After several days of ICE raids, protests, a burnt car, a burnt shopping cart, teargas, riot gear, and now the California National Guard being called out despite California not wanting it, things in Los Angeles are simmering:
Live feed from ABC7 Los Angeles:
California National Guard troops arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday in a show of force following scattered clashes between immigration agents and protesters and amid a widening political divide between California and the Trump administration.
The move by President Trump to activate nearly 2,000 guardsmen marked the first time since 1965 that a president has deployed a state’s National Guard without a request from that state’s governor. The decision was met with stern rebukes from state and local officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom who said the deployment was “not to meet an unmet need, but to manufacture a crisis.”
Newsom’s office on Sunday afternoon sent a formal letter to the Trump administration asking them to rescind their deployment of troops.
“There is currently no need for the National Guard to be deployed in Los Angeles, and to do so in this unlawful manner and for such a lengthy period is a serious breach of state sovereignty that seems intentionally designed to inflame the situation, while simultaneously depriving the state from deploying these personnel and resources where they are truly required,” the letter reads.
On Sunday afternoon, there were tense moments outside a federal detention center in downtown L.A., with officers firing tear gas and less-lethal rounds at protesters.
Around 4 p.m., a swarm of protesters streamed onto the southbound side of the 101 Freeway, blocking traffic. The protesters were in a standoff with dozens of officers lined up under the Los Angeles Street bridge. The freeway remains closed between Alameda and the 110 Freeway, according to LAPD.
But other areas that had seen unrest over the last few days, including the Garment District, Paramount and Compton, seemed calm.
It was unclear exactly how many troops were deployed to Los Angeles as of Sunday afternoon. The National Guard’s 79th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, based in San Diego, said Sunday that 300 personnel were on the ground to protect federal property and personnel.
The false flaggers hiding amongst the peaceful protestors have started ordering Waymos and destroying them.
Which would be funny if it wasn’t a false flag.
There are always going to be people doing stupid and dangerous things in the middle of protests. It doesn’t diminish the overall message, the need for protest or create the “need for unilateral escalation” by authorities.
I just hope they used a burner credit card for the Waymos.
It’s not funny to watch you buy into the utter nonsense, Jaybird. Granted, half the liberals have also.
Do you want a little essay about what _actually_ happens at protests? Left-based protested, let’s be clear, when they are on the right the police mysteriously behave differently.
There are people being somewhat peaceful. The police arrive, and start being hostile. Eventually, the police choose violence, sometimes in response to incredibly vague things, sometimes in response to, yes, false flags. But hypothetical false flags are not really the point. Sometimes someone in the actual crowd throws something, even! The point that single incidences are used an excuse by the police to start the actual violence against the _people in general_. Not against the people who did the violence, not by backing off, but escalates the confrontation against _everyone_ even when the people doing the violence (Protestors or plants) are a trivial amount.
The problem is the collective punishment. It doesn’t matter who ‘really’ caused the police to react as they did, it’s that law enforcement shouldn’t be doing collective punishment to start with, especially when it could just literally leave.
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Incidentally, what’s going on here is not that. This _isn’t_ a ‘peaceful protest’. It’s not supposed to be. And it’s very silly to pretend it is. There are attempted peaceful protests as _part_ of this by people who have not gotten the memo, but it is not that as a whole.
This is basically the first step of an insurrection against fascism. It started as an attempt to stop the secret police from dragging people off to overseas gulags. It’s attempting to disable their vehicles and waste their resources.
That is, straight up, what’s happening. I know it’s hard to understand that is happening in this country, but it is.
The worst part is that the general public will associate the false flaggers with the Democratic Party even though the Democratic Party are composed of, alternately, Nazis and spineless jellyfish.
The people throwing the rocks are people who actually believe things, people! COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THAN THE DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS!!!!
Unless, of course, they’re false flaggers in which case we can bring up Reichstag Fire comparisons.
So just completely ignore my point that false flags are irrelevant, huh?
Anyway, there’s absolutely no actual evidence Reichstag Fire was a false flag. I know that’s gotten into popular culture, but the only actual historic uncertainty is if Marinus van der Lubbe was completely alone or if he had some people help him. There is no doubt he did it, for what appear to be ideological reasons, and there is evidence there was a larger communist conspiracy behind it. It was just a communist (Or two or three) who decided to burn down the Reichstag to make a political point about working conditions in Germany.
