Last I checked, Hispanics are a very significant proportion of the Army.

LOS ANGELES, TRUMP WANTS TO ESCALATE HIS BULLY PULPIT AGAINST THE PROTESTERS BY CALLING IN THE MILITARY WHICH IS NOT NOT NECESSARY! DON'T FALL FOR IT! THIS IS HIS PLAN!!!!!!

Doesn't matter. Using military has the same baseline problems, coupled with even more logistical challenges, than using regular law enforcement. If anything it becomes even more of a losing proposition for the White House bsky.app/profile/socc...

i mean if we're ending liberal democracy there's substantial political risk in issuing unusual and unpleasant orders to your military as well

The Insurrection Act is not some "one weird trick!" to take over the country

Doubt you'd ever get that. Most gun owners aren't going to open fire b/c they're not killers Blockades? Molotovs? Throwing water bottles and rocks? Far more likely – and often enough bsky.app/profile/redl...

Thank you for giving us fact-based hope. We really are more powerful than we realize.

Don’t forget IEDs strapped to drones, which have not really been employed in urban warfare on this scale before but would make things very, very challenging for the occupying forces

I could still see a lot of LA people with guns showing up to oppose ICE. Not all of them, or even most, but probably a non-small number

I know exactly what the military does, which is why I know the logistics are more difficult in LA than in Afghanistan, not less bsky.app/profile/socc...

There's a reason guerilla warfare is A Problem™ and if it's happening in a large metro with plenty places for people to hide???

And strong personal gun rights.

Might want to listen to what he’s saying here, folks. A city with buildings and alleys, cars, barricades, all kinds of things in the way and all kinds of places to hide is potentially friendly to insurgents and difficult for occupiers.

Plus, Iraq would be a better comparison. Iraq was an insurgency nightmare, just like LA or any major city would be. A few months of constant attacks and soldiers would start deserting or turning their rifles on the officers that keep sending them out there to face more.

A key difference here is that the soldiers would not be trapped on the other side of the world, but would be able to simply leave and walk home at any time

Easy to tell who has never worked in a large bureaucracy

And infrastructure you want to preserve for your own use, so you can't just bomb it all bsky.app/profile/itst...

I've been told by people before that trump would just bomb any resistance, and uhhhh if a regime starts bombing its own cities, that means it is losing.

Maybe. The Kent State Massacre suggests otherwise though bsky.app/profile/your...

Kent State and also Jackson State

"your liberal friend" is definitely wrong, that would be an escalation, jfc i wish people would just say they *want* the fascism as opposed to saying nonsense

100% The erosion of state capacity from the government getting DOGE'd makes pacification harder, not easier bsky.app/profile/moch...

Totally agree. There are just apparently a *lot* of people on Bluesky who think supply chains materialize overnight 😂 bsky.app/profile/mada...

And all those tanks and tank crews and maintenance folk are in DC right now for trump’s b’day parade. It takes planning and personnel to move that stuff and it doesn’t move by itself, there are crews. Crews that need food, shelter, organizing, etc.

Ummm, does no one remember National Guard troops sleeping on the floors of the capital after Jan 6th????

It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to maintain readiness in peace time. Aircraft and other complex machinery will break just sitting on the tarmac. Domestic deployment would be an absolute shit show.

Unfortunately this is a common idea, see “just move manufacturing back to the US”

But no one in MAGA is voting Dem, so that doesn't really help them Meanwhile it antagonizes Ds who stayed home in 2024, and annoys unaffiliateds who just want things to be normal again bsky.app/profile/paul...

I guess a quasi-permanently forward-deployed Marine Corps has been highly influential to the minds of many Americans

Or they’ve been drinking the Hegseth MANLY WARFIGHTERS ONLY bourbon

I mean, for perhaps a good example to go by, Russia spent years planning an invasion and camped out on the border of Ukraine for a month, and they're still fighting a war that was supposed to be over in three days.

Protests in multiple states happening in random sequence could overstress the apparatus to breaking. Just fade away quickly after and a new protest starts somewhere else...

