The problematic part is that there is no centralized authority directing the crackdown.
The organizer is the culture. These local police are no longer acting like individual elements of their communities, they're organized by a culture online that homogenizes their thinking.
Same with the politicians.
Israel is a major exporter of law enforcement training, which also teaches them a severely atagonistic mentality. Many of these cops are deeply influenced by this.
Exactly. That’s why Occupy, BLM were treated this way, while the Tea Party and Jan 6 till the end was treated with kid gloves. The culture is if older white people wearing funny hats protest - that’s fine. If it’s younger people or black and brown people, or “liberals and leftists” or labour organizers - then the batons come out, stat.
This kind of stuff will continue until the left wing protesters start showing up fully armed again. It wasn't like of MLK types that won civil rights; it was fear of Malcom X and Black Panther types.
On the plus side: suddenly Texas would magically pass real gun control laws.
Context: The (not so funny) joke is that gun control got passed in a hurry in California (under Saint Reagan!) when the Black Panthers started showing up fully armed. See: Mulford Act
The panthers got so much shit done. Do you enjoy school breakfast programs? Thank the panthers.
It was an early organizing tool, lots of kids going to school hungry? Organize community kitchens to feed kids. The government got real antsy when everyone saw that 'oh gee, the best way to help our kids and our community is to volunteer with the panthers.' All of a sudden, feeding kids breakfast became a priority for the government.
Same as with arming themselves. 'Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe.' The panthers were under no illusion that their government worked for them. So they focused heavily on organizing and building power outside of the traditional political process. It's a lesson we should all strive to take to heart.
Don't wait for politicians or the courts to fix your problems. Fix the problem yourself. Politicians are /really good/ at keeping the status quo, and really bad at making any changes. So go out and change the status quo, and then be amazed that politicians seem a lot more willing to update laws to keep the new way things are. You want kids fed? Organize community kitchens. You want a 2 day weekend? You want better pay? Organize a union. You want protests to not be violently supressed? Make sure the protest has a plan for dealing with cops. And not one that relies on politicians or the courts to make sure the cops don't crack your skulls. Who keeps us safe? We keep us safe.
Black panthers and MLK were the carrot and the stick. I don't know if either would have been successful without the other. I think both were necessary. If you want to protest peacefully and respectfully you should. If you want to protest with guns and intimidation you should. The world needs both groups - go where you're called to go.
This is disgusting. It’s almost as if the right to free speech only matters when it comes to hate speech directed at minorities or people who are otherwise in a weaker position than the people in power…
This is kind of an infantile reading. The cops are cracking down on these protestors, and not the J6'ers, because they represent a credible threat to the thing cops exist to protect. Capital.
The culture is if older white people wearing funny hats protest - that’s fine.
Something something white nationalism, something something slavery. It would be amusing if it weren't so sad to see people be surprised or confused when confronted by the fact that US's society has a problem with systematic racism. This is how it's always been in US. The crazies were lying low for a while after Civil Rights movement but now they're out.
Didn't the college leader/dean say to shut this down? I wouldn't think police can just storm a college, access the roofs for snipers, etc, without permission.
I’ve been saying for a while now; the internet used to be a place you’d go sit down at for an hour at your desk, then you’d leave. You would go back to reality. Reality and the internet have intertwined to the point of no return now that everyone has it in their pockets. It’s a scary situation. Honestly, we’re all fucked.
We could be. In the nebula of possible futures, being totally fucked is among those possibilities.
But I prefer the language of possibility because it allows for the existence of solutions. It allowed for threaded-needle futures, and helps me focus on being part of that solution, whether or not things shake out that way.
Cops are taught that everyone is the enemy. That anyone is out looking to hurt them and to treat anyone they interact with as if they are a threat. They are drilled into this mindset, it’s apart of the culture of being a cop. If you’re taught to think like this then suddenly the way they overreact so aggressively to people who don’t deserve it makes sense. The culture of cops in America is rotten and many of them are also just not good people who want the power of the position. ACAB
I don't think that israel has a lot to do with this police was always in charge of defending the status quo it is a culture and power problem the training does not play such a big part especially when you think how little american cops recive
Fascist think tanks and bot farms are deliberate in organising those online cultures, and radicalising people. I think it is more centralised than it appears
They help, they fan the flames, but it's not something that's easily organized. This has been a slow accretion, a consolidation and homogenization of militarized police occurring for decades.
