7 ms·

I don't recall anyone ever saying... Don't focus on words. Focus on actions. For example, the action of deploying the military on Americans does not make condi

by dfxm12 1y ago

I don't recall anyone ever saying... Don't focus on words. Focus on actions. For example, the action of deploying the military on Americans does not make conditions better for us. Quite the contrary. The action of having a military parade for the president's birthday is expensive and doesn't benefit us. That money could be going to education, school lunches, Medicaid, building bridges, etc. But it isn't. it is only going to stroke the president's ego. Most of his actions, EO's, deals, bills, etc., fall into this category.

dotancohen 1y ago
[flagged]
- ty6853 1y ago
  I don't know it re-establishes order but rather teaches the populace to up the ante. While I don't condone repeating history, it is instructive to look at history. When this military-type response was done at Waco, Timothy McViegh looked at that (he was there) and took out 10x as many feds as they took out citizens. And it sparked a very long period of militia movements, etc.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    Are Feds not citizens in the US? You guys have a stark division between the government employees and the not-government-employees. Isn't the US government "for the people, by the people"? Serious question. I'm not disputing what you said, rather I'm trying to understand it.
    - deleted 1y ago
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    - ty6853 1y ago
      No feds aren't citizens in the US in any conventional sense. They have qualified immunity and a special kind of sovereign immunity that even state and local police do not have. They can initiate violence whereas citizens cannot. They can shoot a fleeing person as a citizen cannot. They can lie to you freely but if you lie to them (their interpretation of a lie), a felony. They generally can't be held accountable unless they are dumb enough to say the quiet parts out loud, and even then usually not. They are also effectively impossible to sue, so you'll probably never see any justice in the courts if they act unlawfully. Even if manage to get the lawsuit going they will play fuck-fuck games with jurisdiction until you lose (as I found out when trying to sue feds for stripping me naked, cavity searching me, and executing a fraudulent warrant on a fabricated dog alert -- no one would take my case because they had lost similar cases every time).
- sleepybrett 1y ago
  They weren't rioting until the crackdown on the peaceful protest started.
- jvanderbot 1y ago
  Yes, if we focus on actions, the action of causing public disorder is a glaring example of things we do not want in civil society. We also do not want tanks in our streets. Both seem like bad things, honestly, so I'm wondering how we got here.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - trust_bt_verify 1y ago
      Reposting this everywhere doesn’t make it truthful.
      - deleted 1y ago
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      - dotancohen 1y ago
        Where have I reposted this? As for not being true, are the newspapers lying? Are those photographs fakes?
    - throwaway894345 1y ago
      > Clearly if these people torching the cars are waving foreign flags, they are a foreign enemy and thus the military is appropriate, no? No. Torching cars is already a crime and the city and state were already restoring order. The kind of flag waved while a car is torched does not change the calculus. Critically, a US citizen does not cease to be a US citizen because they waved a foreign flag; we have free speech in the United States, and flag-waving is protected by the first amendment. Also worth noting that none of this would have happened if the regime didn't deliberately provoke it in the first place.
      - alxfoster 1y ago
        Honest question: how does this calculus change when the person waiving a foreign flag on a burned out vehicle is actually not a citizen and armed with a weapon.
- ChicagoDave 1y ago
  This is the lie. At every step, immigration agents and police have instigated the violence. There are no riots. People are protesting and blocking access to vulnerable people. LA is not on fire. These incidents are in very small geographic areas even though media would suggest it’s widespread. People are pushing back when rubber bullets and tear gas are being used, illegally. U.S. citizens have a right to protest. This is baked into our constitution.
- code_for_monkey 1y ago
  You give away the game right here. You don't consider 'rioters' americans, you're already othering them right in the question. Fascism 101!
