Senior Democrats in US cities are preparing to defend their communities in the event of Donald Trump’s return to the White House after the former president has repeated threats that he would use presidential powers to seize control of major urban centers.
Trump has proposed deploying the military inside major cities largely run by Democrats to deal with protesters or to crush criminal gangs. He has threatened to dispatch large numbers of federal immigration agents to carry out mass deportations of undocumented people in so-called “sanctuary” cities.
He also aims to obliterate the progressive criminal justice policies of left-leaning prosecutors.
“In cities where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order … I will not hesitate to send in federal assets including the national guard until safety is restored,” Trump says in the campaign platform for his bid to become the 47th US president, Agenda47.
Trump provoked uproar earlier this week when he called for US armed forces to be deployed against his political rivals – “the enemy within” – on election day next month. But his plans to use national guard troops and military personnel as a means to attack those he sees as his opponents go much wider than that, spanning entire cities with Democratic leadership.
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Do we have any idea of what military heads are thinking about that? Are they enthusiastic, mixed, or ready to oppose their commander in chief?
Active duty isn’t allowed to talk politics, but so far, some retired generals spoke out against Trump and endorsed Harris.
But on the flip side: go into any mess hall, on any base, and tell me what is on the tv for the news channel. I can guarantee that you won’t like the answer.
Press X to doubt.
Think Trump wouldn’t deputize a few million Red Hats?
It’s a lot easier to mess things up than it is to fix them after they are broken.
You do not execute orders that aren’t moral. The US Military is not like the Russians. Although, I wouldn’t depend completely on that.
I don’t believe anyone is perfectly immune from propaganda but I don’t even know if you need propaganda to get people to follow orders. All you need is someone to give the order. There isn’t any Morality In following orders. That’s why they’re called soldiers
Stanfrod prison experiment proved pretty amply that people will follow orders and adopt other peoples sadism as their own when directed to do so by an authority figure. Nurembourg was largely a propoganda show.
I feel like everyone forgot what happened last time.
People in unmarked vans with no identifying patches or badges, just fatigues, grabbing people off the streets at night in the northwest.
Even worse than the official fascists, the unofficial ones who were emboldened to act with impunity, riding into cities and inciting violence. Attempting to run Kamala’s bus off the road in 2020 in Texas.
Dems run like they want to lose. Always conceding the arguments of the fascists. Touting the endorsement of monsters like Dick Cheney. The kinds of monsters who made the Republican party what it is today.
If “senior democrats” actually gave a shit about avoiding conflict in the US, they’d actually be fighting for universal voting rights and eliminating FPTP voting.
Mega donors don’t want anti fascist rhetoric because it cuts into the profit margins
Allowing direct sales from car manufacturers and cracking down on unregulated supplements would knee cap fascism immediately
This feels like it attacks the problem at the margins. How is this approach more effective than direct dilution of power and flattening of hierarchies?
This approach would be a step along the way to that goal. A good chunk of fascist support comes from people selling supplements or used cars (there was a recent It Could Happen Here ep discussing this). Those people have money, power, and outsized influence on politics from local to federal. Disrupting their profits disrupts and dilutes their power. If your goal is to disrupt fascism there must be concrete steps to doing that, and this would be one.
Oh, I fuckin remember.
Honestly, if Trump somehow pulls out a win - and definitely, if he pulls out a win with some very clearly bullshit tactics involving GOP congressional leaders and the Tribunal of Six - I am completely serious when I say I expect an order of magnitude increase of political violence, up to and including a potential civil war. It’s that bad.
A civil war is the only thing that can pull the US out of a Trump win, because fascists never give up power by choice and no one is coming to save us
the french might seriously consider coming to save us a second time, if only to rub our noses in it for the rest of history. They’d probably make us rename the US to something demeeaning too, like Cretinland,
I think it’s important to contextualize what a civil war in America nowadays would look like. It will be military vs police, national guard vs army, civilians vs government, etc. etc. Most Americans don’t even have a shared history anymore, let alone present.
I’ve gone back and forth on what to do in the event of a Trump win. I’m honestly not sure what I should do at this point. Like yeah, I live here, and I want to defend the place I grew up in from fascists… but if the government just converts to fascism, I’m not sure there’s a way to save this place in it’s current incarnation. It’ll probably be Balkanized to one degree or another after a LOT of messy conflict. And the corollary there is that we won’t be backstopping global stability, like, at all any more, which will have a shitload of absolutely horrific effects in so, so many regions. And yeah - I get that a lot of countries resent American hegemony. As an American, we’ve done a pretty shit job of “defending democracy” (largely because authoritarian regimes are the more stable option for basing agreements). But at the same time, I can guaran-fucking-tee you that Russian and CCP hegemony will be worse.
You hit it on the head. The unmarked vans, unbadged troops, people “disappearing”–those were their practice drills and how they’ll do it. Uniformed troops will also be used in some situations (like the mass deportations), but the ones doing the daily dirty work against any demonstrators, specific political targets, etc. (“the enemy within”) will be those incognito forces. 😧
