murder in Georgia. Then Taylor’s family got the same lawyers representing the Arbery family, and finally there was movement. The boyfriend was released and the charges against him were dropped. The chief of police announced his retirement. But then George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis. There were protests and trashing areas in the downtown, apparently around the courts and police headquarters. During one of these, a policeman came up to a TV news reporter and for no reason shot pepper bullets at her and her cameraman. Then last night during a protest, a shot rang out. Two police officers and two National Guard rushed to the scene indiscriminately firing into the crowd killing a local black businessman and wounding his niece. The man’s body was left in the street for 12 hours. The two police were put on desk duty, and I know you will be surprised, this was because while they were carrying body cams, they weren’t turned on. I also saw video today of plainclothes police in shorts trashing and throwing into a pickup truck neatly stacked supplies, mostly water, which protesters had assembled. State riot police rushed between a gathering crowd and the local police so that they could continue their vandalism. Later the police department said the police were destroying things that could be used against them, something the video clearly disproved.
My point is that the Louisville story shows the police have learned nothing from the protests. They continue to act with an in your face impunity. They can shoot people casually, randomly, secure in the knowledge that they will walk. Bodycams are a joke if they aren’t worn, aren’t turned on, or are aimed at the ground. The sheer lack of professionalism on the part of the police has been mindboggling. No wonder no one respects them.
Meanwhile our most crooked and lawless President invoked the rule of law in his BS speech against protesters’ violence. What about lawless police and their violence? What about our lawless elites and rich? If he wants to turn the US military on anybody, how about against himself, the rich, the elites, the police?
In re Minneapolis, the Minnesota Attorney General has taken over the George Floyd prosecution. The independent autopsy determined that Floyd died of asphyxia due to the actions of the police. Nice to hear but also obvious from the videos. The medical examiner came out today as well with a very wishy-washy Floyd’s heart stopped. Another example of a professional acting unprofessionally.
A final thought to pass on, as someone in my family was saying, the reason Chauvin had his hands in his pockets was to concentrate pressure on the knee that was killing George Floyd.
Z
Caught Trump’s Tinpot Mussolini act tonight. That dude was amped. I’d bet that besides sex, Ivana’s greatest value to him is doing the double check for coke/adderall powder on his nose before he goes out in public.
Again, a man of no vision, all ego and instinct. He looked on the edge of cracking.
Z
Z
If Trump has any intelligence, or has access to any and will listen to any intelligent advice, he’s got to engineer one thing almost immediately: get McConnell removed as Senate leader. McConnell needs to be chucked and somebody reasonable put in his place and at the very least a bill needs to be passed, within a few weeks, that gets citizens immediate adequate monthly income in some way and places a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. If he doesn’t do that, he’s done and there’s a decent chance he may not even physically survive his term due to stress. If he doesn’t get it done, at the very least food riots are coming and that’s when things get real dicey.
It would also by implication silently scapegoat McConnell for the financial stress people are going through.
That would be the shrewd move for Trump: find some way to get rid of McConnell and get someone in there who will do business. And then give Josh Hawley a large voice in the Senate bill and outdo what the Dems in the House are proposing.
Z
someofparts
Somebody, Seder or Chapo, I forget which, noticed that the police have all the equipment they need and then some, but medical personnel struggle to get even basic protective gear.
Mark Pontin
Z wrote: “If Trump has any intelligence, or … will listen to any intelligent advice, he’s got to engineer one thing … get McConnell removed as Senate leader … and at the very least a bill needs to be passed … that gets citizens immediate adequate monthly income in some way and places a moratorium on evictions and foreclosures.”
Pretty to think so. I mean, you’re absolutely right and it would serve Trump to scapegoat McConnell. But they like to quote Talleyrand’s remark about the Bourbons over at Naked Capitalism: “They had learned nothing, and forgotten nothing.” Trump and his clique don’t even rise to the level of the Bourbons.
I’ve just been watching clips of him and his entourage stomping around Washington streets outside the White House, surrounded by imperial stormtroopers or whatever. With the possible exception of Barr, these are some of the most deeply, arrogantly stupid people who’ve ever managed to wander into positions of power in history.
Trump himself is done. But he’s too stupid to know it and he’ll escalate on the way down, so the question now is how much carnage there’ll be.
The empire is ending.
Z
Mark Pontin,
Yeah, instead of dispensing advice, Obama ought to go back to what he does best: tickling Bob Rubin’s balls with a feather.
