If the economy improves and it's still happening in 2026, agreed If either of those things don't happen, likely has zero political effect bsky.app/profile/dave...

Two things are true: ➡️ People writ large are *desperate* for life to be normal. It's why you don't see more people protesting, b/c they're hoping and praying that any day now things will be normal again ➡️ Legitimacy is still important to authoritarian regimes

That said, people who are desperate for life to be normal also reach a level where they get the MOST mad that it doesn't stop and join in.

I don’t think that’s why they aren’t protesting, tbh. 44% of America works in low-wage hourly jobs. The kind of jobs that fire you for one absence. That happens, there goes your healthcare, your transportation, your home. People caring for families don’t feel like they can risk that.

When you get a critical mass of people who think normalcy isn't coming, things snowball When you get a critical mass of people who decide the government is not legitimate, things snowball So regime incentive is to back down if things approach a breaking point

The media and Democrats will do absolutely everything they can to preserve the illusion of normalcy, ie support the fascist clampdown.

That holds true except for when societal arsonists are in charge.

There's a fine line between running Romania for 34 years with an iron fist and state TV broadcasting a crowd of "supporters" no longer afraid of booing your speech, and crossing it ends in your show trial and execution 4 days later.

I saw that speech on the evening news as the uprising was underway. The look on Ceaușescu's face when they started booing is priceless.

Do you have a pic?

On video here, from about 1:20. m.youtube.com/watch?v=TcRW...

Not the video I remember seeing. It had a moment where Ceaușescu is loudly booed by the crowd, and looks up, startled and afraid. Might be a different speech, or maybe my memory of something that happened 36 years ago is faulty.

He drove his dog around the city in a limo, too. I'm sure that really got under their skins.

These guys took all the wrong lessons from 2020. It’s impressive.

Gradually, then suddenly.

(It's why I expect Trump will, eventually, back off the economy-nuking tariff idiocy. He's not going to have a choice)

He'll back off after it's too late. It may already be too late.

If only we had a witty phrase for Trump consistently backing off.

The problem with doing pogroms is not knowing how regime actions affect the decisionmaking of millions of other independent actors Guess right, and your repression continues unchecked Guess wrong, and you're strung up feet first from a lamppost as you're pelted with rocks

Make Piazzale Loreto Great Again?

You can impose order by military force, and with enough of it you'll succeed. But it gets very exhausting very quickly, and there's a reason authoritarian regimes often end up aiming their military outward.

Just like Mr. and Mrs. Mussolini.

MAGA isn't voting for Dems anyway, regardless of how many protests there are The only people who matter at the voting booth are your own voters and the sliver of persuadables in the middle. Today isn't going to push any of them away 17 months from now bsky.app/profile/that...

But maybe for the midterms?

I HAVE to believe the MAGA #’s are sinking. It’s the only thing that’s going to save us! Trump’s screwed them. I think pissed off MAGAs will fight back at the ballot box with a huge Fuck You to Trump & his bullshit! (I HOPE so anyway! 🤷🏻‍♀️🙏🏻)

I know Trump supporters, and I avoid getting into specifics with them on politics, but I do get the sense you're right. They won't go Dem, but I think a significant number at this point will skip voting or go 3rd party.

also: you can’t per se turn them into leftists, but you can make them demobilised. they can be driven to shirk away

Particularly this time around when everyone knows that ICE are the people the protestors really hate. Cops sorta do solidarity with other cops, but if you're an LAPD officer and you keep catching bricks with your face because ICE is being stupid, there's a point where you wonder if it's worth it.

The military could barely pacify Kabul, at tremendous cost in lives, money, and munitions That was only ~4M people, and much looser rules of engagement The military won't be able to pacify Los Angeles bsky.app/profile/mmwr...

Correct. The area of Kabul is 106 square miles. The area of LA County is 4,700 square miles. Paramount (the site of today's ICE action) is in LA County not the City of LA. This place is too HUUUUGE to pacify.

Although mentioning the national guard does bring up something important Smart blue state governors should have very serious conversations with the commanders of their state national guard

Oh I’m sure they have

Not to mention, they didn’t sign up to get deployed against their fellow Americans.

The argument "they're going to send in the military" is shorthand for "the military will go door to door killing people and will saturation bomb cities with air power", which is 1. Unlikely, 2. the sort of thing that causes previously uninvolved citizens to form militias backed by rival governments.

Hey remember when in the 1990s NorinCo tried to turn LA gangs into paramilitary soldiers with select fire Type 56s and antitank launchers, but they got caught and that's why you can't get ammunition or arms from China unless you get them from a Canadian collector with an ATF special form?

not quite, they got banned after they sold missile materials to Iran archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/us-i...

Wait what?

