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.”
If people never actually resist them, they already are the full occupying force.
-Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts
It’s not a popular take in doomer circles like lemmy, but I legitimately believe that there is a “bloodless” outcome that results in the right absolutely crumbling. Not only that, I believe anything less will inevitably result in this exact situation repeating itself every hundred years or so until we learn as a people how to build a sustainable, equitable society that prioritizes human dignity over greed.
We need to learn as a society how to identify and reject fascist ideologies the same way we can look at moldy food and know not to eat it. And I think the Internet may be the tool that gets us to that point.
Until we get to that point, all democracies will continue to fall victim to these types of attacks.
How do you see this coming to pass?
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.
We need a society in which people are not able to obtain the kind of power that can allow for fascism to exist to begin with.
We need a hard wealth cap of something like $50 million including unrealized gains, and we need a leaderless society, where people who seek power cannot gain power. We also need all corporations to be owned by the workers and be run as democracies.
But we also need to lift up the common man by supplying all basic necessities free at the point of service, such as housing, food, water, healthcare, sewage, high speed internet, etc. along with a UBI that is livable so that people can work on the things they enjoy rather than wasting their entire lives away working for a faceless corporation for the majority of their lives.
Anything short of this will just lead right back into fascism as history has shown.
I would like to know what your idea is to get out of fascism without any kind of violence, though, because with fascism, there is no democracy available to allow for a vote to replace the fascists. Fascists are not known for willingly giving up power.
I agree with the first statement, the rest feels to me like an arbitrary list of nice things that I don’t believe is backed by empirical data, so I can’t agree that “Anything short of this will just lead right back into fascism as history has shown”. The “$50 million” number is arbitrary. And workers tend to not have capital to start/run a company, nor do they want to assume the risk associated with it failing. Is there a specific historical example of all those things being successfully guaranteed in some society that you’re thinking of? How is it going for them now?
To stick with my original analogy, the same way I “get out of” food poisoning without puking my guts out for a time: I don’t eat it.
To relate it back to your first statement which I agree with, “We need a society in which people are not able to obtain the kind of power that can allow for fascism”. How do we do this? Democratically! We need a society of people who detest the signs of fascism:
Personally, I think we need to agree on a charter of some kind that has a feedback loop built in: as wealth inequality is relatively low, allow more capitalism, more risk, more innovation; and as wealth inequality rises, so too do corporate tax rates, guarantees on worker compensation, all the bells and whistles. If you’re a corporation who doesn’t like the tax rate, tough, we’ve all agreed that until the state of the society gets better, your ability to capitalize on it is handicapped.
“But why not always socialism, workers own all the things all the time?” The world is a big complicated factory of interconnected systems. We can’t hope to control it all even if we had a One World Govt running everything, much less hundreds of independent nations and cultures. At best we would create unintended emergent phenomena like black markets. I don’t think we should aim to control everything, we just ensure society sets up the right incentives, and the one thing that should underscore every incentive should be human dignity.
Homelessness should be illegal, in that we as a society should not be allowed to let people be homeless. It should be a crime against humanity for any society to allow one person to take billions more in tax breaks each year, while another person dies in the streets. Same for starvation or lack of healthcare. I would even go as far as to say, giving someone a job that is too mind numbing should be a crime. It’s one thing for you to work for the weekend, it’s another thing for it to be psychologically demeaning in its mundanity, which seems to be the ideal end game for many jobs: optimize out any way for the employee to mess anything up with the way that they are.
The part I don’t like to admit though is (without going down a second rabbit hole), I think the best way to achieve this cultural shift is through religion. We need a religion that emphasizes human dignity above all else. No other mechanism has proven as successful at shaping the behaviour of large groups of people.
This fucking Nazi needs to go meet Kirk in hell.