https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-d... ("Former Pentagon chief Esper says Trump asked about shooting protesters")
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tiananmen-... ("Resurfaced Trump interview about Tiananmen Square massacre shows what he thinks of protests")
edit: and remember, it was a net positive for conservatives in the end.
Kind of like shooting reporters with rubber bullets.
(But to your point, anything >0% is pretty horrible.)
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-pre...
>In the 2024 presidential election, 73.6% (or 174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% (or 154 million people) voted according to new voting and registration tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Moreover, due to the electoral college and Senate and gerrymandering of House districts, the majority is hardly needed for attain power. I bet that even in other societies, throughout time, roughly a third of the population will not react to what one of the other thirds is doing (even if they claim they don't approve in polls).
Of that, let’s call it a flat 51% voted for Trump. That means that about half of 65%, or roughly 32.5% of American citizens support Trump, and by extension, likely this policy move.
So yes, it actually is more than you need to win elections.
What's stopping them to do enough fuckery between now and 2028 to "win" the GOP the election in 2028 (or even 2026), and to stop Trump from joining the ranks of despots that keep getting reelected like Putin and Erdogan? Or JD Vance can be his Medvedev.
To use a horrible analogy, a lot of times women don't even admit to themselves that they've been raped, because accepting that means accepting a horrific label. The USA is in the middle of getting raped, and so far the response has been to mostly freeze up and take it, not wanting to fight, because that is scary and can get you hurt even more. (Well, at least for the majority of the country there isn't a real fightback yet...).
And you’re absolutely right about the denial. It manifests as the “nothing ever happens” meme.
This is a dire situation and I'm not sure how this country crawls back out of this authoritarian slide, but we've got to somehow.
After the National Guard shot a few kids for literally no reason (nobody had ever been given orders to fire), they told the student standing around "Disperse or we will shoot again"
This has never been a problem for the party of Roger Stone who literally has a large back tattoo of Nixon and is one of the primary reasons we had Bush Jr as president even though Al Gore won the votes when the count was allowed to finish
If that kind of talk worries you, consider how much uglier it will be when the good people of LA form unregulated militias instead. Do you really want to see Ruby Ridge 2: Rooftop Korean boogaloo?
We are to depend on our trusted local law enforcement to protect us, as well as our valiant governors who will assuredly call up local guards to do the same. Examples of brave, novel Democratic resistance to Trump abound these days. There's no need to worry!
Here's hoping this is purely an optics play and they are only there to waste money and incite nationalism. Because if this escalates in any way and the US military turns on Americans, its hard to understate how bad things could get.
I live in a very red state (North Idaho). They don't need to send ICE here. The sheriffs are all cooperating and lending county facilities to hold immigrants. It is safe to say the entire sheriffs department is basically a branch of ICE at this point. They have been targeting I-90 and US-95 heavily and running plates on every car along with a helicopter that basically just goes back and forth all day.
There is very little immigrant presence here (illegal or otherwise) but they have been catching work crews at random (usually under the premise of suspicious vehicle/behavior).
Spokane has been having CBP and ICE raids as well. Quite a few make the local news. Just doesn't get the attention like the larger cities do. Quite a bit of roundups going on out by Yakima and Tri-Cities, WA too. Which is part of why they are using county jails to hold people.
If it was ever true, it hasn't been true for a long time.
There used to be (and probably still is) a saying in the US military that goes something like "Folks who can't hack it in the military wash out and become cops.".
The military is not at all configured to be an effective long-term occupying force, but its personnel are trained to be soldiers [0] and peacekeepers. (While I'm absolutely certain that one can find examples of psychos that should have been detected and discharged earlier, that's true of any sufficiently-large organization. Finding every malicious person is a task that's next to impossible.)
Anyway, in a high-pressure, chaotic situation, I'd rather come up on a random member of the US military [1] than a random cop any day of the week.
[0] Yes, this does mean that they damage, destroy, injure, and kill when required.
[1] Whether active duty, reservist, or honorably discharged.
They don't deserve any benefit of the doubt at this point. Ask yourself what the MAGA reaction would've been to troops being deployed to their riot at the Capitol.
Now ask yourself why Trump is sending a group (who are explicitly prohibited from making arrests) whose entire mission is war to the 2nd biggest city in the country? It's for the same reason those Marines carry guns.
As I've seen others remark, LA gets far worse whenever the Dodgers or Lakers win a championship. It is not a war zone, warriors are not needed. But clearly they are desired.
YMMV.
I thought only German Nazi soldiers were incapable of having morality and ability to decide, and were only capable of following orders.
The Insurrection Act authorizes the president to deploy
military forces inside the United States to suppress rebellion
or domestic violence or to enforce the law in certain situations.
The statute implements Congress’s authority under the Constitution
to "provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of
the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions."
It is the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act,
under which federal military forces are generally barred
from participating in civilian law enforcement activities.
This is the heaviest hammer in the toolbox. Deploying it against citizens he doesn't like because he resents their message is a historical display of bad character and is profoundly unethical in a way that the harshest adjectives struggle to reflect.
I’d cite my source, but can’t find it. I also can’t find anything saying he is invoking it.
Do you have any specific source?
Edit: I’ve found several sources that make It clear the Insurrection Act had not been invoked.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/09/politics/insurrection-act-tru... - “Trump officials quietly discuss moves in LA that avoid invoking Insurrection Act, but it’s not off the table”
Republicans would have to lose a lot of seats for it to happen. Or, Trump would do something beyond the pale for the GOP. Hard to imagine what would make them change their minds on it. Probably not thousands of dead protesters.
> Approximately 700 Marines with 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, 1st Marine Division will seamlessly integrate with the Title 10 forces under Task Force 51 who are protecting federal personnel and federal property in the greater Los Angeles area.
It seems like Trump has not invoked the insurrection act but instead it’s all under a different federal law. Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown law professor, has a write up [2] on Title 10 vs the Insurrection Act and some possible concerns. He posted this about the National guard but given the military release states they are being deployed to assist the nation guard under title 10 it still seems relevant. To quote the TL;DR of his post:
> The TL;DR here is that Trump has not (yet) invoked the Insurrection Act, which means that the 2000 additional troops that will soon be brought to bear will not be allowed to engage in ordinary law enforcement activities without violating a different law—the Posse Comitatus Act. All that these troops will be able to do is provide a form of force protection and other logistical support for ICE personnel. Whether that, in turn, leads to further escalation is the bigger issue (and, indeed, may be the very purpose of their deployment). But at least as I’m writing this, we’re not there yet.
[1] https://www.northcom.mil/Newsroom/Press-Releases/Article/421...
[2] https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/156-federalizing-the-californ...
They are being deployed on American soil for their force projection.
I have zero problem with deporting people that are here illegally. I have plenty of problems with how it's currently being done.
Can you expand on this? If you are referring to the AEA, as far as I know that’s not what is being used in LA.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/09/los-angeles-...
"Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state."
"Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country."
Note that this affords the freedom to relocate within, leave, and return to one’s country, not the freedom to enter into other countries in violation of their immigration laws.
Well in a Freudian way this statement could be interpreted to exactly mean that what ICE is doing is illegal.
The issue however that prompted the protests was the way they are pursuing deportations with militarized tactics, brutality, and snatching people off the streets as abductions. They do not declare themselves, do not present their civil warrant, do not produce identification, and subsequently frequently do not follow laws, regulation, or the constitutional requirements of due process.
There is no reason that their neighbors, family, and friends need to be happy with what’s happening. They are afforded protection in our society to be angry and disclaim the government without fear of persecution or prosecution. When they’re then persecuted and prosecuted for doing that, people are pissed by the injustice. Then when their governments responsible is to fly in the military, you should expect an explosive situation.
Indeed it seems pretty clear the explosive situation was premeditated and planned - using armored vehicles and riot armored police to invade immigrant neighborhoods and abduct service workers and day laborers in broad daylight when a simple standard ICE operation was clearly designed to provoke strong response in those neighborhoods. Everything after that has been pretty deductively arrived at to create this precise situation. Even the language of insurrection and rebellion - laughably absurd claims for even a riot - which hadn’t happened until the national guard were deployed - are carefully chosen words to provide pretext for what comes next.
I desperate miss the states rights individual freedoms libertarian leaning republicans. They would never have done these things.
Also that they’re going after many people who are actually attempting to comply with the law, because those are the easiest to find. Meanwhile tens of millions of undocumented immigrants are still here, and the lesson they’re being taught is don’t trust the legal process, stay under the radar. In the end the Trump administration is unlikely to make a large dent in the undocumented population - they certainly haven’t so far. It’s mostly theater. They’ll just end up discovering how unintended consequences work.
That doesn't include the hundreds of students legally here on student visas.
And of course, if ICE is going to deport people in the country illegally: it's well establish by now that Musk and Melania violated the terms of their nonresident visas when they first came to the U.S., rendering their U.S. citizenship null and void (Musk worked in violation of his student visa; Melania both worked in violation of her tourist visa and overstayed her visa by several years; if she hadn't married Trump she would have been deported and banned from the U.S. for 10 years).
Will a useful idiot throwing a rock at a federal building be sufficient casus belli for the latter?
As it turns out when you send a force trained only to kill and subjugate, that's what they do. A few guardsman stood down but most did not.
Nothing about deporting illegal immigrants requires deploying the Marines.
The riots got worse after they were deployed. Obviously. They're being deployed because we have a drunk for SecDef, a basket case in Stephen Miller and flagging illegal-immigrant arrest numbers that are making Homan look incompetent. So we get theatrics. Sort of like the tariffs.
It is not just Trump. he represents what conservatives, republicans and their voters are. And this is enabled by consistent pretension that Trump is an secretly opposed aberration. No, he is admired both publicly and secretly.
> The Insurrection Act of 1807 [...] empowers the president [...] to nationally deploy the U.S. military [...] in specific circumstances, such as the suppression of civil disorder [...]
The governor of Louisiana requested federal help. Legally very different.
