And it's not just that it's weird! It's that it's head-scratchingly unstrategic from a fascist optics perspective
Replies
it’s consistent with 🍊💩’s life-long contempt of the military though 🤷🏻♀️
aug 28, 2025, 3:37 am • 1 0 • view
Think it’s maybe not a bad thing. We’re not going to vote our way out of a dictatorship (that we didn’t vote ourselves into to start.) But also, not just a US domestic politics thing but rather Trump more ever just the front man in the US.
aug 28, 2025, 1:20 am • 0 0 • view
Imagine it from the perspective of the national guardsmen. They got pulled out of their day jobs for who knows how long to pick up trash, and to make it worse some of them are sleeping outside and I heard they arent even being paid for the bs
aug 28, 2025, 6:45 pm • 1 0 • view
First as tragedy, then as farce.
aug 28, 2025, 1:19 am • 1 0 • view
I wonder who on the ground gave that order.
aug 28, 2025, 1:26 am • 1 0 • view
Stop trying to have it make sense. There is no plan.
aug 28, 2025, 5:46 am • 2 0 • view
A lot of these guys have franchise manager brain: "if you're leaning, you could be cleaning"
aug 28, 2025, 5:51 am • 2 0 • view
It strikes me as more likely the commanders are ordering their soldiers to do something useful instead of stand around. When I was still in, this is the exact kind of shit we’d be ordered to do if they didn’t have anything else for us. Better than having a bunch of kids marching around with guns
aug 28, 2025, 2:03 am • 4 0 • view
Or it's preparation in advance and them seeming unthreatening makes us more accepting of their presence in advance.
aug 28, 2025, 3:18 am • 0 0 • view
And it's morale krptonite to the junior enlisteds stuck doing this stuff
aug 28, 2025, 1:29 am • 1 0 • view
I mean. It gets people used to seeing - and glossing over - military uniforms in their streets...
aug 28, 2025, 1:12 am • 6 0 • view
Part of it is that Fascistic image management in general has COMPLETELY escaped the admin's grasp. Not only do they not have a Leni Riefenstahl, but literally every man, woman, and child in the country has their own camera. They don't have a prayer in hell of controlling these optics.
aug 28, 2025, 1:20 am • 15 0 • view
It is an interesting question if omnipresent public video can help forestall fascism. It didn't work in Hungary, but maybe the onset was before most people had cameras in their pockets at all times.
aug 28, 2025, 2:40 am • 6 0 • view
Yeah, phones were pretty ubiquitous in America in 2010 when Orbán was first elected, but they were essentially nonexistent in Hungary (at least as far as I could find via Google), so I'm not sure those two examples are a good comparison.
aug 28, 2025, 5:26 am • 2 0 • view
I know there are some good criticisms of Hannah Arendt out there but she was on the money about how these kind of outfits inevitably must fall into the control of complete idiots and crackpots.
aug 28, 2025, 1:13 am • 12 0 • view
Someone very wise once said that these debased, destructive sociopaths can simultaneously be the dopiest cringe-inducing W I E N E R S (paraphrasing…), and maybe they can’t think beyond the audience-of-one Fox News optics perspective
aug 28, 2025, 1:29 am • 1 0 • view
The whole occupation is a political stunt and political stunts are supposed to tell stories. And the story this tells is, oops, actually these streets are so boring and free of crime that all we can think of to do with these guys is make them pick up trash
aug 28, 2025, 1:12 am • 213 44 • view
I think that’s part of it, too. They love the idea of having a group, like the guard, made up mostly of Black and Brown people, that they have control over that they can order to do this labor that plays out very publicly. Especially in the context of things Vance has said/believes.
aug 28, 2025, 1:17 am • 4 0 • view
What's weird is that Trump is doing this now and not like a month before the midterms. But he's an idiot with no impulse control
aug 28, 2025, 1:28 am • 28 2 • view
I'm not sure he's going to be alive at the midterms. He is not a well man.
aug 28, 2025, 11:10 am • 0 0 • view
My take is that it was a photo op to make them look less threatening and like good guys. To soften up their image.
aug 28, 2025, 1:13 am • 0 0 • view
It's a dry run for martial law.
aug 28, 2025, 11:09 am • 0 0 • view
I guess if you're feeling generous the narrative you can put to it is, "we quelled crime so quickly that now this is all that's left to be done." But even that sort of suggests their approach was overkill.
aug 28, 2025, 1:15 am • 86 3 • view
That's an interesting idea, but at the same time if you're a fascist you don't *want* your ground occupation troops normalized into seeming non-threatening. The threat is the point.
aug 28, 2025, 1:18 am • 62 2 • view
I actually agree with both takes here. I think a) Trump’s team saw this is polling poorly, and b) created a photo op to make the military look friendly and unthreatening, but c) not thinking through that it would also make the military look ridiculous
aug 28, 2025, 1:20 am • 28 2 • view
The sad thing is the only outcome was the military looking ridiculous.
aug 28, 2025, 3:30 am • 6 0 • view
A dictator so inept that the stormtroopers he sends in to occupy a city fail to find the imaginary gang threat and accidentally do civil service instead, a far better use for their time than the majority of what the military-industrial complex wants
aug 28, 2025, 1:22 am • 1 0 • view
Yeah no, you're right, I was just struggling to think of a benefit
aug 28, 2025, 1:22 am • 1 0 • view
Yeah, like, are they intimidating shock troops dealing with a surge of uncontrolled crime, or are they friendly neighbourhood peacekeepers? It’s disjointed and incongruous.
aug 28, 2025, 1:45 am • 2 0 • view
I suspect that threat was what they were going for and they're just incompetently whiffing like usual.
aug 28, 2025, 1:39 am • 0 0 • view
The were, not long ago, National Park employees picking up trash. But back then (March) it was considered government waste.
aug 28, 2025, 1:50 am • 1 0 • view
Yup.
aug 28, 2025, 1:13 am • 0 0 • view
They should be bashing litterbugs over the head with clubs and forcing them to crawl through the park on their hands and knees collecting trash
aug 28, 2025, 3:04 pm • 0 0 • view
Maybe not from a “I control them, they will do my bidding” standpoint
aug 28, 2025, 1:15 am • 1 0 • view