It was, in fact, _exactly_ the sort of thing that actually happens at protests: One lone fanatic does something, which the authorities use as an excuse to crack down on _everyone_ ‘like them’.
And to make it clear: All this yammering about ‘peaceful protests’ does is make it where they can be rendered invalid if literally one person does something that can eb seen as non-peaceful. Hence the fact that the authorities sometimes use false flags, and hence the fact people will call everything a false flag.
But that is the entirely wrong paradigm to use to start with. Violence, especially the very small sort of violence that happens at protests (Which is basically just rock throwing.) does not discredit anything. Individual people can do anything they want, there is no magical mind-control that can stop them.
And, incidentally, we also remember pro-Palestinian protestors on campuses trying to filter who was allowed on their side to weed out bad actors, precisely _so_ this couldn’t happen, and how that filtering _itself_ turned into claims of antisemitism. So it has become clear it is a literally unwinnable Catch-22, if protestors in public trying to control who is ‘inside the protest’ so violence can’t happen in the protest, people will just scream and yell about how the protestors will not allow them places and that said refusal is itself violence. Let them in, of course, and they are now protestors and any bad behavior they do is part of the protestor.
It really is clever how the conservative media has invented way to discredit any protests they want.
Although, this is not a protest. This is an insurrection that has some protests happening inside it.
The duplicitous news media is doing nobody any favors by going out of their way to run with the whole “mostly peaceful” thing rather than acknowledge that this is an insurrection.
They probably think that saying “this is an insurrection, but the good kind” will hand Trumpler a W.
They are already handing 47 a win by u critically reporting his words calling this a riot and an insurrection. They are already handling him a win by ignoring the lopsided escalation that David discusses quite correctly upthread.
ABC News has provided our “mostly peaceful” moment.
there’s a large group of people, it could turn very volatile if you move law enforcement in there in the wrong way, and turn what is just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn into a massive confrontation
“just a bunch of people having fun watching cars burn”
I, too, am a fun-loving guy. So I get it.
It was, in fact, _exactly_ the sort of thing that actually happens at protests: One lone fanatic does something, which the authorities use as an excuse to crack down on _everyone_ ‘like them’.
one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory
That can work for protests too. One person starts a fire or breaks a window and others will copy but more so. Or better yet, the cops have to step into the crowd to get that “one fanatic” and his fellow protesters back him up.
The better organized protests understand that’s an issue and take steps to maintain control, but not all protests are organized.
Broken windows theory is pretty discredited to start with, and most people agree it confuses corrolation with causality. But even it doesn’t postulate that it applies to crowd, the premise is that it is a true _over time_.
That can work for protests too. One person starts a fire or breaks a window and others will copy but more so. Or better yet, the cops have to step into the crowd to get that “one fanatic” and his fellow protesters back him up.
You really do not understand what happens at protests. The people angry and throwing things are almost always throwing them in response to _what the police are doing to protesters_, and literally all the police have to do to stop it is back off. Additionally, almost all violence is directed _at the police_, not the random surroundings. Which, again, means that without the police being there, there is no target.
There are basically no ‘protests’ that start out with the goal of damaging anything, or are angry at any actual person there.
This is why, incidentally, I am very clearly saying that has been happening in LA _isn’t_ (just) a protest. It was a spontaneous attempt to stop law enforcement from doing their duty. (And by ‘duty’, I mean, ‘shipping people off without a trial to be tortured in a foreign gulag’.)
That’s not a protest, that’s the textbook definition of insurrection: A rising against civil or political authority, or the established government; open and active opposition to the execution of law in a city or state.
I think people are not understanding the current situation: Part of the US is in open insurrection because the US government has decided to can, and has started to, _unlawfully torture them to death_, and the Democrats couldn’t be bothered to literally do anything about it.
and literally all the police have to do to stop it is back off.
So shop owners should just protect themselves?
There are basically no ‘protests’ that start out with the goal of damaging anything, or are angry at any actual person there.