Most people don't understand why we have the system of laws that we do. Most Americans couldn't design a stable republic the way our founders did. (Most of their contemporaries couldn't either.)
Nothing about deporting illegal immigrants requires calling in the Marines. Nothing about this situation makes their deployment in Los Angeles legal. Performative hackery is practiced by both sides. Desecrating the honour of our armed forces used to be bipartisan, but I guess that's no longer the case.
The Ghorman massacre in the recently aired season 2 of Star Wars Andor is the playbook version of this.
I don't think the US is there yet, but the direction seems about right. As you say, step by step.
Andor was great. I really enjoyed it. It's the AI robots you should really worry about.
I edited this post because riots implies they weren't burning down their own neighborhoods because they didn't actually own anything there and had not been prevented from owning anything. Certain groups love to post the actually affected Korean store owners, but it's a gross one minority group was pitted against another to prove racism was ok in retrospect to cause the conflict.
EDIT: It was US President George H. W. Bush ...
I agree that Trump is unlikely to turn into a dictator. But Caesar wasn't Rome's last dictator. And he wasn't the first to march on Rome.
Precedents are being set. Regardless of your views on illegal immigration, what's going on should be concerning because eventually someone with strong views you don't agree with will be in power, and if they can just arrest members of Congress, openly defy courts, ship ideological opponents to Guantanamo and send Marines into states they don't like, we're all going to be poorer for it. (If this shit stands, I'd argue the next Democrat in the White House should go FDR on the system.)
Now it seems like the republicans are trying to speed-run to a point where there won’t ever be another Democrat to worry about.
The simpler explanation is they're bad at long-term planning. Most of Trump's Cabinet and advisors are, essentially, influencers after all.
We probably need to work on a Project 2026 and Project 2028 document set. Plans to use these newly-unlocked powers to reform how power is distributed in America, force forward long-overdue projects being resisted by vocal minorities and secure our republic from its tendency towards electoral fetishism.
You need electoral reform post haste - but I do not seed even a start to that discussion, so I think you are hosed. Might not be Dictator Trump, but maybe Vance or some other guy who succeeds in this game.
And all who cry "if the democrats win everything will be ok again!!!!" - not it won't. The democrats are too slow to recognize the problem and even if they eventually do, there are no majorities to change the system. And finally: Democracy needs at least two parties - democrats cannot be expected to keep branches of the government forever. You need a sane and democratic second party. Republicans ain't it - but the current system gives them success, so why change?!
We tossed that all aside in the 1930s via threatening to pack the Supreme court. Federal powers are now everything because interstate commerce is now everything and without a functional 10A and with delegation to executive agencies POTUS approaches God level.
Democracies are vulnerable to "authoritarian takeover" has been known and understood for 2500 years.
> The position has too much power, is easily abused and there are not enough checks on that position.
In most parliamentary democracies, the Prime Minister is much more powerful than the US President. This is particularly the case since the PM is PM by virtue of his party having the legislative majority.
> And all who cry "if the democrats win everything will be ok again!!!!" - not it won't.
A better argument would be that this isn't a partisan issue. The last President declared a Constitutional Amendment by fiat and attempted to do (good) things like student loan relief with blatantly illegal authoritarian methods due to the perpetual Congressional gridlock.
This is a grave misunderstanding. A legislative majority isn't a static historical fact like Trump's electoral majority, it's dynamic - those are identifiable people not just a statistic.
Liz Truss was the UK's Prime Minister for less than two months. What changed in two months? Probably most of the idiots who actually voted for her didn't change their minds, but that doesn't matter, her fellow Tory MPs feared the worst from the outset and were proven correct. If she hadn't left she'd have been kicked out, she's known to have actually asked if there's some way she can cling on and been told basically "No" because there isn't.
Ultimately, if they can't get rid of her any other way, her backbench only needs to affirm a simple motion, "That This House Has No Confidence In His Majesty's Government" and it's all over. It would never come to that, but that's the backstop.
We see PMs easily enacting massive legislative reforms and even Constitutional changes that are nigh impossible in the US, that was not a particularly controversial statement.
The Governor requested federal help. Legally different.
It’s usually too much for people to contemplate that things are going to end.
Or worse, it’s bad faith, and it’s shared to lull people into accepting the change.
One of the clear things is that the right side of the political sphere is no longer constrained to narratives that have accurate correspondence to reality.
Even if this blows over, there will be something else, and then something else - and some superficially plausible rationale that contradicts previous positions.
And people who’ve seen this before will point it out - but people in the hall of mirrors will be stuck dealing with whatever is being reflected around them.
It’s genuinely cognitively hard to reason past such things, especially if reasoning past them is done alone - because then you are now stuck feeling like you are outside of your group - worse, you might have to join the people you were angry with.
This is one reason it takes a long time (months, years) to travel this distance - you can’t mentally switch allegiances and world views in a moment. There’s too many interconnected beliefs, actions - neurons.
But for people who’ve seen this before, it’s pretty clear cut.
You think any individual marine will follow their conscience and step in if they see an abuse of power by authority?
The national guard and the marines are not trained in crowd control. They are trained in combat situations. They have no role to play here, at best they just make people angry, at worse could perpetuate a massacre.
Even the British Army, generally regarded for professionalism, make a lot of jokes about how unintelligent and trigger happy the average squaddie is.
Man I’m obviously not saying they have perfect discipline, I’m saying you clearly cannot compare them to a nation dealing with an ACTIVE CIVIL WAR.
It stems from leadership - and current leadership wants them to be like that. So, they will become like that.
I suspect many commenters on HN would also have bridges to sell you, seeing as they’re from around the world, and countries where similar statements were made.
The statement is one thing. Reality is different, even with the best intentions, things get messy, and then the media and information firestorm that follows leaves scars that fester for decades.
You’d be lucky if it doesn’t lead to new infections and new wounds.
Which is why self inflicted wounds are so absurd, especially from nations that have the expertise to know better.
But - expertise is expensive, and entertainment and narrative vitality is the currency we traffic in.
A currency that pushes the costs of clean up and figuring out what happened to the future, if you are lucky to have any committees to look at it all.
We all need a news system that isn’t competing with engagement.
Safe? When manned by actors known to shoot journalists in the head with “less lethal” weapons?
ADS operators would be exposed to more than the standard maximum permissible exposure (MPE) limits for RF energy, and military use requires an exception to these exposure limits
According to Wired, the ADS has been rejected for fielding in Iraq due to Pentagon fears that it would be regarded as an instrument of torture
Seems to have problems on both ends.
From an outsider's view, everything looks so performative and fabricated to be consumed by a tv target audience. I mean, if there is so much illegal immigration in the US, is it the most effective use of resources to target a TV cliche that would gather a residual number of people?
So in late May, Stephen Miller, a top White House aide and the architect of the president’s immigration agenda, addressed a meeting at the headquarters of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE. The message was clear: The president, who promised to deport millions of immigrants living in the country illegally, wasn’t pleased. The agency had better step it up.
Gang members and violent criminals, what Trump called the “worst of the worst,” weren’t the sole target of deportations. Federal agents needed to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens,” Miller told top ICE officials, who had come from across the U.S., according to people familiar with the meeting.
Agents didn’t need to develop target lists of immigrants suspected of being in the U.S. illegally, a longstanding practice, Miller said. Instead, he directed them to target Home Depot, where day laborers typically gather for hire, or 7-Eleven convenience stores. Miller bet that he and a handful of agents could go out on the streets of Washington, D.C., and arrest 30 people right away.
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/protests-los-angeles-immigrants-...
I think this makes it even scarier. This means the goal is clearly not establishing sound policy, but to output propaganda that is designed to be easily consumed by TV audiences. It is beyond reality because it is not designed to make sense, it is designed to make sense to TV consumers by feeding on the context they get from their TV tropes. The Mexicans hanging around in Home Depots is a TV cliche that's recognized by people living wel beyond any Home Depot.
The best is Trump crowing about historically low unemployment numbers, and then peddling hysteria about illegals "taking American jobs." None of his degenerate followers care that this argument is stupid, and calls them stupid.
Now it's been papered over with other excuses, like the mythical "fentanyl" that's pouring in from Canada.
The image the Trump administration conveys goes way beyond targeted hate. They appear to be replaying the Nazi playbook of persecuting minorities as a strategy to wedge in totalitarian control over a nation and society. Illegal immigrants just so happen to be the path of least resistance in the US.
They is doing lots and lots of heavy lifting here. At the same time things are very confusing, because it seems like your fellow American is out for blood in a manner that shows no humanity.
Your fellow American on the right is plugged into a Matrix that traffics in its own narratives and can now freely manufacture or amplify its own fringe facts and narratives.
They are actually fighting very hard for the soul of america - as they see it. Virtuous efforts to stop the villainy and stupidity of the venomous yet weak liberals, leftists and democrats.
There’s a system in place to manufacture narratives, the closest analogy would be wrestling - except the President doesn’t treat it as fiction, he acts as if it’s real.
And since you can make and sell narratives incredibly quickly, while facts and analysis are days of effort - well, you have a structural change to the market place of ideas.
It happens everywhere in democracies now. See Brexit - entirely predictable. Yet completely unable to “sell” the known and clear problems to a majority of the citizenry.
Same with tariffs.
There’s a floor to people’s capability in navigating our current information environments - and partisan groups of experts are happy to use it to their advantage.
The problem began empirically with conservative positions, but the efficacy of the technique has now created its own political force.
I think the whole point of these stupid stunts is to mobilize the base and distract critics. Your random redneck racist might feel strongly about the Hollywood caricature of Mexicans wearing sombreros at a Home Depot parking lot, but the truth of the matter is that Trump is mobilizing the US armed forces against a governor's will while threatening him with imprisonment.
Whether it’s good public policy is neither here nor there, so long as our Leader is right.
So, you know, maybe they could try to do what they said they'd do for once?
They said they'd target violent criminals, but they didn't say they wouldn't target non violent criminals as well. People who heard that were wishcasting.