  - freedomben 1y ago
    GP said they don't live in the US, it's possible English isn't even their first language. If they are a non-native speaker and just made a translation/wording mistake, you might feel like a pretty big asshole twisting that to call them a fascist (which word btw, is pretty overloaded and has become essentially meaningless to a large number of people). It's also quite possible they mean "Americans" in a general sense in that the Marines are not being turned loose on the American public. They are being focused on the rioters specifically. Obligatory self-declaration since you and many others will probably jump to conclusions about my opinion (as for whatever reason, we seem incapable of nuance even to the point of understanding that not everything in life is completely black or white), even though I've said nothing of it until now: I think Trump's actions are grotesque, authoritarian, and fascist, and it really pisses me off.
    - dttze 1y ago
      [flagged]
  - ExoticPearTree 1y ago
    > You give away the game right here. You don't consider 'rioters' americans, you're already othering them right in the question. Fascism 101! If they are non-citizens, they are not american. Pretty cut and dry distinction. Nothing fascist about this.
    - simtel20 1y ago
      I have neither seen nor heard anything that would lead me to believe most of the protesters are non-citizens or non-resident. You are not providing any evidence, just conveniently excusing this overreach by the executive branch by ignoring the rights of the protesters with a facile lie.
- johnQdeveloper 1y ago
  > I can understand having the military in the streets, when the news is full of people waving foreign flags while torching vehicles in the streets. Yes but the news (in the US) is a fully for profit organizations most of which are owned by the right-wing folks. (i.e. Much of the newspapers, CNN, Fox News are run by boards that are right-leaning) They are intentionally pushing a narrative that the family I have in the area believes is simply a very small number of incidents that are nowhere near as bad as what is presented. > This does not look like the military being deployed on Americans, rather it looks like the military being deployed on rioters. Whether those rioters are Americans or illegal immigrants really doesn't matter for the purposes of reestablishing order. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/posse-comitatus-act-explained https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/poss... I suggest you stop looking at this through the lens of an Israeli and do some research on the US system of laws :) Deploying the military "on rioters" and whether they are "Americans or illegals" is actually quite important. Using the military as a police force is illegal and the only real open legal question is if using it against "invaders" who are not here legally is technically allowed. You are acting like these people are Hamas, when in reality, they are nowhere close to even 5% as dangerous.
  - susiecambria 1y ago
    And the media and federal government citing the waving of foreign flags is another distraction. As Americans, and people living in the USA, we are allowed to do this. It's a Constitutional protection. Again, all of this is a distraction from what the prez is doing.
    - johnQdeveloper 1y ago
      Correct. But for some reason "flags" and "not white/christian/jewish" somehow makes them the OTHER TRIBE and therefore the laws don't matter to conservatives. I don't feel particularly safe in the US with the government making lists of people like me based on the medication we are taking. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-05-02/is-rfk-jr-creating-an-autism-registry-what-to-know https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-05-02/... Its not new, but the centralization of these datasets isn't making me feel like anything other than a target.
- throwaway894345 1y ago
  For the most part, the protestors are peaceful, not rioters, and there are plenty of scenes of police and national guard being marshaled against them. In one clip, a couple dozen police officers opened fire on a kid with a skateboard. In another, they open fire on a journalist giving a live report. In another, they're beating back protestors holding signs. And "reestablishing order" is an obvious farce, because the Trump administration was deliberately provoking this conflict by sending in masked agents to abduct people and at least in one instance, running over a protestor. The administration has been consistently escalating the conflict, which is not something you do to "reestablish order", but it is absolutely a tactic of 20th century authoritarians to acquire emergency powers which they then use to prevent elections, jail political opponents, etc.