Shop owners arming themselves to protect their propriety would probably agree, but still say it doesn’t matter and predict property damage.
LA _isn’t_ (just) a protest. It was a spontaneous attempt to stop law enforcement from doing their duty.
Fully agreed.
the US government has decided to can, and has started to, _unlawfully torture them to death_,
If this were true then we could disarm this situation by simply deporting people to their original country and not to that mass prison.
IMHO that’s not the case and you were correct before. The people are trying to shut down ICE because they’re trying to do their jobs and enforce bad policy.
So shop owners should just protect themselves?
The problem is not the police being there. It would be fine for the police to stand there passively protesting property.
The problem is that when the protest is from the left, the police, a good chunk of the time, end up doing completely insane irrational things that are clearly designed to provoke the protestors, like kettling them around nonsensically and trying to arrest them because they are walking on some undefined ‘wrong part of the street’, or literally getting in their faces and screaming at them, or just throwing around pepper spray for no logical reason.
They don’t do that to the right, they are incredibly deferential to the right. The Jan 6th people, it should be noted, did not have a permit to protest at the Capitol and if they had been the left, would have been _immediately_ arrested just for being there. The police would have arrested people for setting foot on the Capitol steps or something. As it was, the police were so deferential to an _actual violent mob_ that several of them got killed by said mob. (An actual violent mob, you know, the thing they always pretend that left protests are, but I don’t recall the left ever _trampling cops to death_. Weird.)
This because the right is made up of the sort of the people the police think they have to protect, and the left is, bluntly, the opposite.
If this were true then we could disarm this situation by simply deporting people to their original country and not to that mass prison.
Who is ‘we’ here?
In case it’s not clear, I’m on the side of the insurrection. I’m not really doing anything that would count as part of that, but if I had a ‘we’ here, it is with them, not the Federal Government.
Instead of an insurrection, I would much rather the other people we have elected in the Federal government, along with the Federal courts, to solve this, but they are absolute disconnected morons and incapable of action, so I guess an insurrection it is.
IMHO that’s not the case and you were correct before. The people are trying to shut down ICE because they’re trying to do their jobs and enforce bad policy.
…yes, and that bad policy is Trump’s immigration policy, which, again, has sending people to torture prisons without due process (Not that I know what due process for that would be!) as part of it.
If you want to argue that the policy could be slightly different, it could hypothetically not include that specific part, and people would still be fighting it…yeah, I guess. Probably not as much, but some. Not really sure if that’s important.
I find it confusing, disappointing, and frankly, disturbing that so many libertarians of yesteryear have become in effect, if not in explicit intent, apologists for government violence. I’ll think of this image every time I see it happen from now on.
Personally, I think we should get rid of Qualified Immunity and do our best to tackle police unions.
You and I agree on QI. But unionization haze very little to do with why the President is federalizing the National Guard and threatening to deploy Marines in domestic soil.
Yeah, I want to say that the insurrection is why he’s doing that.
You mean people protesting the escalation of state sponsored violence in their communities?
Or do you agree with the president and the SecDef that actually using the First Amendment constitutes a violent act against the government.
No, I mean the insurrection part.
The LA police union will make sure this guy keeps his job: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reporter-los-angeles-protests-rubber-bullet-lauren-tomasi-9news-australia/.
I’m sure getting rid of qualified immunity and cop unions, two things I’m all for, will fix this.
Is this the “that’s not a silver bullet” argument?
Because, if it is, I’d like to point out that it won’t solve Palestine either.
Because those things have nothing to do with Palestine. Interesting deflection however.
Back in the heady days of the last time we had a bunch of people having fun and watching cars burn, there were a bunch of discussions of the importance of police reform.
There was a bunch of suggestions made and, get this, one of the go-to criticisms against the lists of suggestions made to reform police involved pointing at this or that item in the list and complaining that it wasn’t a silver bullet.
Like, there was arguments against change (effectively in service to the status quo) because the changes suggested contained items that were not silver bullets.
When asked for what should be done instead, the responses were much loftier. “We need to address racism” or crap like that.
Which, you’ve got to admit, would be a silver bullet. If it didn’t work, you could just say “we didn’t address racism *ENOUGH*” and Bob’s your uncle.