Whether or not they are a "priority" is semantics. If you hear them explain it, they're all defacto criminals for being undocumented, and therefore equally culpable as a murder or a rapist in matters of deportation.
The crime they're concerned about over all others is illegal immigration. According to them, an illegal immigrant who has done nothing else wrong deserves to be deported just as much as rapist illegal immigrant.
For example, you are deporting labor. Ostensibly Because of fairness and justice - they are in the country illegally. Ergo they should go.
No one should be above the law.
This has zip to do with gangs and criminality though.
But why this process ? Why not punish people who are employing them ?
This is more efficient and even more just. People are employing workers they know are here illegally and undercutting minimum wage.
Or why not raise minimum wage so more people will be willing to work those jobs ?
People act on incentives - and america is a country with a concentration of some of the hardest working and smartest people in the world.
It has a tradition of valuing this and converting those strengths into its own.
Now I have enough of a background in econ, business and politics to see through the narratives.
I also know you can’t sell all those interventions, not the least because none of these address the issue of gangs and criminality and eating pets.
Which brings us to the issue that your rationale, the ones which are debated online - are downstream from whatever controversy and theory that’s going to show up as soon as a new distraction is needed.
I mean, just Take a look at your original question,
“Leave the hardest working and deport the lazy ones ?”
America is built on immigration of the hardest working, most driven people from across the globe.
America is a machine for hardworking people to move ahead. That’s its promise.
And this is the question its citizens are unironically asking.
As I said, many ways to skin a cat.
People follow incentives, so why not punish people who are paying for the labor? Arrests for employing them?
Its an economic system, theres 2 way incentives.
The process used, depends on what problem you are solving.
As it stands, employers can pretend ignorance and as long as they were not really stupid, put putting things in writing or personally arranging for the trafficking, they can likely get away with it. There’s no reason I can think of why we shouldn’t change that.
For reference, Euromaidan involved the death of over a hundred protesters before the government finally collapsed.
The people of the US may be inured to violence. They aren't inured to violence from their own military, though.
One man was taken into custody for allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at an officer and a motorcyclist was arrested for ramming a police skirmish line.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/kill-l-police-attacked-fireworks-...
Los Angeles County Sheriff Robert Luna said "you had people who were...attacking police officers, deputy sheriffs and causing a lot of destruction."
The 101 Freeway shut down Sunday evening two times due to protesters on an overpass throwing rocks, debris, and firecrackers at California Highway Patrol officers and vehicles.
Footage on Sunday from the CBS News Los Angeles helicopter showed that multiple windows of the police headquarters had been shattered as well.
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/downtown-la-protests...
Rocks / debris came after tear gas.
The news has been startling in its mis-coverage.
Your effort to overstate might have derailed your own reality.
Don't know about you, but I could never throw a brick at anyone. I couldn't and wouldn't put a mask on and head out with the intent to burn cars, throw rocks, loot, and cause criminal damage. That is the opposite of "largely peaceful."
The LAPD chief stated it's "out of control." Your attempt to imply tear gas was used on peaceful protesters doesn't fit the evidence. Many of the rioters are highly organised with supply runs of masks, fireworks and projectiles. I'm not sure what your agenda is but "accuracy" doesn't seem to be it.
There's a lot of videos of the contrary - LAPD pelted with rocks by aggressive mobs who are there to fight against "nazi scum" or fight for "stolen land" as they wave every other flag than American.
I suspect the usual media chicanery - everyone reporting the story that their viewers want to hear.
Anyway. My point was that I could not do this. If I was asked to fire teargas at a crowd who were protesting kidnapping people off the streets and taking them to concentration camps, I could not do that. I would refuse that order.
There's a lot of people in LA with the skills and equipment to rapidly organize like this; got to see it in person during the Occupy protests, when a tiny village popped up around City Hall - complete with power and internet infrastructure; medical, porta-potties, meals, workshops and seminars... it was pretty impressive!
It's also worth noting the insanity that is July 4th in Los Angeles, so there being a lot of fireworks is uhhh... really, really not weird for LA? We usually get increasing amounts (in size and frequency) of illegal firework "shows" all throughout June.
Lastly - there's also a big difference between "out of our [LADP's] control" and "out of control" - that's (AFAIK) actually the norm for effective protests. A large protest that's under the LAPD's control is generally a "demonstration" instead (see the women's marches).
But some people hang around after it's ended and then the sun goes down and the protest is actually over and the police try to get people to leave. Then it's a people Vs police confrontation that may escalate. Then it's a riot. Usually these deescalate and the police have training in how to do that.
It's not the protests that is violent it's what happens after the protest finishes. Riots by definition are out of control!
Some protestors would claim that the violence is orchestrated by the police. There has been some evidence of that in some places of the world. Mostly it's a riot of violent people, criminals, kids usually, who are thrilled by the violence and chaos and hatred. Mob mentality creates a mob.
they shot a bunch of people, and the feds took it pretty hands off. if anything, the protestors arent being nearly violent enough to get soft hands from the government. if they were out there with automatic weapons and actively shooting at the cops and guard, theyd be left right alone, and the road would be shut down for a couple months
Firey but mostly peaceful protests are happening all over again. No, burning down cities is not peaceful. After just a few days, at least five officers, several journalists, and we don't know how many rioters have been injured so far. We don't yet have estimates of property damage, but tens of millions would be conservative. Similar riots have resulted in hundreds of millions in damages.
When the right does this, we call it what it is: violent riots. We acknowledge it's wrong to attempt to prevent the government carrying out its the duties it was democratically elected to carry out. We should hold that standard to the left as well. These rioters are anti-democratic.
You can say, rightly, there's a car on fire. You can also say the police shot at a journalist.
"burning down cities" would however be incorrect, as the person who literally lives here I can tell you that it is not happening.
What you, and other's, need to understand is that the police have absolutely no mechanism to de-escalate anything. It's a concept completely foreign to American policing. As soon as the police are involved, the situation deteriorates rapidly.
For instance, almost all (95%+) of the BLM protests were completely peaceful. No violence or property damage. You wouldn't get that impression from the news. But, of the ones that did turn violent, every time the violence BEGAN with police overstepping. Pushing protestors, or shooting them, or throwing gas. And then, obviously, the situation deteriorates.
Once the state sets its eyes on enemies, it doesn't stop adding to that list.
Use of the tools and techniques in place right now will continue to be used, and against "legal" citizens.
I worry how we turn the corner. I don't like what history says.
This was always a well-understood risk though.
This is why the 4th amendment exists. It is my favorite amendment. I wish people would take it more seriously.
So many homeless here have zero identification.
They are basically just going after people who are too brown and even ending up grabbing people who are just here on vacation, legally.
https://theconversation.com/ice-has-broad-power-to-detain-an...
I agree that in practice there is some kind of loophole: ICE gets a "warrant" for someone that by definition has no ID, so there is no point in identifying a detainee - the immigration court will do that, later. Effectively, they seem to get away with snatching people off the street that vaguely may resemble any "warrant" they have.
That has happened to me. Some of them did real heinous shit and deserve prison for the rest of their lives. And some I disagree with the laws they were charged for.
HN not beating the allegations of sheltered, gated community, out-of-touch kids going straight into white collar life.
I trust this is true. But the comment would be stronger with a source.
A combined 42 arrests were made by the Los Angeles Police Department, California Highway Patrol and Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, the LAPD said early Monday. Alleged crimes included attempted murder, looting, arson, failure to disperse, assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and other offenses.
is one source, others may have more or less detail. It supports arrests being made wrt looting, not the assertion that most of the looters were arrested.
So less violence towards law enforcement and insurrection than January 6th. Action the President endorsed in January by issuing pardons.
Honestly, if a Democrat were to match Trump's energy, they'd be promising pardons to protesters who damaged ICE property or torched a Trump property. They're not. In part because they're rudderless. But also because they're still gripped by the notion that we're not in the midst of a coup.
If Trump wanted to match Democrat energy he would declare the LA riots an insurrection and devote 40% of the FBI to identifying, rounding up, and imprisoning all of the protestors.
The Marines aren’t enforcing squat. That’s on ICE and the LAPD, the only ones doing the arresting.
> he would declare the LA riots an insurrection and devote 40% of the FBI to identifying, rounding up, and imprisoning all of the protestors
If they broke into a federal building? Absolutely.
Note that Trump's DoD did not seem to be in a hurry to deploy the National Guard on 6th January, despite multiple requests to do so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_enforcement_response_to_th...
My understanding is that the National Guard are being deployed because ICE is being impeded from carrying out their operations. If California were allowed to constructively block the Federal government from carrying out policy of democratically elected administrations, that would be effectively a declaration of secession. Hundreds of years of precedent has made it clear that states are subordinate to the Federal government.
The California government are not blocking the Federal government from carrying out ICE raids. If you believe otherwise, please show the evidence that Trump has presented.
Governor Wilson called up the National Guard, actually; subsequently, at Governor Wilson's request, and coordinating planning with both the Governor and Mayor Bradley of LA, President Bush invoked the Insurrection Act, federalized the Guard, and called up the Marines, and deployed the federal and federalized forces (including, also, federal law enforcement) in close cooperation and coordination with state and local law enforcement to restore order.
That is very different from the situation presently.
The fact that the Guard can be actively federalized, rather than sent home to prevent jt from being used against the Federal government, demonstrates that the situations are wildly dissimilar.
(It is also not legally similar as Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act, which is the only thing that allows using the US military use to enforce the law, whether restricted to doing so in the neighborhood of civilian federal infrastructure and personnel or not.)
https://www.npr.org/2025/06/09/nx-s1-5428352/johnson-nationa...
After invoking the Insurrection Act, correct.
> So is your issue state sovereignty?
In part, but more specifically, my issues are both the substantive issues of policy and the relevant federal law.
The latter is simpler: 10 USC § 12406, which Trump has relied exclusively on in federalizing the Guard, explictly does not (unlike the Insurrection Act, which allows federalizing any part of the universal militia, including but not limited to the Guard when its conditions are met) allow bypassing the Governor. And no provision of law, absent the Insurrection Act, allows deploying regular federal forces, with or without the Governor, for any civilian enforcement mission, however limited.