Z
Stirling S Newberry
Coronavirus crisis coming
Flames, periods configurations
interrupted furious incline durations
Conflagrations
crisis multiplied by craigslist
officially mortality swept.
Countenance such misery
video horrific
Death.
Smoldering disparate trials not unrelated.
Predictability of Trump
misadministration.
Sentiment emergency virtually
attention public novel
coronavirus.
National security council directorate mitigates
bugs deep-rooted racist connotations
looting starts shooting starts.
Chronically negotiating monitors implementation.
Highlighted police misconduct
of a different racial background
glorifying violence
the shooting starts
is this the way of MLK Jr?
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/08/minneapolis-the-coronavirus-and-trumps-failure-to-see-a-crisis-coming
Stirling S Newberry
Scenes from a Weekend of Mass Protest in New York City
Eolian haze departed randomly
Minneapolis is everywhere
police hunting killing
downtown uptown
all around the town.
FDR Washington Sq., Gray
protesters and police cars in a dense
erected barricades
flagrantly using trash
responded batons pepper spray
in solidarity.
Honk their horns
because
I can’t breathe
no Justice and no peace
down
black lives matter
but not to the establishment.
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/scenes-from-a-weekend-of-mass-protest-in-new-york-city
Ché Pasa
Um, no, Mark. Just dig back in US history a bit to find plenty of equivalences to the corruption we’ve seen growing in our lifetimes. It’s baked in. The anomalies are years/eras with less corruption and consequent immiseration, not more.
A standard text on this and other issues of interest is Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.”
metamars
Tucker Carlson has finally called out President Trump, by name, for his poor leadership vis-a-vis the rioting. Good for him, though he didn’t do Trump any favors by waiting so long.
He (thankfully) particularly fingered Jared Kushner as having a deleterious influence on Trump. Trump was a fool to trust that good-for-nothing.
BTW, it was Carlson who finally got Trump to take covid-19 seriously.
See my post “(BAD TRUMP) Tucker Carlson Righteously Calls Out President Trump, By Name – Also His Worthless Son-in-Law”
Z
Pardon me, Melania, not Ivana (his old wife).
Z
sbt42
If anyone is interested in reading up on alternatives to typical policing, there are some solid resources to help you read up, all currently available at no cost.
The End of Policing
https://www.versobooks.com/books/2426-the-end-of-policing
“What To Do Instead of Calling the Police”
https://www.aaronxrose.com/blog/alternatives-to-police
Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/952-who-do-you-serve-who-do-you-protect
Ché Pasa
Saw some of the “Ouu, look at me, I’m so POWWERRR-FULL!!!1” display last night on a livestream and some snippets of the march to St. John’s online. Ugly, yes. But that’s where we are. Quite possibly, we’re past the point of no return.
More than ever, I think we’re going to wind up with a military quasi-dictatorship before November, and there probably will not be an election on the scheduled date. There may not be another presidential election for some time to come.
I suspect that if military rule does come, most people will accept it, grudgingly or no. The task of our new overlords will be to manage the final collapse of constitutional self-government so that neither the Boogaloo Bois nor Antifa (both creatures of chaos and show business at this point) get too far above themselves and to see that most people just sit down and shut up and do as they’re told.
Trump has essentially irrelevated himself. Whether he stays in office or goes won’t much matter, because nobody will pay any attention to the doddering fool. What he did last night was to “release” the military to do what they will domestically, much as he did regarding their actions in the various war theaters upon assuming office. What followed (unseen and unknown by most Americans) was an obscenity and a tragedy of bloodshed and destruction and displacement. They made a desert and called it “peace.”
It’s possible — though unlikely — we’ll see something like that transpire domestically. If there is significant resistance, don’t count on compassion from these folks. If you think the riots have caused destruction, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
On the other hand, I don’t expect much resistance. There wasn’t any to speak of last night, despite the obscenity of what was happening.
terrorist lieberal
Re Che\’s comment, positively agree, there will be no election, don\’t know what comes next, but the news continues to call this ass president when it\’s been proven that there is no law or order !! He\’s our dictator, but the news keeps spouting on about an election that won\’t come to pass ?? I\’m no scholar, but doesn\’t take a rocket scientist to see what\’s been or about to happen ??
krake
Che,
November is paradoxically too near and too far away, in time, for me to agree or disagree.
What I cannot see are the mechanisms by which a junta would be legitimized for Congress, various State governments, the divided SCOTUS, at least some of the officer class, or a number of the circuit courts.
Thoughts?