More overarching to me is that there are so many people in Bluesky who are desperately trying to manifest ways the military will be mobilized to kill all protesters, all the while saying that's a bad thing. Like, what the fuck guys.

Also, where are these ICE guys from? All from the LA area? Prob not, but let's say they are. Is this the same squad that was in fashion district/DTLA yesterday? If they're from Corona or Victorville, is ICE paying for motels? I recall someone (Raskin?) was pressing Noem on going over budget.

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 @unroll.skywriter.blue @unroll.bsky.social Unroll please

on a practical level, but also in the sense that there are a huge number of recently unemployed people who hate this administration

Smart people who are familiar with the inner workings of the govt. Trans CIA agents. FBI agents who did jobs assigned to them but that involved Trump, oh and a couple of highly ranked generals too. Legit all the best ppl who were in the govt.

De-Baathification worked so well in Iraq! Why not here?

Kent state did not result in general protests. Mody sided w/LEO. Also, 4 students died. 5 cops on buildings with ARs could do significantly more damage to a large protest. I hope it doesn't come to that, but we are dealing with unhinged people in office.

Yeah it did and nixon even had to bring an airborne unit into DC because the riots were getting so nasty

If 100 people get mowed down we'll start to see how many people oppose this and own guns. They may try it, but I think it would be the beginning of the end.

If they kill 100 people in LA, it will result in a tidal wave of anti-state violence. The protests will turn into Angelenos dragging cops out of their cars and ripping them to pieces lol

The public blamed the protesters for Kent State, though.

If *the government* guns down 100 civilians I think it's more likely that officials even remotely connected with that event would be at risk of assassination, or having their homes firebombed. I doubt Americans would just go home and sit quietly. And we have a lot more guns than we did in 1970.

Oh but it’s already been “shut down” by the courts, so the danger is over. Great job, everyone!

This isn't MOVE in Philadelphia!

What's the remedy to agents provocateur like proud boys types infiltrating crowds & escalating? Like the boogaloo boys did in 2020. They killed cops, set the cop precinct on fire & everything got blamed on "antifa". The optics of "the resistance" are awfully fragile, susceptible to bad faith actors

I'm not sure they're bright enough to figure that out ahead of time.

Or been in the military.

General strike!!! Get the oligarchs to weigh in to stop this!

or has lived in Los Angeles

I can't criticize that, I've never lived in Los Angeles either 😆 But I know procurement!

General strike!!! Get the oligarchs to stop this!

logistics of getting around LA are complex enough at rush hour, can’t imagine all the ways this could become Difficult

Just have the protest at 4:30 on Friday afternoon in Santa Monica and let the tanks get stuck on the 405

Now I'm imagining a Los Angeles Commune with barricades made of cars instead of cobblestones and furniture.

Yuuuuuup. I kept thinking that, looking at all these replies.

Depending on how this goes I think one major question is "do grocery store owners refuse service to occupying forces"? Of course if occupying forces bring plain clothes I don't know if they can be practically distinguished from Angelinos.

It is worth asking "what is the government's objective here?" As far as I can tell: * Bullying for its own sake * Actually carrying out deportations with ICE to keep the numbers up for Steven Miller. The logistics of actually deporting people are challenging!

And blockades can be a lot more effective if you know what you’re doing. And if you *know* what you’re doing, you’d be using blockades and cutting off supply lines and using your small arms forces to secure/disrupt supply lines.

Portland 2020 is probably a good judge of about the maximum protester escalation.

I don't think it's about opening fire. It's about showing enough force to be able to hold the line without firing a single shot. That said, I don't think it'll happen before the feds start shooting folks because violating open-carry laws is a major escalation that puts everyone in serious danger.

When this started going down yesterday, it suddenly occurred to me the very large number of left-leaning and anti-Trump people I know in San Francisco who are packing

The new protest tool should be the vuvuzela 😆 Also, this point about people not being killers is well made. Loving this thread btw 👏

Last night, they threw plates lol

The thing I keep coming back to is using this as a pretext to suspend Habeas, which in Admin thinking lets them yank anyone they don't like off the streets w/o court oversight. They already tried and end-run around Habeas with Abrega. An 'insurrection' gives them another angle.