I mean, Gavin Newsom just did a long interview from a "crisis center" where he did exactly that, today. And plenty of Democratic politicians also speak against violent protests whenever they occur.
But unless you actually pay pretty close attention to what Democratic politicians actually say, you won't hear these statements. Fox doesn't cover Democratic politicians speaking against violence. And frankly, if there's a 99.9% peaceful protest with one burning car, the media will devote 80% of their coverage to the burning car, and maybe a few sentences to politicians saying the burning car is bad. The media is unfortunately interested in spectacle and entertainment.
I pay more attention than average to what politicians of both parties say, and it's kind of hilarious how often I hear "Why didn't so-and-so say X?" (uh, they do every week or two), or "I never believed so-and-so would do Y" (uh, they literally promised Y on the campaign trail). I don't know how to fix this.
Trump: We must have law and order. Immigration laws must be enforced. We will not tolerate riots or destruction.
Protesters: The government shouldn't detain people who are in the country illegally. We should ignore federal laws we don't agree with. If we disagree with federal agents who are enforcing existing laws, we should impede them, attack them, and destroy property to lash out.
This is not an endorsement of Trump, as he's clearly milking this situation to squeeze Newsom. This is a deliberate strategy to put Newsom in an untenable position and paint him as an irredeemable liberal to everyone outside California. Until the left takes a logically defensible position on illegal immigration, they will continue to be vulnerable to Trump's theater on this and he will continue to bludgeon them with it in elections.
>This is a deliberate strategy to put Newsom in an untenable position and paint him as an irredeemable liberal
What's fascinating with current US politics and media is how these two sentences can be constructed in same sentence in an attempt to come off as "see I'm smart and media literate, I can see the full picture!" while literally the first sentence of your comment shows that that's not the case.
The media repeating "Democrats are far left" long enough and it have penetrated your head. There's probably pandering to far left in democratic party I assume, but it have been magnified to a reality altering level by media so that's now believed as the core, while same thing happening on the far-right & Republican party.
Both side must be truly be thinking like you, I assume. "I see the full picture, I'm smart" while parroting a distortion only required to be repeated for years.
If everyone could put their phone down, touch some grass, take a road trip to the opposite political isle maybe this distortion could've been avoided.
So we're in a situation where the democratic party is utterly failing to actually implement any of the good or popular left policies that would help the masses, even the pretty moderate ones, but is pushing incredibly unpopular extreme left policies that don't actually help the citizenry. In that context it's honestly a very reasonable thing for someone on the right to point to the dems call the party far left. And yet for those of us that want these policies for the people, the dems appear right-leaning. Very odd how this has worked out, but both are true in a way.
I think the reason behind this is mainly due to them being controlled by their corporate donors who dictate focusing on the unpopular policies which are cheaper for the corporations to contend with. Universal healthcare would be a huge blow to corporate control in this country, as right now healthcare is tied to employment and that gives large corporate employers incredibly excessive power.
In either case, thank you for the insight. It didn't give me any additional insight and while you call it one dimensional, I only see an expansion of the same idea I shared: both sides use culture war to smear each other (and as a lazy cop-out to game the media attention for coverage and votes). Most people have heard of AOC, Bernie, and Elizabeth Warren's. Even Ted Cruz & RFK JR (pre election). Surely when congress is 400+ and senate is 100+ people, those names don't represent ALL of the intricate factions of the two parties?
Yet we all act like they somehow are the representative of the opposite. To me you're just saying the same thing, but relieving any responsibility of the parrots, and putting it solely on corporate and self interested politician.
If those culture wars win votes, I think putting the sole responsibility that way is just an convenient excuse for everyone to play along the system and shout at each other.
I guess to the people shouting at each other, my comment might have come off as "touting my horn". I'm from the outside, I don't have any high horse or stakes in this but I understand the confusion
You've swallowed a lot of right-wing propaganda about the Democratic Party. Do you really thing Democrats are "pro-illegal immigration"? The rest of these tendentious mischaracterizations take some tedious and likely fruitless effort to debunk, but just think about that phrase. Do you think any party is in favor of illegal immigration? How would that work anyway? Parties try to pass laws. The best you could find is that some party favors immigration policies you would prefer be illegal.
Democrats are against violating laws to deport people here legally or following the legal, prescribed process for adjudicating their status. Republicans are okay with breaking the law to chuck people out of the country. That produces a different result, but "illegal" is on the wrong side of the balance there for your argument.
You're not in a great position to tell Democrats what to say and do if you're clearly ignoring what they say and do and believing the lies other people feed you about them.
I do. Demonstrably so. The Biden administration admitted between 8-20 million illegal immigrants into the country, depending on the estimate used. Even at the low end, this is the highest ever in the history of the country. More than any other administration. They made all kinds of excuses. They claimed they needed new laws. Trump solved it almost overnight. [https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...] The Democrats lied. They didn't need more laws. They wanted things the way they were. They chose to permit the situation and allow it to devolve like that.
Now almost every Democrat representative is resolutely opposed to deporting illegal immigrants. There is simply no other way to interpret this than they are in fact pro illegal immigration.
Frankly i think you're exactly the person who is part of the problem here, proudly prejudiced, not very well informed despite thinking you know better than everyone.
> Do you think any party is in favor of illegal immigration? How would that work anyway? Parties try to pass laws. The best you could find is that some party favors immigration policies you would prefer be illegal.
This kind of reads like it's written by AI or something but either way it's irrational on such a fundamental level that i don't really know what to make of it. Obviously a ruling power in a country can be in favor of something illegal and take action to increase illegality on purpose. That's what you are saying trump is doing, so you don't even disagree with yourself. Where did you think the huge numbers of illegal immigrants came from while under democratic leadership, did they materialize independently? No, they promoted illegality.
It wasn't in my post but just in case you aren't an AI, the democratic party is pro illegal immigration for relatively straightforward reasons. their large corporate donors like having a large cheap underclass of workers to exploit and abuse. Illegal immigrants are much less likely to cause problems at work and are likely to work harder because they are at a much higher risk. If you're a CEO you can bet it's better to hire people you know will never unionize, you can exploit easily and won't file any workplace safety complaints. You can even commit wage theft with abandon, what are they going to do about it? There's also other secondary effects like creating a large amount of illegality overloads the courts and generally creates chaos which can be easy to exploit.
I've also seen the argument that the dems hope to swing demographics to secure the vote but i'm not so sure about that one, especially considering how hard legal voting immigrants are swinging against the democratic party for all of my prior mentioned reasons. I feel like if you were actually in touch with the legal immigrant population you would understand this a lot better.
I'm in favor of large scale legal immigration so people get full workplace rights and aren't easy to take advantage of. Duh. Creating an underclass of workers with less rights to keep corpo rat profits rising is bad. The democratic party has done the opposite, this is fact. Not really sure what else there is to say, all your smoke isn't worth much.
And i do think the dem's longer term plan was something stupid like "bring in infinite illegal immigrants to create a problem" and then "we will sell the solution and make them all citizens!" and that went ass up with their own hubris exploding in their face. Either way that's evil shit.
Well, unless it's done in furtherance of our agenda and against Congress...
Trump's political superpower is his ability to take a base position that is entirely reasonable and agreeable to most people ("The US must enforce its federal immigration laws"), then use inflammatory rhetoric and legal boundary testing to whip his opposition into undisciplined, emotional overreactions that leave them in a worse political position than him. He has been absurdly successful in using this tactic since 2015.
"Too many people are saying, "It's terrible that innocent black men died, but this property destruction has to stop!"
when they should be saying, "It's terrible that there is property destruction, but the death of innocent black men has to stop!"."
Remind us all what crime he was convicted of. A $20 bill was alleged by a shop clerk to be counterfeit. There is no evidence either that it was, or that it was known to be counterfeit.
> He then resisted a lawful arrest. His death was entirely self inflicted.
Hard to self-inflict murder. "It wasn't murder!" - if his death was due solely to his alleged actions, and not due to excessive and inappropriate force by the police involved, then an officer would not have been charged with and convicted of second-degree murder. Nor would prosecutors not only charge the police involved, but move to increase charges and sentencing requests due to the "unnecessary and particularly excessive cruelty being inflicted upon [Floyd] by the officers". Weird.
The punishment for no crime in the US is state-sanctioned public execution.
We should be clear, protesting is not illegal. It's protected first amendment speech. There is activity at protests that is illegal, and should be punished, but that's not protesting and lumping them together puts a chilling effect on.
I've seen lots of pictures of protestors waving Mexican flags, and of the burning Waymos, etc. My guess is these are a very small percentage of protestors, but it makes for great TV, and Trump gets to say that he's "protecting America against violent foreign invaders". And I can imagine many people watching this and agreeing with him - I mean, I consider myself quite liberal, but waving a Mexican flag at these events just makes me think you can fuck right off with that bullshit.
It's a great example IMO of how Trump deliberately sows division and escalates whenever possible in order to use people's fear to consolidate power. It's basically Autocracy 101.
I'm confused, you consider yourself quite liberal but you think it's bullshit for Mexicans in the US to celebrate their heritage?
If you think that's what's going on, you are indeed quite confused
What is your explanation? I suspect that it's something along the lines of: "people waving foreign flags are signaling their intention to invade the US", but that you don't want to say it overtly because it's obviously a racist talking point from right-wing media.
You either support somewhat violent protests, regardless of topic, expecting that law enforcement and civilians will handle it amongst themselves, or you are authoritarian and demand that the federal government intervene with the US Armed Forces the moment someone throws a rock at a cop car.
This is an abomination, and anyone who supports the deployment of troops in my opinion lacks the values I thought were universal in this country.
(To support this action by Trump is to say you don't support the second amendment, on the grounds that the people should never have the power to subvert the state).