- HillRat 1y ago
  It looks like the military being deployed on rioters Leaving aside the equivalence of "protesting" with "rioting," the United States has robust Constitutional, common-law and statutory guardrails against the use of the military domestically. The US military cannot, absent an insurrection in which regular legal order cannot be maintained, be deployed against US residents. The use of the military in the past has been limited to what were deemed by federal and state officials full insurrections (e.g., the Whiskey Rebellion), or, in the civil rights era, in response to governors affirmatively refusing to enforce the law regarding an end to segregation and the integration of public institutions. In this case we have state and local officials explicitly stating that the factual predicates of an insurrection aren't being satisfied (the protests cover a few square blocks in a metropolitan area that by itself is larger than Lebanon or Kosovo, in a state larger than Japan or Sweden). While courts traditionally give deference to executive determinations of this sort, they aren't beyond judicial review, and this is (I would argue) clearly pretextual. What we're seeing here, conversely, is an attempt to sidestep this clear principle through not-particularly-clever tricks and semantic gamesmanship; for example, mobilizing Marines to "protect federal property," but then DHS officially asking DOD to give active duty forces arrest power. This is clearly unconstitutional and illegal, but, as with much we've seen recently, the hope appears to be that if you change the facts on the ground quickly enough, the clear illegality of the actions can be ignored. In addition, the federalization of a state National Guard against the will of the state is unprecedented; I don't know of any previous example of this happening. In the American system, even though the National Guard is a vestige of the old state militias, it's clear that the states are at least assumed to have plenary authority over their own forces absent an invasion or insurrection.
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    > Leaving aside the equivalence of "protesting" with "rioting," Is not burning cars crossing the line from protesting to rioting?
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Yes. Some protests are riots, all riots are protests.
- atakan_gurkan 1y ago
  It is the other way around. The military is being deployed on Americans. Whether they are rioters or not doesn't matter for establishing an authoritarian state.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  Since you're not American, a brief overview of our military: 1. We have 5 or 6 branches of military. The important one here is the national guard, ones meant to aid Americans in emergency or crisis. 2. The other branches have huge limits on when the federal government can deploy them domestically The Posse Comitatus Act that came as a result of the US civil war covers this.so having marines being deployed is a huge overreach. 3. The vast majority of the time, the national guard is managed by the state Governor, and Gavin Newsom has explicitly opposed this decision. The federal government taking command of the national guard is an exploit of The Insurrection Act that's been going on for a while. All thst context being given: Newsom is right. This isn't trying to establish order, this is a meticulous escalation on a conservative president in a liberal city to make a show of force. For reference, there's reportedly some 600 rioters and they sent out 2000 (now 4000) national guard and 709 marines. This is all without including the LAPD which is comprised of over 8000 officers. The amount of money and resources spent on this is utter overkill. And part of the point. They want an excuse to call martial law so badly.
- mensetmanusman 1y ago
  Military is being deployed to protect federal buildings like what was done during the king riots.
  - bobmcnamara 1y ago
    The marines deployed in 92 marched with the national guard and LAPD. The marines shot up houses in Compton.
    - mensetmanusman 1y ago
      Yes, that’s the famous case where the marines were shot at multiple times with shotguns and returned fire.
      - deleted 1y ago
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      - deleted 1y ago
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- deleted 1y ago
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ElectronCharge 1y ago
> The action of having a military parade for the president's birthday is expensive and doesn't benefit us. The funds for the "United States Army 250th Anniversary Parade" were allocated before President Trump was elected, during the Biden debacle. The fact that it falls on June 14th is what is called a "coincidence". Be careful about blindly accepting propaganda as fact.
- throwaway894345 1y ago
  I would agree with your "coincidence" explanation if it weren't for the consistent pattern of "coincidences" in which Trump does something dictator-like and right-wingers rush to his defense with "coincidence". It's just a coincidence that all of these foreign diplomats invest in his meme coin or some family business and then suddenly are granted meetings with the president! It's just a coincidence that Qatar sends him a luxury airliner and his rhetoric about Qatar does a 180 degree flip! It's just a coincidence that he tried to interfere in a presidential election! It's just a coincidence that he consistently claims Article I and Article III powers for himself! It's just a coincidence that he's rounding up people and sending them to foreign prisons! I've never met someone so unlucky /s
  - ElectronCharge 1y ago
    Are you claiming that the Army anniversary date being on DJT's birthday ISN'T a coincidence? That must take some crazy mental gymnastics... As to your other points, most aren't coincidences, though some aren't real either.