The prob with this admin is that he wants to be some kind of warrior-king (that doesn’t fight) but fighting in pre-Napoleonic fashion bc Napoleon realized the benefit of an administrative state to organize and coordinate resources effectively.

In one sense this admin will make the history books, but if it weren’t for how we ended up making people rich and powerful here via attention and corruption, this admin would not be worth mentioning—if it was its own country, it could never rise to greatness or be noteworthy on its own it’s so bad

I believe that if they try to invoke the military there will be internal chaos. Hegseth is not well liked by DoD/troops, and being deployed against citizens would not go over easily

Also, that's the sort of action places like Idaho might respond to.

You're also going to have a decent number of active duty military that are gonna refuse because they'll recognize it as an illegal order. I don't think people realize how much it is reinforced in the military that the military does not operate in the US against US civilians.

ICE and FBI officers can quit their job at any time and not go to jail, and they’re still dooming raids. Refusing an order of a superior officer sends you to prison and gives you a dishonorable discharge that fucks up your life for the rest of your life.

So the thing about disobeying in mass is you're the boots on the ground with guns in your hands and your superiors aren't.

And in fact your superiors are in a highly precarious position for having issued or passed on an illegal order: if the regime ever falls they're gone with it.

History being written by the victor also means that punishments and non-punishments are also handed out by them.

So all you're really saying here is you expect We The People to lose and MAGA installs a 100 year reich and buddy why don't you just go dig your own grave already and lie down in it

So you're implying thr military is too stupid or to incompetent to know what an illegal order is? Good to know what you think. I'll stick with the folks who have told me what I know.

No I’m saying if FBI and ICE folks who can quit their job without impunity are happy to do this shit, most military folks who would face serious consequences if they do something similar aren’t going to be taking a stand.

Sure. Plenty won't. But some will, and that means even fewer people available to try to enforce martial law.

No they won’t.

Well I'm sorry that the military people you seem to know are such cowards. We apparently know different ones.

"They'll just do a joint op between the military, Nat'l Guard, DHS, FBI, & local cops!" It's clear Miller et al. haven't read the Mythical Man-Month but has nobody on Bluesky read it either? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myt...

It's like these people don't understand how much of a losing proposition this is for the White House to even flirt with this. Idk if these people are making doom and gloom their personality for clout or what, but it's getting really old.

It’s more than that - they don’t seem to understand that they’re sowing the very division and doubt that these acts are meant to inspire. Friendly fire never helped anyone.

Exactly. We need to be pushing back against them, not giving them exactly what they want. If these people want to keep with the doom and gloom, they need to stay out of the way of our fighting back. Getting in the way just means they'll get hit by shrapnel.

I think people are just sort of being their amygdala with their whole chest-it's kind the same as the little voice in your head goes when it's stuck on overdrive, you know? ALARUM ALARUM ALARUM ALARUM ALARUM it's not well thought out because in that state, you're just not.

Which is a good reason to be nice about it (I try), I guess, but mostly: ignore. block if needed. It doesn't help.

And I totally understand being stressed about the situation at hand. Lord knows I definitely am right now. The thing is, doom and gloom is exactly what they want from us. They don't want us fighting back. We need to make their lives a living hell until they figure out that we aren't pushovers.

Totes. I mean I can at least understand it from a "be alert!" pov if that's all they're trying to do--thanks, we got it, but it's fairly harmless of itself I guess. Just blocked someone who literally wrote "Martial law is coming" and "there is little or nothing you can do." "You," who?

When they *actually* say "resistance is useless" I figure bad actor likelier, but not interested enough to explore more before the plonk.

Indeed. Resistance is a very viable weapon against these people. They're banking on no pushback, so when we pushback, they aren't prepared for it.

And members of the US military are more likely to walk away from the job.

IIRC, even the Feds in the Civil War—with a higher population—relatively quickly had to turn to volunteers for reserves, greater manpower

They don't need to be deployed somewhere else. How many LA-level protests are happening elsewhere right now? None? Maybe one other city?