It’s not even new. They did this to people during 2020 protests. They drove up in mini vans jumped out, grabbed people and pulled them into the mini van and drove off.
There used to be footage of it but I haven’t been able to find it. I think it was happening in Portland and Seattle. At the time there was live stream footage. And it usually happened later in the night as people were cooling off and dispersing.
America hasn’t been what it preaches for half century at least.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/feds-unmarked-vans-portland/
The video snopes talks about I saw. Possibly even live streaming at the time because I was hooked on watching all that. Iirc it was a bronze gold colored minivan and the sliding door opened and 1 or two guys got out masked and just grabbed the person and pulled the protestor in and drove off.
Am from Seattle.
Yep, this happened in Seattle and Portland multiple times, just basically black bagging people into unmarked vans by… presumably, plain clothes / “off duty” / half kitted out, face obscured, no visible ID cops.
They typically did this black bagging to people who had not actually broken any laws, but were so effective at keeping protester morale high, and/or were simply causing overwhelming masses of people to defend them from, in many cases, literally entirely unprovoked police assault/brutality.
Most of these were the people they wanted to removr but knew that no charges would actually stick because they had nothing, and then release them 24-72 hours later.
Sometimes they’d black bag / white van people who had actually crossed the threshold into doing something they could actually charge you for, but most of the time, nope.
I know that in Portland the cops actively decided to act as body guards for fascists, and look the other way when they attacked people.
In Seattle, … the cops intentionally started so much shit, assaulting nonviolent people, well we uh… we literally forced them to abandon their major police office in Capitol Hill.
As in, we seiged them. Surrounded the building for days. Eventually they burned a bunch of records and made a stealthy withdrawal in the dead of night.
That police center is only a few blocks from where the ‘CHAZ’ would be set up.
Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
As in, we literally drove out the local police and are thus now autonomous.
… We’ve still never seen the all the actual communications between the police chief and mayor, other internal police records… because the police destroyed them. They destroyed them because they almost certainly outlined numerous violations of the law in terms of orders issued, tactics used, illegal arrests/detainments, bullshit ‘overtime’ overpayments and other financial shenanigans, crimes committed by the police and probably all the way up to the police chief and mayor engaging in a criminal conspiracy.
I feel like this isn’t talked about enough… You guys are badasses for that shit.
I was in Seattle during this. Word was people got snatched here but I don’t recall seeing hard evidence myself. Portland though they for sure got caught kidnapping protesters
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THIS. Everyone who’s feeling hopeless needs to get out of the Lemmy echo chamber and find people building the resistance in the real world. It’s actually not hard to do. Go to a protest and talk to people. Look online for a local resistance organization and show up at a meeting. Spend your money at companies that don’t support fascists. Whatever you do, just don’t give up because that’s exactly what the fascists want.
If you see Ice agents covering their faces, call 911 and report a masked man with a gun.
Please forgive my ignorance but isn’t the police force in USA known for its violence and profiling? Wouldn’t they be “in” on it, too?
ICE isn’t alerting local law enforcement of what’s happening. They get a call about a masked gunman and they’ll show up.
Can the police do anything when they show up? Aren’t ICE federal agents and above the local police’s jurisdiction?
Shoot first, ask questions later
Finally, some thing they are good for!
When local police show up, they’ll make the ICE agents identify themselves.
From what I’ve seen (admittedly completely online anecdotes), the ICE agents flee before the local pd show up because theyre cowards
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Lie and say they looked black so police show up faster and use their guns before asking to identify.
Police are more likely to show up and open fire on the civilians
Cops are there in minutes when seconds count.
You must live in a nice neighborhood. In my experience when seconds count cops show up in hours.
And get hauled away anyway.
You don’t have to be the one being targeted to act against them. If I see gestapo going after someone, I’ll make the call even though I don’t fit the profile of who they’re targeting today.
We aren’t supposed to accept that law enforcement just does as it pleases, ignoring our civil rights and protections and donning standard identification markers so that each officer can be uniquely identified. But this is not all that new.