I really hated when Fox news would say things like this and I hate it when individuals do. It makes it impossible for us to communicate.
Just because the other side doesn't share your values doesn't mean they have none. You might say their values are evil. That's a different discussion, but they're rarely just reacting blindly.
I'm saying they lack the values I grew up believing were universal in this country.
No, they do not even get to claim order any more. This situation is being escalated by Trump in order to have a raging crisis for him to attack and drive even more division. Just like he did to the 2A/BLM protests, just like he did with the election lies culminating in the J6 protests, just like he did with his appalling anti-leadership throughout Covid. Trump doesn't possess the skills to actually tackle problems. His only real skill is slithering away from blame after he creates chaos and destruction. The fascists' only real value is now naked autocratic "strong" man authoritarianism. And the only reason they're still clinging to caring about the law is to assuage their own egos that the suffering they're reveling in is somehow justified.
They are bad people.
It makes me feel sick as a programmer knowing how many people on this board that values "hacker" anti authoritarianism and curiosity would have the government send the military to shoot their own citizens
But yeah, some cars getting destroyed is terrible.
I mean, surely you're not so stupid to legitimately believe the marines are being sent in for "control", right? We all, left, right, and center, understand what this is. Trump news-casting. It's an attempt to make the situation worse for clicks and views, for sensationalism. And it's working quite well!
Even if you think these riots are riots and that they're the bad guys and yadda yadda yadda... okay and why are we sending in the marines to cause more destruction? What's the link there buddy? Do you just want to watch the world burn? Because, honestly, that's kind of fucked up.
- In the summer of 2020, as Trump privately fumed over nationwide Black Lives Matter protests, White House aides drafted a proclamation to send thousands of active-duty U.S. troops into the streets.
- Trump ultimately was talked down by Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Mark Esper, but he has publicly expressed regret over not acting more forcefully.
- Top Trump allies, including architects of the far-right roadmap "Project 2025," have at various points called for using the Insurrection Act to secure the border, preempt Inauguration Day protests, and even subvert the 2020 election.
https://www.axios.com/2025/06/10/los-angeles-protests-trump-...
I don't love the phrasing of inferiors, but at least evil certainly applies. (Well thought out, well informed) Politics is a duty not a luxury.
The Republicans are rubbing their hands together and cackling every time one of you claims "everything is political" or "politics is a duty" because it just helps them win elections.
What happens in these coming months defines a major historical event for the USA, which sets it's course for the coming century.
It may become a country which is directly hostile to you. If you are American and are ignoring this, then it is no different to getting mad your family is wanting to talk about the raging kitchen fire that is unaddressed and escalating because "so what, the stove top has fire sometimes, it's a gas heater, that's normal" which, sure, would be right, but right now the entire wall is ablaze.
You cannot ignore this one, even those of us in other countries cannot ignore this one, as we have to reconsider our alliance with a country that reasonably one can assume is in the middle of falling to a fascist regime.
This is NOT run of the mill politics. This is genuinely about the collective future of the Anglosphere.
And it's even topical here - this surveillance industry that grew out of many tech startups is itself at ground zero of this fascist takeover, both boosting extremist disinformation to drive "engagement" and also creating a crop of newly-minted elites with the audacity to kick over the whole apple cart of our American way of life.
So, you willingly and intentionally honed-in on the 1% you don't like... just so you can complain? I don't mean to be rude, but I don't think that's normal behavior.
Everyone’s okay with peaceful protests, but they should call in the national guard and prosecute people for violence. You might hate Trump, but in my previous experience, it’s the residents of the most liberal districts that suffer all the consequences of this nonsense.
Was literally everything destroyed, no, but I've got photographs of small businesses boarded up with they already looted everything, please don't loot again. There was devastation throughout the city.
After everything happened, national guard trucks showed up and guarded the devastation. If you drive out to the wealthy burbs, it's like nothing happened. They devastated one of the most liberal parts of America. Congrats.
Of the 2000 national guard deployed, only 300 have actually been operationalized.
There was hardly any looting or rioting. Certainly not more than could be handled locally. Trump is doing this to deliberately escalate the situation.
> LA had plenty of local police to handle the scale of the protests before
sure, and why didn't they do it this time? I suspect for the same reason: both Bass and Newsom want to escalate the situation as well. And when both sides want escalation that's what we get. My 2c.
It's hilarious to me that we even have the cultural understanding of a sports riot, and it's assumed that it's just not that bad. Just people having a good time, burning up a car and smashing businesses to celebrate (mourn) their team's victory (defeat).
Is that supposed to be funny? Because in a super dry sort of way it's hilarious as a concept.
Edit:
Fwiw, the governor probably shouldn’t have waited for permission. A white man encroaching on the city run by a black woman at the height of Freddie Gray, tough spot to be in.
> where the mayor of the city said that she was going to allow, give protesters room to destroy and wasn't going to stop them.
https://www.fox5dc.com/news/hogan-says-defunding-police-wors...
Glad to see Trump learned his lesson from the first time.
They didn't make any such claim. They were explaining the consequences they experienced as a result of the BLM riots.
The fact that you won't say which city is telling. Do you still live there? How does one live in a city where everything was destroyed?
Go look at photos of Ukraine, Syria, Gaza... There, cities have been entirely destroyed. Portland had some building fires and boarded up storefronts.
I don’t still live there. Honestly, it convinced me right or wrong that the only reason I’m able to live in the city was because the police are there to sort of enforce the laws and that there is a certain percentage of the population that will steal everything as soon as they think there is an opportunity. Compare that to the suburbs where you could leave valuables out in your yard and no one would take them convinced me that I would rather raise a family in a stable mostly crime free environment.
They burn the small business of honest working people.
The cops escalated every situation they arrived at.
What can they do to guard then?
His posts were always insightful and it is indeed sad that he is no longer with us.
Well, I'm not so sure about that last part anymore.
Or to quote Serbian president's freudian slip (from just two days ago): "Every living soul in Kosjerić [small town that held municipal elections] came out to vote against us, but we still managed to win."
It is fucking bullshit how a country can spend decades building up its democratic institutions and all it takes is one opportunist to get elected once to undo it all and solidify himself into power for the next 15ish years. And then after they finally leave, you have to start all over again from scratch.
Turns out it's all BS. Unless it already deteriorated, and no it has not deteriorated in most of the world, votes do count and you live with the outcome which may include the eventual reality of vites stop counting. It's very weird, I can't form an opinion if its a psyop or just how the societies work.
The same steps, in the same direction, the competitive authoritarian[0] playbook was clearly in full play, during the first term Trump started to openly attack the free press, subjugate some democratic institutions, etc. but guardrails were still holding, some GOP Congress people could pushback, the VP wasn't entirely in the cult, the cabinet had some level-headed people.
Now in the second term there is nothing holding back, not the Congress nor Senate, not the Judiciary, not the cabinet, not the elites, not the press, and seemingly the people aren't able at all to comprehend and pushback on how authoritarian it all is.
The plan trudges along, crisis will keep being fabricated so Trump's grip on power increases, this one in LA is definitely going to be used to salami slice more and more power into the Executive, under the veil of "homeland security".
You're entering a new phase of Trump's authoritarianism, Americans, and there doesn't seem to have any power actually powerful enough to fight back.
At the same time it feels pretty hopeless, even more when I noticed downvotes coming to my comment right after the day rose in the USA without any rebuttal, you're among people who actually support this and do not realise the path it's verging towards.
And then 2010-2025 happened, we saw what the revenge was.
Trump coming back feels very similar to this.
Project 2025 is just a collection of methods they used in E-Europe before. On one hand one could read and learn from history. On the other hand... It's a manual on how to do things, in case you wanna build a system like those in E-Europe.
> In his first speech as PM, he promised drastic measures to stop the negative spiral of the Hungarian economy, and to ease the burden of the international crisis. He also stated that he would remain in power until he had the solid majority of Parliament behind his austerity package, but will stay no longer than a year.
> The new cabinet formed on 29 May 2010. Bajnai was succeeded by Viktor Orbán. After that he retired from politics and returned to business life.
Funnily, Gyurcsany was removed after a leaked recording on which he said "we have fucked it up. Not just a bit, but much." [1] It's amazing that after 17 years, when Orban's huge lies and corruption is proven, people are fine with that, but when a former clown PM was complaining to his party members that "we should've done better", half the country was in riot.
[1]: In English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%90sz%C3%B6d_speech
The "real" problem was that they had too many (Russia-influenced / supported?) ex-communists and some of them were doing corrupt business in the 100k USD range; Of course this is already forgotten, Orban's friends' 100M+ USD ranging businesses seem to be fine with the voters. Not to mention Orban's and the foreign minister's regular visit to Putin.
Relevant search keywords: "Hungary Orban" + any of the following: "stadium", "castle", "rich meszaros", "corruption"
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Hungarian_parliamentary_e...
"At stake is a fundamental component of the framework of US constitutional democracy. It begins with the principle, enshrined in law, that military forces exist to protect the country from existential threats — such as an invasion or rebellion — not to enforce the law.
Most fundamentally, the founders of the American republic understood very clearly that concentrated military power, loyal to a single man, could be used to achieve total control by that person. And they had a historical example in mind: Rome — a republic governed by the people and the Senate — was transformed into an empire ruled by an emperor as a result of the Roman army being turned against its citizens."
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-06-09/trump-...
serious question: are Countries such as Italy, France etc not a democracy?
All of them are, verbatim from wikipedia, "a military force with law enforcement duties among the civilian population.". Ditto for spain Guardia Civil, and many of the countries listed in that same wiki page: Algeria, Netherlands, Poland, Argentina, Romania, Turkey, Ukraine, Chile, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, ...
They are, but not in the the "framework of US constitutional democracy." A system for which we have more evidence of stability than either of Italy or France's modern republics. (Note, too, les gendarmes' heritage: imperial France. Also, gendarmes aren't usually deployed overseas. They are, in a sense, more similar to the FBI than the U.S. Marines.)