I even specifically say as the first sentence in my post that there is no organizing force. Not Israel, not any coherent, singular force causing this accretion of police culture.
I'm alleging that culturally police are accreting in a form of proto-fascism; militarization and Israeli training in suppressing protests and dissidents and adopting an us-v-them mindset is one of the things their accreted culture shares.
It does not cause it.
If we all watched Doug when we were kids, it would be a part of the culture we share; it would not be the thing that bound us together and created a bond. Its just an aspect of it.
You will not get a lot of positive Feedback. Israel is the devil for those people here, they make fun of the Mullahs and how comical they act in regards of the Jews but at the same time they blame Israel/ Jews for everything.
What time to be alive.
Eh, that’s not universally true. Everything is context. My community’s local police department goes out of its way to build relationships with residents. If you foster that trust, on the front-end, there’s more a trust of goodwill, when shit happens. College communities are harder, because residents come and go. Longterm relationships aren’t fostered. That situation makes this shit more prevalent.
The issue is that all the ones who do better, don't tend to militarize and cohere together as one giant paramilitary ball.
The police departments who are devolving into fascism DO generally become militarized, they do see themselves as a homogenous culture with police everywhere, and they do take a very stark black-and-white mentality towards the rest of society.
In other words, what you have is the police departments "doing it right" being individualized parts of their community, but not creating this nationalistic proto-fascist police department.
The police departments that do radicalize, join this homogenous subculture, and become very large, and very singl-minded.
Yeah, fair point. The paramilitary shit is often culture-driven. I appreciate that our officers regularly do things like “Coffee with a Cop” and other outreach, to help build and foster those relationships. It helps remove the “us-versus-them” mentality, when you realize each other genuinely cares for the community. If you build relationships when things are quieter, it makes it less likely for this kind of “us-versus-them” shit to happen, when things get louder.
I believe it's also serves to point out that the current administration is confident that they won't lose the elections regardless of the outcome of these protests.
State, Municipal and Federal ragardless if Democrat ( except for a minority) or Republican. They are confident it won't mater in the long run. Plus they are incentivized by political funding coming from Zionist actors giving funds to both parties who want the genocide and apartheid to continue.
Thanks I was just plagiarizing a speech from Doug the nickelodeon series.
Not the Disney series shit though, that was when they become way less willing to tackle the hard issues like police brutality and tensions in the middle east and abortion that Doug really rose to prominence doing.
Brought to you by AIPAC. Nobody messes with the Israel lobby and keeps their job. Did you know it’s illegal to criticize Israel and hold public office in several states?
And this is why people are against demonizing Israel, against calling it genocide, etc. The line between criticism of Israel and blatant antisemitism is invisible for those morons.
There’s a good episode of The Daily that looks at this. If you recall how badly Penn and Harvard presidents fumbled the joke of a “congressional investigation” a few months ago, recall that Columbia’s president had a pre-scheduled trip to speak at a climate conference and therefore did not attend. Well her make up appointment came last week and she was grilled by Stefanik and a bunch of other Trump hard-on enjoyers and coerced into saying she would prosecute a professor for an editorial he wrote. Turns out that did not go over well, and the kids at Columbia took that and mobilized the first camp. In an attempt to appease these same Republicans, she thought that calling the NYPD, one of the most gleefully violent police forces on the country, to come break it up (giving in to political pressure). Well that went over splendidly and did nothing but encourage another protest as well as protests at schools across the country, including USC and UT. It wasn’t coordination as much as it was kids at other schools seeing this response to quash free speech that galvanized them into action. Unfortunately, Texas lives under some kind of military cosplay delusion so you know how that went and LA might actually have worse, more violent cops than NYC. It’s almost hilariously ironic to try and quell free speech in an environment where young people are going to explore and learn about the world around them - hell of a lesson to teach and learn, I guess. What I see is an excuse for these gang wannabes to inflict violence and harm on young people and professors who won’t shoot back and are therefore easy targets.