Most of the time we don’t know we’re being kidnapped by g-goons or the police are ignoring our rights until they’re doing it, and we can only hope we get our day in court to challenge the arrest.
Since the development of DEA, the US courts have been carving out more and more exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments of the Constitution of the United States, and by even the 90s (with some big thanks to RICO laws / rulings) we are no longer policed by consent, but by force, because there’s no one around with more firepower to stop them.
This was only noticed by minorities, especially in the 1990s with the crackdowns against street gangs and feral youths. At that point we were seeing ur-fascism feature #8 ( The enemy is both too strong and too weak ) where street gangs are described as feral youths who can’t be negotiated with, while the same gang is an international organized-crime syndicate.
Then the 9/11 attacks happened, and the PATRIOT act was signed, and DHS was formed, and we noticed that some Americans, typically Muslim Arab-Americans, but sometimes Persian-Americans, sometimes Sikhs…really anyone who looked too middle-eastern, got disappeared by LGMs (dudes who look like cops but without personal or department identification, sometimes without the yellow POLICE plates), and rendered abroad to black sites to get tortured. But much of the US overlooked it because we were sore about WTC1 and WTC2.
(some of us screamed like Cassandra that this was a big move towards fascist autocracy, but I digress)
When Obama took over FBI was searching hard for terrorists in US borders but couldn’t find many, and had to invent some (Remember Kellyanne Conway’s Bowling Green Massacre? In the actual Bowling Green event no-one died but two refugees were gaslighted by FBI with a budget into doing some inoffensive para-terrorist work, and entrapped into terrorism charges. They’re still serving time.)
By then, our massive surveillance state was in operation and all of the US’ internet traffic went through NSA, and when there were Islamist militants who were thinking about a plot to suicide bomb an American asset, we’d send a predator drone to literally burn his village down: the CIA drone program killed 50 civilians – including grandmothers and children-- for every person-of-interest neutralized. We learned that while video games don’t make kids violent, making real-world warfare like a video game still meant the operator squeezing the trigger got PTSD. US drone programs had a turnover rate about as bad as German einsatzgruppen (death squads who mass executed villages for betrayal or harboring Jews).
So in 2016 when Trump won, Cassandra over here screamed about the Obama administration disabling all the mass intelligence state and surveillance state assets before Trump could get a hold of them.
We got a break, as Trump pissed off CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, so they weren’t talking for a while, but then, somehow, when he had a Heritage Foundation plan and staffers who knew what structures were in place, we elected him President of the United States for a second time. Even despite his insurrection charges (which were stalled until moot).
So yeah, the previous administrations, knowing this was going to be a problem gave the Trump regime is very own SS / Brownshirt secret police (who behave a lot like the Sicherheitsdienst under Reinhard Heydrich) complete with a concentration camp system that is overflowing due to purge quotas.
During the 2020 George Floyd protests, there was a move to abolish ICE who had been hunting undocumented folk and were sent in to brutalize the demonstrations, which only pissed off more Americans, and there was a movement to Abolish ICE (what was always just a paramilitary department to serve the will and interests of the current administration, id est, a secret police).
We are now suffering the consequences of having failed to follow through.
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The recipe has been in play for over a decade, probably more. People can’t stand up if they have nothing to stand on. Everyone is struggling. What the fuck is fascism if you have to concentrate on just surviving. That’s the whole play. They give us just enough to get by so we can live with no time to think. It’s not denial, it’s an orchestrated structure. The system isn’t flawed, it’s working as intended
Add to that several decades of constant far right propaganda disguised as news, and a massive rightward shift of the Overton Window, and you end up with brainwashed citizens willing to cheer this shit on.
Add to that the systematic dismantling of our public education system to ensure that people don’t have the historical and political context to understand the implications of any of it.
They (The Heritage Foundation and their ilk, I guess) really learned a lot of lessons from the Third Reich… This is the culmination of decades of work for these people, and it is working as designed for the most part.
It’s a very difficult trap to escape from. If not impossible.
Generally people in America don’t get organized until there’s a disaster. That’s one of the lessons of the Great Depression/New Deal. Not the most optimal way to maintain democracy. It’s not really “maintenance” if you wait for the thing to break and then fix it.