1- the territorial split between gendarmerie/police within the French territory
2- the fact the gendarmes for police work report to the Ministry of Defense.
If one had to design the police system from crash, they would likely merge police and gendarmes for police work.
The split is nonsense today.
In the Netherlands, the Royal Marechaussee are literal soldiers who perform military police duties and also many civilian policing duties, but all of them are soldiers first.
The second part is a huge differentiator from "normal" military. A police force even if administratively under the military has one crucial differentiator: their daily duties and training revolve almost exclusively around policing civilians from the same country. Military training and tactics are overwhelmingly aimed at dealing with foreign enemy combatants, mainly other military forces.
The methods give away the intentions and expected outcome. The US already has a very "militarized" police force. You send actual military only if you want to inflict the maximum amount of damage, and with that threat overwhelmingly scare the country into compliance.
That is the part that is not universally true. There are plenty of Gendarmeries who are soldiers first, with combat training and ethos, who also perform policing duties, the Marechaussee included.
Fair enough, but Wikipedia confirms that they all have civilian law enforcement and police duties so clearly their training, tactics, and experience revolve heavily around dealing with civilians.
I'll still take that over "soldiers only", even more with US's very active military where the soldiers routinely see active combat. Both the theory and practice shapes their "soldier vs. enemy combatant" world view. That's a hammer if I've ever seen one.
* when used domestically, it's under the Minister of Justice and Security
* there's also no Dutch equivalent of the U.S. presidency with unilateral executive control over the military
I'd argue this kind of danger is something you get more in presidential systems. Not that we all shouldn't be wary of military forces within our civilian populations.
In my experience they don't act at all like normal cops, and sometimes can be in conflict with them. The only interactions I ever hear of with citizens is if they beat the shit out of someone. You're not going to be going to them for a lost phone or a cat in a tree.
But they absolutely will do traffic police on highways, intervene to reason with a loud neighbor, etc. They'll also routinely show up during large protests in big cities.
The "big-gun carrying" Gendarmerie is a special unit, the GIGN, probably akin to US' SWAT teams. They'll intervene when "very dangerous" people are involved, think hostage situations or the like. "Regular police" also has a similar outfit.
The unit I was confusing with the Gendarmerie as a whole was the Mobile Gendarmerie, whose role is more similar to the the Guardia Civil and Carabinieri.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Gendarmerie
I wouldn't have included GIGN, since I they appear to be much smaller and have a more "special”/"tactical" role.
I'll also note that the the Gendarmerie don't appear to be sending a team to the AWC (the olympics of smashing through the ceiling and shooting you in your bed) in two weeks, whereas the Guardia Civil and Carabinieri will. This may be a geopolitical thing though.
Seeing Gens D'Armes on the street was somewhat common. The Gens D'Armes are akin to 'heavy' police and are a show of force. The Gens D'Armes were pretty common to see in the subways, airports, and/or just on patrol. They were Gens D'Armes stations in the city just how there were also regular police stations. Gens D'Armes patrols were a bit distinct from other police patrols, almost always larger groups, around 5 to 7 people with long-guns and plate carriers. Meanwhile regular police had much lighter weapons, no body armor, and very rarely were in groups of more than 2 or 3.
However, regular police now wear bulletproof vests, too, even when randomly patrolling the streets. Since some years ago, we now have "municipal police", basically police which answer to the mayor [0], as opposed to the state, with somewhat fewer powers. But even they walk around with bullet-proof vests.
---
[0] In France, "the police" usually means "Police Nationale", which answers to the Prefect, who represents the State in the local Jurisdiction (département) – they are not elected, but appointed by the Interior Ministry. The "Municial police" answers to the City, but they're not allowed to conduct all the operations that the National Police do. The City means the Mayor, who's elected by the local population.
IMO as Chilean, it's a pretty bad thing democratically, for both historical (dictatorship) and more recent reasons. Still, there is a clear difference between when the police with deep ties to the army enforce the law and when actual troops do it.
While copper Gutiérrez and grunt Herrera both technically have the rank of corporal, one mostly writes tickets, deals with noise complaints, and has riot training, while the other only knows how to march and shoot an assault rifle.
The actually important thing is that this is testing the waters. Trump will use the troops for flimsier and flimsier reasons.
NOTE: Chilean police are semi-routinely brutal; this is not an endorsement.
So I don't think your comment makes any sense, at least in Portugal.
In any case, I hope you agree my description of the GNR was accurate in substance.
The spanish Guardia Civil is a very good example of a police force tied too deeply with the military. In 1981 some parts of the force attempted an actual coup, with one guy entering the parliament and shooting in the air (or ceiling).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt
The continuity of the Guardia Civil after Franco's dictatorship is one of many vestiges that has not been removed due to fears of creating an instability leading to some coup and a reversal to fascism. IMHO this may have been justified the years immediately after Franco's death, but should have been addressed at some point. See the 1981 coup as for why "appeasing" the oppressors usually doesn't work out, or even works out for the oppressors.
Their logo even today still contains a fasces[1] shield, which as been added during the Franco regime.
Other countries can do that if they want. It may or may not be a threat to them. But in the US, it's absolutely a threat to democracy, because it's already the executive deploying the military against the law.
Although I know quite a lot of (what I consider) well-educated Americans, it is also the only country from which I regularly meet the type of person who doesn't care at all about how society works (also, technology, history, art, etc).
You'll probably find that HN-person is the kind of person who values this kind of argument, but HN-world is quite small.
On multiple occasions, I've met Americans who simply care about might-makes-right. It's skin-deep, as soon as you ask them why they support this or that policy, it's because they are powerful and the rest of the world is not. I've literally met Americans who thought their tax money allowed them to summon troops, more than once. (This ended up backfiring as it turns out, they did not know how to get US Marines to arrive, big shocker.)
The same kind of thinking seems to be prevalent internally. You can trample the law, because you can. You see it even in ordinary US-made popular media. What happens what a character gets in trouble with the law? Well, then of course it depends on who has the most money to hire the best lawyers.
In the current case, I suspect the government will just do whatever it wants and there will be no legal reckoning.
The nice thing about the HN Small World is that it can be efficiently searched.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_navigable_small_w...
My read is that this is even further along in many places in Europe.
Quite often, and the answer is not many. It's why I've returned to a frankly elitist worldview, because this seems to be a historical pattern when power is diffused too widely. The lesson of our age may be that the Chinese political system, which seeks to restrit political competition within a small, carefully-selected group, is fitter than the American experiment.
I'll additionally note that China has famously not handled some of its major protests well and uh, calls in the military.
Agreed. I'm saying if we're accepting this as precedent, a Presidential republic is not a stable system. We either reject the military being called in to quell protests. Or we accept it as precedent and revise our system of government to remove that power from the madness of crowds.
Seems like it's just cultural norms all the way down. If people want to take advantage of the system, they can break these norms while pretending to be what they used to be.
Quite the opposite. It was passed in 1878 because of the backlash against Reconstruction, shortly after federal troops were withdrawn from the South in 1877, and was intended to prevent something like Reconstruction from happening again.
You're right. Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest it was a product of Reconstruction. It was absolutely part of the process of post-civil war renormalisation.
Its always been this way.
Its no surprise that some government systems more strongly appeal.
The problem here is you've taken the last part as the whole.
There were plenty of thugs as you say that have no social inhibition and get imprisoned. But there are numerous others that got along well enough and covered for each other they kept themselves away from punishment. There were cruel bullies in my school while committing vicious acts had enough of a following they could depend on them to blame the victims as the entity that started the fight. This type of person is well suited for the thin blue line.
I was a member of an infantry battalion once tasked with doing policing in a foreign country. Let me just say that the outcome was exactly what you’d expect. We were very effective at responding with overwhelming force to attacks by an insurgency but pretty ineffective at keeping the peace.
I don't think you were, since all US COIN operations in living memory have been abject failures.
I never said we were effective at counterinsurgency ops
> /4 So “cover me” to the LAPD means “if someone pops up with a gun and shoots at me, shoot at them.” Apparently to the Marines it means “lay down a curtain of suppressive fire using your rifles.” Hilarity ensued.
https://bsky.app/profile/kenwhite.bsky.social/post/3lr2w7wo3...
Is that supposed to be a surprise to someone? What do you think "cover fire" is?
It's called that because it's how you cover people.
If you ask someone to darn your sock, and they do, will you complain "hey, I didn't say 'darning needle'"?
A cop saying “cover me” is asking for something the marine might call overwatch.
So yeah in conclusion, I don't really understand the point you're trying to make.
Read it in the sense of "I told my toddler they can't have ice cream three times a day and apparently that makes me a meanie".
Crowd control is pretty much the opposite of modern warfare, with large number of troops marching shoulder to shoulder forming shield walls, even having supporting cavalry.
Probably very specific, but I was in two non-US militaries and all combat corps were trained in Aid to the Civil Power, including public order, and were regularly refreshed.
I think you’d already kinda lost this? Cops seem to mostly serve themselves?
It’s not just that the military has become both, the police have too. Arming your police to the level of US police is just crazy.
How can one argue that the police serve the people? They don't necessarily even serve local government. They get a lot of federal funding and equipment, and in riot-control mode their purpose is to brutalize protestors until people stop showing up.
I also find it rather grotesque to watch Newsom argue that state and local police are perfectly capable of handling (i.e. crippling) protestors by themselves and don't need any federal assistance to do so.
Goes all the way back to Rodney King.
But there was countless incidents that were not high profile that went completely unpunished. The purpose was to terrify protestors. If the police beat, abduct, maim, and injure protestors, and a year or two later, a half dozen get some light punishment, are you going to risk getting your eye shot out by a rubber bullet or your arm broken by a baton to protest the police next time?