Also, traditionally, few things are as damaging to morale as being deployed against your population. And, good luck doing anything at all with soldiers that are engaging in malicious compliance.

No. But it's in line with Trump's insistence on targeting California and Stephen Miller's demand to raid Home Depots, so it's a reasonable conclusion there was intent IMO bsky.app/profile/just...

Worth noting that the Home Depot guy is a huge GOP donor and he's probably not going to like the negative PR. Could be Miller has stepped on a rake.

Excellent point

Where do you imagine these 500,000 soldiers will be housed? Where will they get gas for their vehicles? Where will they get their food? At peak US involvement in Vietnam, we had just over 500K troops in theater and it was a logistical dumpster fire bsky.app/profile/mmwr...

It's about 700k in the army and marines not including national guard, the latter of whom will be reluctant to fire on their neighbors. They couldn't subdue the whole country without reinstating the draft.

Exactly

Also, I mean. To hold it from whom, and for how long? We already know how effective the US Army is at controlling local insurgent populations.

100%. Because every person you deploy to Los Angeles cannot be deployed somewhere else. bsky.app/profile/enri...

Also a majority of the army isn't combat arms

Moving 500,000 troops to one point without months of planning cannot happen. That is also assuming you could find 500,000 people who are not in critical positions & that the logistics are already in place. Yes, the US can redeploy some troops quickly, but not 25% of their total.

You're aware there are military bases in CA, right? 125,000 of them are already here! CA is not Vietnam. It's a billion times more accessible. C'mon. Did you really try to compare the logistics of Vietnam to California?

yeah but everyone really liked Vietnam and generally agreed it was a good war so I'm sure doing Vietnam 2 closer to home will be fine

Vietnam was a lot of things but it wasn’t a *logistical* dumpster-fire (but I agree with the general thrust of your argument)

Wait. Is that Jim Amendments' music???

Whether this is tactically wise or not, or even strategically possible, it seems obvious that ICE is pursuing an accelerationist policy and that this policy will enable frump to invoke the insurrection act. Why not take it to the place most likely to encounter resistance?

also, I would wager most soldiers currently stationed in California aren't combat-arms, let alone readily deployable against protestors. Hell, the Army National Guard only has 45,000 combat arms *in total.* The Army has 70,000 combat arms, the Marines 120,000.

If we have to get a 3rd amendment SC case out of this, this will be the dumbest timeline.

"Where will they get gas for their vehicles?" The Trump campaign deserted rallygoers at least twice: once in dangerous cold, once in dangerous heat; by not providing adequate shuttle service from rally to parking area. The second time, the buses drained all area gas stations and ran out of gas.

And they're not going to send clerks, linguists, cooks, IT specialists, chemical NCO's, F-35 maintenance troops, sonar operators, bulldozer drivers, etc., etc., to stand around carrying M4's with empty magazines, radios on different frequencies, and reporting to unknown chains of command.

As far as I'm aware, Trump hasn't checked of violating the 3rd amendment yet from his list, so that is always an option.

I beg everyone who thinks this’ll be a government curb stomp to check our military’s record against decentralized urban forces and guerrilla insurgencies

That person is really determined to give in to fascism regardless of reality, huh?

And the moment an occupying army descends on LA, anyone with a rifle can interdict supply chain operations and tie it up in knots. At some point, people with nothing to lose realize they have nothing to lose.

"I know, we could quarter them in the houses of the locals!" Ask King George how popular that idea was.

This Two million number is insane. They’re not calling in the navy reserve to pacify LA.

It's also a weird assumption to think that all of those soldiers would be okay with killing Americans, especially when a lot of those soldiers live here. Fox News viewers might think the cities are criminal wastelands, but the marines stationed at Pendleton know what Los Angeles really is like.

Not to mention the current Secretary of Defense doesn’t believe logistics is that important.

Also doing something like this is a great way to bring even more people onto the streets.

With this bunch in DC we might all find out why they stuck #3 into the bill of rights...

LA riots had 10k national guards sent out It was a logistical nightmare

bsky.app/profile/acyn...

Military will sleep in parks. This is not a concern for them. They’ll air lift or convoy gas in. Also not an issue for them.

It's like none of these people have ever looked at the force ratios considered necessary for operations in an urban environment to go door knocking.

“Get in losers, we’re going to lose the mandate of heaven” is certainly A policy choice.

That makes sense. Thanks for responding. I’m really hating the lack of coverage on this. And, as always, worry there’s something bigger going on that we’re being distracted from.

What? What would be "bigger?" Why do people keep doing this? These people aren't subtle; we've been watching them for ten frigging years or more. It is what it is. I mean-- yeah, idk. It's quite enough without adding onto it, really.