    - weberc2 1y ago
      > Are you claiming that the Army anniversary date being on DJT's birthday ISN'T a coincidence? That must take some crazy mental gymnastics... You should read the post you're responding to. It clearly addresses this very question. > though some aren't real either I think you mean, "though I'm not familiar with some of those cases"--otherwise a citation is needed.
    - 1y ago
deleted 1y ago
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by dfxm12 1y ago

dotancohen 1y ago

[flagged]

ty6853 1y ago
I don't know it re-establishes order but rather teaches the populace to up the ante. While I don't condone repeating history, it is instructive to look at history. When this military-type response was done at Waco, Timothy McViegh looked at that (he was there) and took out 10x as many feds as they took out citizens. And it sparked a very long period of militia movements, etc.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  Are Feds not citizens in the US? You guys have a stark division between the government employees and the not-government-employees. Isn't the US government "for the people, by the people"? Serious question. I'm not disputing what you said, rather I'm trying to understand it.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - ty6853 1y ago
    No feds aren't citizens in the US in any conventional sense. They have qualified immunity and a special kind of sovereign immunity that even state and local police do not have. They can initiate violence whereas citizens cannot. They can shoot a fleeing person as a citizen cannot. They can lie to you freely but if you lie to them (their interpretation of a lie), a felony. They generally can't be held accountable unless they are dumb enough to say the quiet parts out loud, and even then usually not. They are also effectively impossible to sue, so you'll probably never see any justice in the courts if they act unlawfully. Even if manage to get the lawsuit going they will play fuck-fuck games with jurisdiction until you lose (as I found out when trying to sue feds for stripping me naked, cavity searching me, and executing a fraudulent warrant on a fabricated dog alert -- no one would take my case because they had lost similar cases every time).
sleepybrett 1y ago
They weren't rioting until the crackdown on the peaceful protest started.
jvanderbot 1y ago
Yes, if we focus on actions, the action of causing public disorder is a glaring example of things we do not want in civil society. We also do not want tanks in our streets. Both seem like bad things, honestly, so I'm wondering how we got here.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - trust_bt_verify 1y ago
    Reposting this everywhere doesn’t make it truthful.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - dotancohen 1y ago
      Where have I reposted this? As for not being true, are the newspapers lying? Are those photographs fakes?
  - throwaway894345 1y ago
    > Clearly if these people torching the cars are waving foreign flags, they are a foreign enemy and thus the military is appropriate, no? No. Torching cars is already a crime and the city and state were already restoring order. The kind of flag waved while a car is torched does not change the calculus. Critically, a US citizen does not cease to be a US citizen because they waved a foreign flag; we have free speech in the United States, and flag-waving is protected by the first amendment. Also worth noting that none of this would have happened if the regime didn't deliberately provoke it in the first place.
    - alxfoster 1y ago
      Honest question: how does this calculus change when the person waiving a foreign flag on a burned out vehicle is actually not a citizen and armed with a weapon.
ChicagoDave 1y ago
This is the lie. At every step, immigration agents and police have instigated the violence. There are no riots. People are protesting and blocking access to vulnerable people. LA is not on fire. These incidents are in very small geographic areas even though media would suggest it’s widespread. People are pushing back when rubber bullets and tear gas are being used, illegally. U.S. citizens have a right to protest. This is baked into our constitution.
code_for_monkey 1y ago
You give away the game right here. You don't consider 'rioters' americans, you're already othering them right in the question. Fascism 101!
- freedomben 1y ago
  GP said they don't live in the US, it's possible English isn't even their first language. If they are a non-native speaker and just made a translation/wording mistake, you might feel like a pretty big asshole twisting that to call them a fascist (which word btw, is pretty overloaded and has become essentially meaningless to a large number of people). It's also quite possible they mean "Americans" in a general sense in that the Marines are not being turned loose on the American public. They are being focused on the rioters specifically. Obligatory self-declaration since you and many others will probably jump to conclusions about my opinion (as for whatever reason, we seem incapable of nuance even to the point of understanding that not everything in life is completely black or white), even though I've said nothing of it until now: I think Trump's actions are grotesque, authoritarian, and fascist, and it really pisses me off.