[1] “Police here routinely embrace the violent crowd-control tactics … indiscriminately attacking protesters with tear gas, flash-bang grenades, rubber bullets, and other “less lethal” munitions. The bureau has been hit with two temporary restraining orders from federal judges: one rebuking the PPB for likely violations of protesters’ rights to free speech and against excessive force; the other ordering the PPB to stop arresting journalists and legal observers for documenting police clashes with protesters.” https://archive.ph/39lib
[2] “Donovan LaBella, 30, was peacefully protesting outside the federal courthouse in Portland on July 11, 2020, when a deputy U.S. Marshal fired a “less lethal” impact munition that struck LaBella in the face, causing brain damage.” https://www.opb.org/article/2024/11/20/portland-protester-do...
[3] “A Portland cop who chased down and beat a protest medic, in one of the most harrowing incidents of police violence from the city’s Black Lives Matter protests last year, will not face criminal charges.” https://archive.ph/6ErUo
[4] “[N]ot a single federal officer on the Portland streets at that time has been held individually accountable for alleged constitutional violations over claims brought by David and other protesters. In fact, courts have not had a chance to assess whether constitutional violations even occurred. That is thanks to the intervention of the Supreme Court, which in a series of rulings has created an accountability-free environment in which federal officials interacting with the public on a daily basis…can violate people’s constitutional rights with impunity.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/supreme-court/portland-prot...
[5] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/17/892277592/federal-officers-us...
[6] “the video shows Mr. Gugino stopping in front of the officers to talk, an officer yells “push him back” three times; one officer pushes his arm into Mr. Gugino’s chest, while another extends his baton toward him with both hands. Mr. Gugino flails backward, landing just out of range of the camera, with blood immediately leaking from his right ear… ‘These officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square’[John T. Evans, the president of the Buffalo police union]”. https://archive.ph/KYOIS
Longer vid: https://streamable.com/bc1sog
Still doesn't make it right.
https://www.twitch.tv/rhyzohm/clip/SmellyCourageousSardineTT...
Your linked video is in the background in my clip.
Thanks though, better angle.
Wait, don't you mean that "the people become the enemies of the state"? Or did I miss some jab at immigrants?
The people coming will be coming for a variety of reasons but it won't be to take the jobs of the uneducated Americans
Also, isn't it completely reckless to import a lot more people in a short timespan, without the necessary housing and infrastructure (doctors, nurses, teachers, etc) to support them in the first place?
It's definitely not the case now. Unemployment is way up. Which I suspect is a combination of factors (slowing economy & tariffs) not just immigration.
But yes, Canadian governments work for employers, not workers. Just like any other advanced capitalist country. There is an expectation that there's a "natural" unemployment rate in this country around 6%, and they freak out if it goes much lower than that.
In general, when regular people are complaining about inflation they're complaining about their groceries. When you hear businesses and governments concerned about inflation .. they mean they're stressed out because minimum wage employees are demanding some basic respect that employers feel they shouldn't have to provide...
No wonder Canada's productivity is stagnant and on track for the lowest growth in the G7. Why invest in technology or productivity when you can just cry to the government for cheap, indentured labor?
Increasing immigration is a good way to revitalize a stagnant economy. This is the great chasm between people's intuition of how national economies work and economists' understanding of how they work.
Then why is Canada's economy stagnating with all that emigration? When is that supposed economic boom coming?
The second issue is, if that economic boom is gonna trickle down to the Canadian working class or only to the top 1% of Canadian business and asset owning class while everyone else is left holding the bag?
Because we've been duped for decades with this uncontrolled immigration trickle down economic fallacy.
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/largest-joint-immigration-...
If I was a betting man, I'd handicap the number of paper-less workers he employs at his 3 golf clubs in Florida at 100. If we were to take into account the amount of work-permit-less laborers working on his golf courses nationwide, I'd say the number is over 200.
And even then, I'd bet my life on the over. Having played golf once at his club in Doral (shitty course, would never play again, even if my round was covered), I can safely assume ain't nobody mowing that course that can speak English passably, let alone are in this country working legally.
How proletarian of him to hire "normal" help. Lol.
Based on my limited experience with comparable clubs in the northeast I would have expected the properties to be run by (subcontracted) crews of "you pay extra because we speak english and have no face tats or felonies" type service personnel because that's what the old money wasp clientele expect.
I can also attest that some of the multigenerational "my great grandkids won't have to work a day in their lives" wealth types are some of the cheapest and stingiest people I've ever met, and most certainly don't care that the groundskeepers at their too-cool-for-school clubs in Westchester or The Hamptons or Greenwich speak zero english and aren't here legally. In fact, that's the expectation, because god forbid their club dues go up by a few hundred dollars a year (while they spend that same amount on a single dinner at the clubhouse).
Now, I get that "a few" isn't a trend but the effect is pretty observable. IDK if it's the customers really driving things or if the townies are simply more capable of excelling in such roles.
I've played tennis and golf all over Westchester County, all over Fairfield County, and in Long Island. On the golf side, yeah, it's townies. Same goes for pro shop, tennis assistants, pool staff, and sometimes, kitchen/snack bar staff. But the folks who mow the lawns, clean the locker rooms and toilets, water the greens? Hell no those aren't locals.
Remember folks, with this administration, hypocrisy is the point.
> President Trump spent much of his campaign vowing "mass deportations" of undocumented immigrants, and the first weeks of his term have been marked by public displays of immigration enforcement. It could pose a blow to multiple parts of the country's food supply chain, including the dairy industry, where more than half of the national workforce is undocumented.
* https://www.cbsnews.com/video/how-undocumented-workers-suppo...
I don’t know that that is true:
Florida: https://www.fox35orlando.com/news/100-undocumented-immigrant...
Texas: https://www.tpr.org/border-immigration/2025-06-05/ice-raids-...
California farm country: https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/01/kern-county-immigrati...
“This appears to be the first large-scale Border Patrol raid in California since the election of Donald Trump, coming just a day after Congress certified the election on January 6, in the final days of Joe Biden’s presidency.”
It strains credulity somewhat to act as though ICE, whose purpose has always been immigration enforcement, only started enforcing immigration under Trump. I remember hearing about ICE/immigration raids for many decades now in California.
In any event I think the prior’s point was that the current admins’ zealous focus on immigration is mostly optics. The idea is to get California activists to juxtapose themselves on the evening news throwing bricks and Molotovs against clean cut patriotic young servicemen. The American electorate prefer marines to brick throwers, so it’s just easy politics. It’s been the go to gambit of the Trump team for most of his two terms. Immigration is a very popular issue with voters, but not with educated journalists who know most GOP donors like the Koch brothers are free market libertarians who want totally open boarders and therefore despite the voter concern, nothing meaningful will ever happen because immigration enforcement and reform will remain in essence a tool to whip up hysteria in the non-sophisticated. Immigration and deportation numbers don’t lie, and tell most of the story.
Gun control, abortion, immigration (legal and illegal), taxation/gov’t spending, affirmative action (aka DEI), etc.
Trump is really good at pushing buttons and generating outrage though. Not unexpected for a reality TV show star.
How did the market going up lose her money?
The loss of potential gains?
No, it’s much better to go harass people who aren’t in republican circles. Us vs them. Round up some illegals, make some examples, stick it to the democrats (who loosened the borders and are complicit). Trump is strong, and finally cracking down on all of this illegal nonsense, hoo rah!!
It’s all theater, that’s what Trump is - a darn good showman. Some illegals will get deported, eventually some of his core will see him as the thug he is. We just need to ensure democrats have a viable candidate lined up…ideally a white southern man. Clearly the push to elect a woman isn’t working at this time - we’ve tried it twice and Americans vote Trump instead.
I mean, this is a guy who put out a press release about his own health where everyone could tell he was lying because it included his own height and they just found pictures of him standing next to other people who were supposed to be the same height or shorter.
Even if we had a perfect e-verify system that magically guaranteed the result was accurate, it probably wouldn't make a difference. Not while it's use is "optional" in states like Texas.
It was a multi-million dollar if-statement that copied the expertise of the relevant law into a permanently legacy expert system.
Doing anything besides that would be illegal. But that also means there is no cross-referencing or vendor enforcement of fraud.
It did things like check if some tax-related status code was valid for the indicated home country of emigration. It didn’t do things like check against a national database for an SSN.
It basically punished people for filling out forms incorrectly or not being able to scan a document.
We didn’t get new regulations every quarter or ever. I dunno what the point was.
Edit: the everify step technically used personally identifiable information to contact a national database.
I guess my gripe is that I didn’t see how it could prevent fraud in any way a normal HR person wouldn’t have caught if it were to be caught. It’s a duplication of a process everyone was already doing.
If you want something like this to work, federal agents need to do it.
And if illegals are such a problem, why do the Republicans toady up to the corporations that perpetuate and profit from it?
Doing the arrests? Sure. Intimidating protesters for partisan messaging while desecrating the honour of our armed forces? No.
The only "they" doing arrests are ICE and the LAPD. The California National Guard isn't arresting anyone to my knowledge.
> local law enforcement did nothing to protect ICE from the mobs that try to set free illegals
Source? For literally any of this sentence.
Yesterday I saw a pic claiming to be of local law enforcement keeping the protestors separated from ICE. It was shared by protestors very upset that ICE was being kept safe while ICE shot at the protestors with tear gas — but(!) I have no way to tell if that was even taken this week in LA or 10 years ago in a different continent, because even before GenAI, there's loads of cases where people share videos of something awful, but label it about something completely different and use it as evidence about that other thing.
The person you replied to is looking for evidence that "local law enforcement did nothing to protect ICE from the mobs that try to set free illegals" — it's really hard to show "did nothing" from any single clip.
Even absent GenAI being pretty good now, what kind of video do you think will actually demonstrate that (1) local law enforcement, (2) did nothing, not just in the area being filmed but even when the camera was off, (3) specifically that the mobs were trying to set free "illegals" rather than being very unhappy that unidentified armed people wearing masks were hauling away their local pizza maker who they'd known for a decade?
LAPD/Sheriffs are doing vandalism related arrests including unlawful assembly.
CA guard is standing around federal properties. They normally don’t do arrests but they can and will do “detainments” until another agency can take over.
But the FBI is on site doing federal arrests (vandalism etc against a federal building is both a state and federal offense).