Alot of great points here. Their incompetence is one thing we have on our side. They don’t know what they are doing. If they activate military on citizens, it will be shit show bc there is not 100% agreement in military it is legal. They can still do bad things but will not go smoothly.

True. Stepping back it did look a lot like typical Trump incompetence.

Even if by some miracle they did manage it there’s still the entire. Rest. Of the country.

They don't need to police the entire rest of the country - just like they don't need to do ICE raids in every city. The vast majority of cities will not do anything.

Exactly. People need to stop with the doom and gloom and start looking at the reality of the situation. This isn't going to end how Trump and his people want it to end. This is a complete lose lose situation for him and his people, especially if he's actually serious about trying this.

Ahh, pretty sure the rules of engagement were not looser in Kabul, but outside that, yes to the rest. (Happy to be corrected though)

🤘

Also with a far Far lower risk of defection to boot

Assessment and Action: breakdown on the LA military deployment and how it follows the authoritarian playbook. It includes concrete steps we can take now. 🔗 lfitzhugh.substack.com/p/the-author...

They did ok in '92.

Except that Afghanis had less compunction about hurting an American. And American troops had less than non-zero hesitance to smack down Afghanis. So that comparison doesn't translate to the greater LA area.

This is also assuming that if shit goes full Posse Comitatus the odds of LA being the only city they would need to visit are pretty slim.

if this actually goes hot you'll have protesters in different cities intentionally playing rope-a-dope with the fed army get rowdy in one city until they're at saturation then go back indoors and let somebody 3000 miles away carry the torch they CANNOT enact martial law on the entire country

Rise up!!! youtube.com/clip/UgkxKvE...

They have sworn an oath to defend the constitution. Will they even obey an insurrectionist who holds them and their values in open contempt?

And I’m once again reminding folks MAGA is very loud but also (relatively) quite small

I don’t think there are any more persuadables to the right of Dems at this point. What they need to do is stop actively driving away their own base.

This isnt even just what they voted for. They **like** what they see, regardless of what happens to them in the future.

Right. We don’t need them to vote Dem per se. Them staying home is still helpful.

Trump won because more voters showed up for him in certain states than did non-voters either due to complacency, indifference, or disdain. There is no conspiracy. Just disengagement and suppression. All Tvoters are write-offs as turnout energy has higher ROI from new and newish + some comp/indiff.

Threaten me with a good time, lol

I get the impression he still thinks high tariffs are *good* for the economy in the long run, if they get a chance to be actually put in place permanently, he's just waiting for Wall Street to stop overreacting, perhaps when they get burned by timing a TACO Trade wrongly, and stop crashing at once.

He is and has been—but that’s also just making things worse by straight up weakening the dollar. And normally some might argue that a weak dollar means increased exports, but reciprocal tariffs are taking care of that. It’s just a weak dollar. (…maybe a good time to buy oil tho?)

you may be underestimating the narcissism involved

You better not back down. Our democracy house of cards will collapse if you do. It is incumbent for every lover of democracy to pick up his/her oar and help us row this democracy boat up the stream and help us fight the autocracy waves that are trying to make us fail. RESIST!!!

The vast majority of Trumper actions AFAICT is done with an underlying belief that you can't *really* break things Just keep doing these things that don't blow against you because they never will, you will never reach a tipping point (nevermind if you've already hit the trust thermocline)

TBF this is how Trump has mostly lived his life, bend or break the law and get away with it because trying to hold him to account is more trouble than actually prosecuting him

> who think normalcy isn't coming *for them* That’s the rub. In Kabul, in the colour revolutions, in the Arab Spring, people had something at stake. If Trump can persuade middle class white people that they’re safe and everything is fine, he’s safe. And he has Fox, OAN, etc to sell that message.

Important third point: the people who want normalcy blame the admin, not the protestors, for the current chaos.

I hope so but that’s not what happened after 1968

There's a cause and effect thing that I think people are missing here in their comparisons to the pro "law and order" backlash in summer 2020. In 2020, the feds and riot cops showed up after rioting started. Today, the riots are literally only happening because the armed, masked feds are there.

Seems like this would make a difference in how ordinary people respond right?

They'll believe what the news tells them

People wanted 2019 back, instead they're going to get 2020 on repeat except this time completely self-inflicted and managed by even more incompetence. Don't think that's going to play well with the wider public.

Legitimacy to whom?

The Minneapolis/LA things this past week now are definitely illustrating this, but also that 2020 had some effects of people preparing. If they keep poking, they're gonna find the tipping point *again* and the communities are better organized for protests and support now.

As you have pointed out, the decision to select L.A. as the location to initiate this major crackdown was a significant mistake. Repeated events of this kind, particularly in blue cities, will compound the error.

I was just saying, the 3A association might need to start limbering up