  - dttze 1y ago
    [flagged]
- ExoticPearTree 1y ago
  > You give away the game right here. You don't consider 'rioters' americans, you're already othering them right in the question. Fascism 101! If they are non-citizens, they are not american. Pretty cut and dry distinction. Nothing fascist about this.
  - simtel20 1y ago
    I have neither seen nor heard anything that would lead me to believe most of the protesters are non-citizens or non-resident. You are not providing any evidence, just conveniently excusing this overreach by the executive branch by ignoring the rights of the protesters with a facile lie.
johnQdeveloper 1y ago
> I can understand having the military in the streets, when the news is full of people waving foreign flags while torching vehicles in the streets. Yes but the news (in the US) is a fully for profit organizations most of which are owned by the right-wing folks. (i.e. Much of the newspapers, CNN, Fox News are run by boards that are right-leaning) They are intentionally pushing a narrative that the family I have in the area believes is simply a very small number of incidents that are nowhere near as bad as what is presented. > This does not look like the military being deployed on Americans, rather it looks like the military being deployed on rioters. Whether those rioters are Americans or illegal immigrants really doesn't matter for the purposes of reestablishing order. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/posse-comitatus-act-explained https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/poss... I suggest you stop looking at this through the lens of an Israeli and do some research on the US system of laws :) Deploying the military "on rioters" and whether they are "Americans or illegals" is actually quite important. Using the military as a police force is illegal and the only real open legal question is if using it against "invaders" who are not here legally is technically allowed. You are acting like these people are Hamas, when in reality, they are nowhere close to even 5% as dangerous.
- susiecambria 1y ago
  And the media and federal government citing the waving of foreign flags is another distraction. As Americans, and people living in the USA, we are allowed to do this. It's a Constitutional protection. Again, all of this is a distraction from what the prez is doing.
  - johnQdeveloper 1y ago
    Correct. But for some reason "flags" and "not white/christian/jewish" somehow makes them the OTHER TRIBE and therefore the laws don't matter to conservatives. I don't feel particularly safe in the US with the government making lists of people like me based on the medication we are taking. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-05-02/is-rfk-jr-creating-an-autism-registry-what-to-know https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2025-05-02/... Its not new, but the centralization of these datasets isn't making me feel like anything other than a target.
throwaway894345 1y ago
For the most part, the protestors are peaceful, not rioters, and there are plenty of scenes of police and national guard being marshaled against them. In one clip, a couple dozen police officers opened fire on a kid with a skateboard. In another, they open fire on a journalist giving a live report. In another, they're beating back protestors holding signs. And "reestablishing order" is an obvious farce, because the Trump administration was deliberately provoking this conflict by sending in masked agents to abduct people and at least in one instance, running over a protestor. The administration has been consistently escalating the conflict, which is not something you do to "reestablish order", but it is absolutely a tactic of 20th century authoritarians to acquire emergency powers which they then use to prevent elections, jail political opponents, etc.
HillRat 1y ago
It looks like the military being deployed on rioters Leaving aside the equivalence of "protesting" with "rioting," the United States has robust Constitutional, common-law and statutory guardrails against the use of the military domestically. The US military cannot, absent an insurrection in which regular legal order cannot be maintained, be deployed against US residents. The use of the military in the past has been limited to what were deemed by federal and state officials full insurrections (e.g., the Whiskey Rebellion), or, in the civil rights era, in response to governors affirmatively refusing to enforce the law regarding an end to segregation and the integration of public institutions. In this case we have state and local officials explicitly stating that the factual predicates of an insurrection aren't being satisfied (the protests cover a few square blocks in a metropolitan area that by itself is larger than Lebanon or Kosovo, in a state larger than Japan or Sweden). While courts traditionally give deference to executive determinations of this sort, they aren't beyond judicial review, and this is (I would argue) clearly pretextual. What we're seeing here, conversely, is an attempt to sidestep this clear principle through not-particularly-clever tricks and semantic gamesmanship; for example, mobilizing Marines to "protect federal property," but then DHS officially asking DOD to give active duty forces arrest power. This is clearly unconstitutional and illegal, but, as with much we've seen recently, the hope appears to be that if you change the facts on the ground quickly enough, the clear illegality of the actions can be ignored. In addition, the federalization of a state National Guard against the will of the state is unprecedented; I don't know of any previous example of this happening. In the American system, even though the National Guard is a vestige of the old state militias, it's clear that the states are at least assumed to have plenary authority over their own forces absent an invasion or insurrection.