Ah, the American method in action!
That’s a pretty classic Marxist understanding of how class conflict actually happens. In response to a crisis a state can either adapt or fall into chaos if it can’t. That’s essentially what happened during the new deal era and the civil war respectively. Although arguably the external threats of WWII allowed the US to adapt rather than fall apart.
funny how you never hear from the “cold dead hands” guys when tyranny actually happens
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“good morning cold dead hands 😘”
that’s what my ex wife called me
Thats strange, she called me “warm lively hands”
You can be certain that a lot of concealed carry leftist will actively respond if something like this happens near/to them.
i hope so, but the people I’m referring to aren’t leftists. they’re the people who oppose any and all regulation and cite being able to defend against tyranny as the ostensible reason.
yet when this shit happens they’re awfully quiet. because they’re full of shit and fucking love tyranny.
I generally agree. I had one neighbor that always voted straight ticket and was a gun nut with a screw loose. Not a fan of tyranny though. I think losing his brother in Vietnam put a fire in his soul.
Lol
Lmao even
Rofls4realz
Falls asleep … someone sharpies ‘I’M A BIG FAT FASCIST’ across their forehead.
Goes about their life for a month without ever noticing … even when using a mirror.
You’re pretty much already there, bucko. I know it’s a silly image but if you’re only starting to worry now then you got a lot of catching up to do.
That’s the joke though… the picture is from a sketch where one Nazi officer tells another that he’s starting to worry that they’re the baddies, after he realizes that their hats have skulls on them.
I am aware, yes, it’s just I’m completely out of patience for anything that sounds even remotely like the setup for “who could have seen this coming?!”
Like, the alarms have been blaring and nothing is being particularly well hidden and even right now there are way too many people who zero clue what’s going on at all.
I mean America is a fascist regime. And you know who support fascism? Fascists. So I guess most fascists are kinda OK with what’s happening.
That’s not denial, that’s full endorsement.
This argument will just give the fascist leverage to call you a fascist. They are pros at projection and sadly you dont stand a chance.
The issue is fascists are going to lie regardless. There is nothing we can say, no way we can act that will prevent that. It is pointless to try.
Not asking that we try to confront the fascist populous. Asking we confront the fascist government.
I fail to see how this responds to my comment.
The op was saying americans are fascist so it makes sense the government is fascist. To claim the general populace is fascist will only get you in a shouting match of who the most fascist is. A distraction from what really matters, addressing the fascist regime occupying the white house.
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Apparently not because they keep doing it and are effective in their propaganda when they have no right to be.
Fun fact: you know who gave them that power? Bill Motherfucking Clinton. And he fucking did it for money.
Must be nice living in such a black and white world.
I wonder what chain of thought led you to this conclusion, which is very strange to me. But at the same time, I’m not willing to start some kind of futile quarell over this so… well, have it your way and have a good day.
Is it legal in the US to shoot people who are trying to kidnap you?
I mean, anyone can go around claiming to be law enforcement or ICE or whatever, but with no badge or ID, how are people supposed to know that this isn’t a gang trying to trafic them?
In vast majority of states there is a stand-your-ground law in place, which means you’re explicitly allowed to use deadly force if you reasonably believe that you’re defending yourself from a violent crime, and in minority there is a duty to retreat while outside of your home or workplace, which means that you still are allowed to use deadly force, but you have to try to retreat first, and only use force if you are reasonably sure that you can’t run away.
Kidnapping by a group of people in plain clothes in an unmarked van is explicitly stated as an example of a case where use of deadly force is permitted by law.I think that would count as self defence.
but would the court?
According to law, it’s a matter of law in most of the states, and matter of jury instructions in a limited number of states. In other words, it is explicitly a law.
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I’m pretty sure self defence doesn’t apply against law enforcement, even if you don’t know they are law enforcement.
There have been cases where firing upon law enforcement who failed to adequately identify as such has counted as self defence
It may not, but imo you do what you have to do to protect yourself against aggravated kidnapping, and then hope you/your lawyer can articulate how/why you did what you did later in court.