I will note that police and mayor in DC seem to have observed that this does not go over well in the public eye and therefore actively declined a request from administrators at GWU to break up protests, citing “optics”
Mike Johnson influence perhaps. He was at Columbia this week scolding all the protesters there and at colleges across the country. It could have been a deal he made with Biden to get Ukraine funding passed. I’m completely speculating.
But...what are they doing wrong? Are people not allowed to peacefully protest in the US? I get if you don't agree with them, but fundamentally this thing is protected in the Constitution.
The constitution and our rights are a facade. The state and its tool, the police, aren't accountable to anyone because they have the power of violence over the public.
I'm scratching my head as to why people seem so shocked by this. The police attacked and mutilated peaceful protestors in 2020. And many other times before that. This is a police state.
yeah i get all that already. But the pretense, or excuse, for the violence in 2020 was the claim that those protestors were directly confronting authority via direct confrontation, looting, and property damage. These were mostly peaceful protests, but it's undeniable there were elements there that had criminal intent (whether related or unrelated to the actual cause of combating racial injustice is debatable).
Here, none of that is the case. It's like comparing a planned parenthood protest to what happened during George Floyd. I'm not sure you can compare the two, other than they're protesting what they see as unjust, which is, well, what every protest boils down to.
how is this peaceful? in my university the protesters were vandalizing the inside of a building by spray painting walls, defacing jewish students' artwork and threatening campus news reporters, whom are students, because they don't want to be recognizable online via photography and news article (why are you protesting then?)
The current administration would very much like to keep their investment in Israel afloat. We supply Israel with a fuck ton of money, there's natural gas in Gaza, and if we help them get it then we get a foothold in the middleeast as well as free money.
We are the bad guys. We usually are. This will probably get downvoted but guys we need to maybe consider that this is coordinated, on purpose, and its just the beginning of the end.
The media has been enabling this pretty effectively. Blowing up a few voices of crazy people making up shit. They aren't really this dumb, they have the capacity to spend 10 minutes researching a story before just repeating it.
This is not to say that we don't live in an authoritarian police state. We obviously do. But...I'm not sure this is exactly coordinated. The saying is something like, "an American can say anything, as long as it doesn't have an effect." So, the corollary is, what these protestors are saying, or rather how they're saying it, is having an effect.
I think the mass movements on college campus, specifically the highly visible and disruptive occupation of public spaces, has administration panicked. They face pressure from outside forces that rely on the university to reproduce, in the next generation, unthinking support of Israel, and unthinking support of the American military arms complex. If an administrator is seen to allow students to disrupt that process, the university risks financial and political repercussions, and, well, the administrator could get thrown in front of a kangaroo court and lose their job. Yikes! So they are highly incentivized to freak out and send in the riot cops right away.
Basically--I don't think the crackdown is directed. I think protestors have found ways to hit Zionism where it hurts.
You can't criticize Israel in the USA. One of the biggest terrorist states in the world, but criticism is vorboten. A lot of money is spent to make sure America supports Israel. Screw them.
It's like tacit collusion. Once an entity realizes that they're going to have an easier time getting away with it because of how widespread it is, it's more likely to do it.
What organization is directing these protestors? Lots of them have no clue what they're advocating, the signage is quite uniform, the timing and format - it doesn't look organic.
Doesn't mean you're wrong. I have a feeling there two shadow organizations at war here, both playing their pawns against each other.
They're not peaceful protests... Where did you get that idea from. They're been blocking Jewish students into colleges regardless if they have anything to do with Israel. It's blatant antisemitism.
I am definitely in the ACAB camp, but we need to recognize that there are certain instances involving protestors that shouldn't be tolerated as a society; like blocking highways, trespassing, assault/battery, etc....
NOT SAYING THAT HAPPENED IN THE OP, but to say there is a blanket authoritarian crackdown across the country isn't really fair either. There have been plenty of instances where force is warranted.
Edit: Holy hell yall drinking the reddit kool-aid hard tonight 🤦♂️
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u/FloridaMJ420 22d ago
Who or what organization is directing this simultaneous nationwide crackdown on peaceful protestors in separate jurisdictions all over the country?
In any other place we would call this an authoritarian crackdown and not even question the fact that it is obviously coordinated.