- dotancohen 1y ago
  > Leaving aside the equivalence of "protesting" with "rioting," Is not burning cars crossing the line from protesting to rioting?
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    Yes. Some protests are riots, all riots are protests.
atakan_gurkan 1y ago
It is the other way around. The military is being deployed on Americans. Whether they are rioters or not doesn't matter for establishing an authoritarian state.
johnnyanmac 1y ago
Since you're not American, a brief overview of our military: 1. We have 5 or 6 branches of military. The important one here is the national guard, ones meant to aid Americans in emergency or crisis. 2. The other branches have huge limits on when the federal government can deploy them domestically The Posse Comitatus Act that came as a result of the US civil war covers this.so having marines being deployed is a huge overreach. 3. The vast majority of the time, the national guard is managed by the state Governor, and Gavin Newsom has explicitly opposed this decision. The federal government taking command of the national guard is an exploit of The Insurrection Act that's been going on for a while. All thst context being given: Newsom is right. This isn't trying to establish order, this is a meticulous escalation on a conservative president in a liberal city to make a show of force. For reference, there's reportedly some 600 rioters and they sent out 2000 (now 4000) national guard and 709 marines. This is all without including the LAPD which is comprised of over 8000 officers. The amount of money and resources spent on this is utter overkill. And part of the point. They want an excuse to call martial law so badly.
mensetmanusman 1y ago
Military is being deployed to protect federal buildings like what was done during the king riots.
- bobmcnamara 1y ago
  The marines deployed in 92 marched with the national guard and LAPD. The marines shot up houses in Compton.
  - mensetmanusman 1y ago
    Yes, that’s the famous case where the marines were shot at multiple times with shotguns and returned fire.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 1y ago
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ElectronCharge 1y ago

> The action of having a military parade for the president's birthday is expensive and doesn't benefit us. The funds for the "United States Army 250th Anniversary Parade" were allocated before President Trump was elected, during the Biden debacle. The fact that it falls on June 14th is what is called a "coincidence". Be careful about blindly accepting propaganda as fact.

throwaway894345 1y ago
I would agree with your "coincidence" explanation if it weren't for the consistent pattern of "coincidences" in which Trump does something dictator-like and right-wingers rush to his defense with "coincidence". It's just a coincidence that all of these foreign diplomats invest in his meme coin or some family business and then suddenly are granted meetings with the president! It's just a coincidence that Qatar sends him a luxury airliner and his rhetoric about Qatar does a 180 degree flip! It's just a coincidence that he tried to interfere in a presidential election! It's just a coincidence that he consistently claims Article I and Article III powers for himself! It's just a coincidence that he's rounding up people and sending them to foreign prisons! I've never met someone so unlucky /s
- ElectronCharge 1y ago
  Are you claiming that the Army anniversary date being on DJT's birthday ISN'T a coincidence? That must take some crazy mental gymnastics... As to your other points, most aren't coincidences, though some aren't real either.
  - weberc2 1y ago
    > Are you claiming that the Army anniversary date being on DJT's birthday ISN'T a coincidence? That must take some crazy mental gymnastics... You should read the post you're responding to. It clearly addresses this very question. > though some aren't real either I think you mean, "though I'm not familiar with some of those cases"--otherwise a citation is needed.
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