Oh, totally, no dispute there.
As Legaleagle put it in their most recent video: At that point it becomes logical to resist arrest, to run or to fight.
How long will people
The Gestapo could be hauling them away in cuffs and putting them away in camps and some will just go “why is this happening to me? there must be some mistake”
Anyone who is still on the fence is either only tuned into propaganda or is incapable of reasoning.
Or still thinks that the leopard won’t eat their face, because it hasn’t so far.
Yeah, for many the leopard has to actually be eating their face directly at the moment for it to be a problem.
There has to be some serious level of being downtrodden that’s required to like empathy for everyone else in the world that’s not them.
How long? My guess is that masked unmarked people that don’t even verbally identify themselves will be shot at (and killed?) by someone as they’re walking down the street when law enforcement are attempting to take into custody. My guess is that this shooter will either be killed by the unmarked and masked law enforcement or that person will be arrested and charged.
This is the point when all of the “every day carry” gun folks (and there are a lot of these) will then be faced with the question when they could every use their gun to defend themselves and not be facing charges themselves through no fault of their own.
I think thats when it finally tips enough people into the category to be against trump’s actions.
To avoid armed targets, they have been calling people into court hearings, then they drop charges which allows people to leave. On the way out of the courthouse feds will abduct them.
It’s pretty brilliant. If people become too scared to show up to court, then they get a real judicial warrant which allows them forcibly go into homes.
In a year: “Why are all these people turning their backs on the law and embracing the mob?”
Some truly evil shit.
In context it looks like a goon squad kidnapping a man.
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You may be prepared to give up, but the rest of us aren’t. I hope you find your hope before it’s too late.
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and seeing everyone make the same stupid mistakes over and over
Propaganda has improved. People don’t have communities. It’s worse. People have to be more clever than before to compensate.
Who’s the rest of us? As far as I can tell, there isn’t anybody actually doing shit. Well, maybe one or two people. And a misguided and toothless protest isn’t going to achieve anything, no matter how many people show up. I hope you find your rest of us before it’s too late.
The top 10% with an absolute absurd amount of the wealth are the ones that don’t care. Their miney, therefore their lifestyle seems safe.
The poorest idiots care deeply but think Trump is on their side and will come down to sweep them up right before it gets really miserable cause he needs to break standards of living for all the rich for them to rise up.
What will get people to finally pivot is unknowable. It will be when there is nothing left to lose, probably. If that ever happens without help from the outside, I dunno. It’s not like Germans could Stop Germany from the inside or Japan it’s fascism, or any other group.
But I think it’s wrong to say the average American doesn’t care. The over represented, as always, dont care, which includes out government. The average American agrees deeply we just don’t have much power and all disagree on the solution.deleted by creator
Yeah, pretty depressing huh?
Hopefully effort becomes cool again.
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The guys so old, I’m not sure hell make it through this term. He’s clearly not well, but that’s what makes this all crazier. Dems at least knew to kick out their senile old man, how the Republicans are okay with this is wild.
They’re okay with it bc Trump has a cult and many of his cult members are the ones voting the other republicans into office. If they kick out trump, they kick out a bunch of their voter base. Because unfortunately there’s a larger amount of non-cultist republicans that will still vote republican but just not for trump bc “there’s a difference” between the guy doing the bad things and all his best friends “begrudging” helping him do the bad things apparently. Basically they’re delusional about how politics actually work
Sigh
Cracks me the fuck up the rest of the world thinks this now.
This has been the case since Bush passed Citizens United and it was even happening before that. RIP Rosenbergs.
I thought Citizens United was an Obama thing. Are you sure you don’t mean the Patriot Act?
It happened during the Obama administration but it was in response to shit under Bush from people being critical of him/his admin. Obama did not support Citizens United.
I thought it was a Supreme Court thing? What did Obama do?
Not every bad law is fascism.
I would say only in a vacuum.
Both in a vacuum and in an atmosphere, if you call something fascism because of one bad law, you’re doing nothing but deminishing and watering down the term. It means something, you know.