Anyway, we’re in a situation where people are rioting (“*SOME* people are rioting. Not all.”) and looting and setting stuff on fire and the need for people to distance themselves from Trump’s 100% opposition to that sort of thing results in them effectively defending the mostly peaceful bullshit all over again.
What happens today?
What happens tonight?
Who gets sick of it first?
Whenever someone says that point 18 of the 20-point plan isn’t likely to move the needle very much, we hear “so you’re saying it’s not a silver bullet?” That would be a good point if that were someone’s actual argument. But it’s not. It’s a lot easier, though, to invoke anti-werewolf ordinance or the Lone Ranger than to grapple with the genuinely tough empirical question of the likely practical effects of Point 18 and whether it is, all things considered, worth doing. Unless you’re of the something must be done, this is something, therefore we must do this school, which, admittedly, makes life easier.
That would be a good point if that were someone’s actual argument.
Oh, it’s not a strawman! It happened here in Oscar Gordon’s “Altering the Policing Paradigm“.
Oscar wrote a post in which he posited a list of different things that needed to be done to police forces around the country to make things better and the list included:
And that list right there was in the section called “other ideas” that followed the section with thicker paragraphs that talked about altering the paradigm of the police in general.
And what was the counter-argument I linked to? That’s right:
I am not sure that abolishing QI is the magic bullet people imagine it to be.
I appreciate that you think that I was beating up a strawman because, surely, that argument is so bad that I must be making it up. I do.
Perhaps you should accuse me of “nutpicking” instead but the counter-argument to that would be something like “who among us are *NOT* nutpicking when we argue against the arguments given here?”
I refer those interested to the link to see who is making an actual and who is throwing around a catch phrase as if it were one.
“Sure, Jaybird used copy/paste, but that doesn’t mean that someone responded to a list by pointing out that the 5th thing on it wouldn’t be a magic bullet!”
I don’t find it confusing at all. Libertarians want state violence when it is used for purposes they support.
“They’re such hypocrites for not continuing to press the ‘collaborate’ button no matter what.”
700 Active Duty Marines Deployed To Los Angeles. This is… very far from ideal.
ICE kicked out of a Pasadena Hotel: https://bsky.app/profile/ashervo.bsky.social/post/3lr6s3pcbdc24
Meanwhile, the Federalized National Guard did not even get a single night in such luxurious digs. Just imagine what that place smells like.
Trump’s team is planning this with the skill that one would expect.
I was reading the other day that a deployed infantry squad carries at least a week’s worth of rations and shelter in those god-awful heavy packs they train with. What happened?
Trump’s omnishambles inability to do logistics helps and hurts him and his opponents in interesting and unexpected ways.
One of the trillion dollar questions that no one wants to find out the answer to is how will the military react if Trump orders them to do something like open fire on civilians?
The most likely and scary answer is some will do it and some will not but I think even Trump and Co are not sure how much they can bend things.
What if you knew her and
Found her dead on the ground
And the guy shot her got a pardon?
Trump’s omnishambles inability to do logistics helps and hurts him and his opponents in interesting and unexpected ways.
Oh, this one isn’t Trump fault. You see, the US military has amazing ability to do logistics anywhere in the world. Literally anywhere. At a moment’s notice. They have the best logistics on the _planet_, of any organization that has ever existed in all of human history. (Granted, part of that is because they are incredibly inefficient and willing to operate like money grows on trees.)
Any prior US president could have ordered the National Guard or Marines or whatever to LA and all that would have basically be magically been taken care of by the military, no effort at all.
The actual fault here is Hegseth, who is just a complete screwup in every possible way. It cannot be stressed in how wrong he is in everything even vaguely related to the military. A literal random person on the street could run the military better, and that’s not hyperbole.
I’m not sure how he has screwed this particular thing up, but it’s very clear he has.
Starring Donald Trump as Julius Caesar, Peter Hegseth as Mark Anthony, and Laura Loomer as Cleopatra.
Trump meant the admin broadly.
Of course, it’s Trump’s is why Hesgeth is in charge at DoD, so it’s also Trump’s fault really.
I’m sorta wondering if Trump is going to start violating the 3rd amendment.
He violated every other amendment.