cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/81808
...the agents had demanded to ride along in the ambulance en route to the hospital. The driver replied that without arrest paperwork, they were not permitted to ride along. Agents continued to insist that the vehicle would not be allowed to leave until an officer was permitted to accompany them.
“I repeated again,” the driver said in their report, “that no officer is permitted to ride in the ambulance and that they can meet us at the hospital and that we needed to be let out of the facility. Officers then began walking away from me whenever I spoke. At that point, a group of 5-8 civilian-dressed men walked into the garage and just stared at me. No identification on any of them. I walked back to the ambulance and got into the driver’s seat. I flipped the emergency lights on and put the car into drive. I inched forward slowly out of the garage.”
A man described as being in civilian clothes and a neck-wrap then stepped in front of the vehicle and ordered the ambulance not to leave, according to the report. As more agents amassed about 15 feet in front of the vehicle, the driver assumed they were preparing to escort the ambulance off the property and continued to slowly inch the vehicle forward. But agents continued to obstruct the ambulance’s path. As of 9:39, a dispatch report said there were “50-60 fed agents completely blocking the road.”
At this point, the crew member in the passenger’s seat exited the vehicle to attempt to reason with the officers. After putting the vehicle into park, the driver began to exit as well. They said that as they opened the side door, “I looked up and suddenly the entire group of officers… were crowded around the open car door, some of them leaning forward towards me, inches from my face.”
The driver recalls that an agent “pointed his finger at me in a threatening manner and began viciously yelling in my face, stating, ‘DON’T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN, I WILL SHOOT YOU, I WILL ARREST YOU RIGHT NOW.”
How do you see this coming to pass?
Probably something like economic collapse as people start checking out and stop participating in society. People just start buying, and doing less and less.
Not saying this will happen, or is even a likely outcome. Just that it is such a path.
I mean, for one I would argue that there's already a lot of blood on Trump's hands, and will be more if their budget plan passes, so the original quote is already moot IMO.
But as far as placing blame on the left, I think any sufficiently motivated population will outright reject the version of America that the right wants to build, and part of that build creates that motivation. The vast majority of Americans don't want to be told what religion to follow, what books they can read in school, what words they're allowed to say; regardless of politics, rebellion is part of American culture. I mean to say, I don't think the "left" will be instigating anything, it will be the people generally demanding change out of necessity. If trump holds all the levers, then it's just a matter of time before most people expect him to use them effectively. The more he "peacefully" extracts wealth to his oligarchs, and rolls out military rule, the deeper he's digging his own...hole.
I don't believe we reach a future of "hypernormalization" like in Russia. Our American myths are too filled with rebels for us to accept that.
But we've now seen both Nepal and Madagascar protest the govt completely out of office, in both cases supported by their own military, with minimal casualties. Of course in each case you now need to solve the power vacuum problem, which could go many different ways, especially if other world powers start getting involved, which is an exponentially harder challenge for the US.
But how do we turn "demanding change" into actual change without violence? Trump and his regime have no care about what anyone else wants whatsoever. They won't give in to demands.
To be clear, the question isn't how we do it without violence at all, it's how do we do it without the left instigating violence. If 70% of the country is against him, we don't need to do anything but protest (ideally as a general strike). The states have the ability to grind his aspirations to a halt by just doing nothing.
HE might try violence to hold onto power (as he already is), but I personally don't think the military will help him hold onto power if the states are saying they don't want him.
His sycophants might try violence (as they already have), and in both cases, no one should feel bad about defending themselves from criminals of all types.
If our democracy is worth anything, and if our justice system is worth anything, it needs to be used to solve this problem. If you instead believe we should toss the Constitution out, dissolve the US, fight it out in the streets, create hundreds of power vacuums, and spend the next 20 years figuring everything out from scratch, during one of the most tumultuous times in human history, as other world powers and oligarchs continue to scrap for as much power as they can, then I respect that. But IMHO, this needs to be settled in a way that ends with a Nuremberg Trials v2.0, and a peaceful transfer of power to a president that restores respect to the office.
Trump and his cronies head the organizations but do little real work themselves. Governments and bureaucracies actually function by the actions of hundreds of thousands of individual people who can each find ways to disrupt or slow things without necessarily threatening their jobs. If there's not enough people to actually make the government get anything done, Trump's words mean very little.