Not properly, they are hiding while wearing masks and not making it clear they are LEOs.
Not to mention arresting people here LEGALLY....
Doing a lot of work for you there.
The balance between State and Federal power is part of how the country works. You can’t just call in the military whenever States refuse to help you, which they aren’t obligated to do.
[1] “The clause relating to fugitive slaves is found in the national Constitution, and not in that of any State. It might well be deemed an unconstitutional exercise of the power of interpretation to insist that the States are bound to provide means to carry into effect the duties of the National Government nowhere delegated or entrusted to them by the Constitution.” Prigg v. Pennsylvania https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/41/539/
[2] “Congress may not simply ‘commandeer the legislative process of the States by directly compelling them to enact and enforce a federal regulatory program.” Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-476
The other was about the deportations, which the court said they need to serve deportees a notice of deportation before they are actually deported.
There is no ruling that says ICE can't go after them wherever they are and arrest them.
Looking at it from both sides, they are providing cheap labor to the bourgeois, taking a penance and it's agreed that it's okay, and now an outsider is coming in(trump and his administration) threatening that contract and they expect the state leaders to protect them, as they currently are with their inaction and posturing that everything is fine and safe until Trump opened his big mouth and showed force. The inaction and posturing not being effective, now they are out there punishing the elite for not protecting them by burning down the city they love, and love for them to work in, like slave labor.
Everyone knows this to be the case in LA, the argument is does ICE have the right to go in and mass-raid? I believe it does act in the interest of the state, but I also believe that no party has ever wanted to solve the issue of illegal but otherwise law-abiding people having a path to be legal, and that issue also should also be of great interest to the state.
Count how many gray posts are here and think what will happen when they will all leave. Not to mention that this site is Reddit v2.0 and have the same result and that is not coincidence.
> Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
Where are they finding these actors? Why aren't the job advertisements ever leaked to the public? Why hasn't an investigative journalist gone undercover to get paid to protest?
But, you're the smart guy, right? We're all imbeciles because we don't want a ruling class of billionaire grifters to normalize the concept of extrajudicial kidnappings. My bad.
Btw, nothing significant was "burned down" in 2020 either. Some shops hit by looters closed for a while and eventually reopened. Fairfax was hard hit by looting and if you went there today you would have no clue that anything happened.
The current events are primarily happening in an area that is full of state and federal government facilities, not really anyone's favorite spot. No looting either, there's nothing to loot. The demonstrators are burning Waymos and Bird scooters, better if it would not happen at all, but it's nobody's personal property.
The Nazis leveraged hatred towards minorities as a wedge to force their totalitarian control over Germany's state and society. They built up a ficticious enemy within, they inflamed society against that enemy, and proceeded to promise they would eliminate that enemy if the were granted total control over everyone and everything.
It's no coincidence that Trump is targeting California to fabricate a crisis and rapidly escalate the issue he created himself, specially how he forced the unjustified and illegal deployment of national guard and the armed forces. The goal is clearly not illegal aliens standing next to Home Depots. The goal is to force a scenario where loyalists in the armed forces target any opposition. It's no coincidence Trump has been threatening the governor of California with prison for the crime of "running for elections" at the time he's announcing deploying armed forces in California without authorization or legal standing and against the will of the governor of California.
They blamed them for pre-existing social problems. I feel the important context was that the government had to be significantly dysfunctional for the Nazi party to even exist.
The military are now being used for police work, and the police are behaving like the military.
This mob are creeping towards KristallMethNacht.
Is immigration a new hot topic in the US?
I mean, a few years ago the US government started wasting money building a wall on the US-Mexico border whose only purpose was propaganda and dog whistling.
And is it really necessary to point out the obvious parallels between the Nazi's "vital state" propaganda and Trump's "Canada as 51st state" and "Greenland is ours" rhetoric?
If they talk like Nazis and they goose-step like Nazis, what are they? I would ask if you'd start being concerned when they started rounding up random people off the streets, but apparently that's still not enough.
They act accordingly to those incentives.
it's so widely know im unsure if you're really oblivious or being sarcastic. sorry.
Why jump to these conspiracy notions about division and blatantly ignore the simplest and most obvious explanation.
So ... who is hurt and how badly are they hurt? Because when I see the amount of perfectly legal murder, robbery and torture happening in the U.S. [5] [6] [7] [8] I just don't understand what the big deal is. I guess it's whataboutism, but when we have limited resources, why are we using them for this specific problem? How bad is it compared to this other stuff?
[1] https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o... (the feds took it down -- gee I wonder why -- but the facts are in the permalink)
[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/white-houses-misleading-error-ridd...
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7768760/
[4] https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/farm-labor#lega...
[5] https://www.techtarget.com/revcyclemanagement/feature/Breaki...
[6] https://ij.org/press-release/new-report-finds-civil-forfeitu...
[7] https://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/07/27/whistleblower-e...
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#United_States
Coming as someone living in Texas - yes, it affects no one. It's always been an hallucination. We just attribute random things to "the illegals" when, in reality, they're not hurting anyone.
In fact, if you've ever been in Texas, you'd know this state is run by illegals. I drive around and I see homes being built out the wazoo and who's on the roof? Huh? Who is it? It's not white people.
I drive down 114 and they got 2 lanes closed for construction and I look over and what is working on the concrete? It's not white people. I stop by 7/11 to buy a coke and who checks me out?
People just don't like "illegals" because they're racist. That's the hard truth, the pill a lot of y'all don't want to swallow.
The only way this would stabilize is if the government came in and subsidized and socialized farm work heavily and that would also never happen.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/wh...
Something along the lines of:
Now nobody is picking fruits, all the fruits die on the tree/vine, so there's none of that in the supermarket and those farms go bankrupt. Also, most of those who were paid to butcher the cattle are gone, but the cows are still there, costing the farmers money, so those farms go bankrupt. And then so do the feed suppliers for cattle farmers that don't ranch (or do but need extra feed besides the grass). But everyone still needs to eat, which means there's correspondingly more demand for the stuff which is heavily mechanised, so prices for that go way up, but because this is an instant supply shock the average person is still hungry no matter what the prices are, unless the humans start eating alfalfa en-masse.
The whole working class/middle class divide was made up by the rich to get you to vote against your interests, and propped up by pick-mes who want to feel like they're better than someone.
If the US were more self-aware and honest it would expand existing guest worker programs and create new pathways for temp labor to work without obtaining citizenship the way Singapore and Middle Eastern countries do. They seem cruel but at least each side of the equation knows what it's getting and they can even visit home every year! But Americans' hubristic tendency is to look at a place like Singapore or some other new skyline in the middle east or Asia and declare smugly "borderline slaves built that."
As soon as you institute such a program businesses could get sued for illegal labor conditions, abuses of employees, sexual abuse of employees, violations of contract law, and more. Their expenses for imported labor would probably triple.
Would such businesses close as a result? Maybe a handful would but the real impact would be a huge drop in profits—also known as a greater share of profits going to workers.
FWIW, I bet the part of the population saying that is also the part opposed to the current immigration enforcement, namely liberals.
The side that's trying to maintain a population of illegal immigrants and explains that this is necessarily because it is necessary to have a pool of workers willing to work for illegal wages.
Trump needed immigration to go unsolved in 2024 to have something to run on.
Liberals may make the point that removing millions of workers from the country would be bad for the economy, but you're being downright disingenuous if you suggest that is the primary reason people are upset about the raids and deportation.
Nothing GP wrote suggests that. Listing some realities and effects doesn't mean you approve of them.
Your analysis is simply off. The side pushing for worker and immigrant rights are not saying "please keep immigrants here so we can exploit them more".
It's fascism 101.
12million immigrants came into the country during the Biden administration. This type of load on the system does not go unnoticed. NYC for example was drastically transformed.
Why do you think it’s just a “perceived” problem?
We had caravans of tens of thousands of people constantly streaming into the US for four years. The video evidence is out there for everyone to see. News outlets that did not engage in hiding reality and promoting falsehoods had crews at the border every day for four years collecting video evidence of what was going on.
If you care about understanding the truth, go to the US Customs and Border Protection website and look around. You can also cross check with Homeland Security and other official sources. And, yes, you will find data that predates the Trump administration...so you can't blame bias. For example, if I remember correctly, there were over THREE MILLION unauthorized entries in 2024.
If such a thing were being reported by multiple reputable sources, I’d be less inclined to roll my eyes at the preposterous idea.
We had an average of 250K people per month coming into the country for 48 months by land an air. The relevant government agencies have published the statistics, even going back to Biden era reports. You can believe anything you want, but thinking that it was only four million is a delusion.
OK, even if I play your game and we say it was "only" four million (ridiculous). Here's the problem:
That means 88K people per month for 48 months breaking our laws. Four million people entering the country without permission has a very simple name: Invasion.
Even worse, unless we create 88K new jobs per month for 48 months, these people are, by definition, unemployed. Our published unemployment statistics somehow conveniently ignore this fact. And, the other fact that we ignore is that the US has not created an additional 88K jobs per month over the 48 months of the Biden administration. The best we did was to recover the 10 million jobs lost during the pandemic.
At 12 million, that is 250K new jobs required to support them. The US is NOT AT ALL anywhere close to that growth rate, not even enough for 88K new workers per month.
That aside, as a resident of Los Angeles, I have seen the increase in crime (a neighbor's home, for example, was broken into by a couple of illegal immigrants). In addition to that, these destructive demonstrations full of Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadorian flags are as tone deaf as can be. Throwing cinder blocks at police officers on the road and highway (surprised nobody died) isn't going to do anything positive for anyone's cause, justified or not.
This is madness and it has to stop. What's worse, is that these people are protesting (and wanting to protect) criminals. The government of the state and city are also on the side of criminals. Here's a partial list of who was detained in Los Angeles and who these demonstrators want released into our city:
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/06/08/ice-captures-worst-worst...
Yeah. Right. Time to realign your world view. This is stupid.
We are left in a very, very bad place when the media can't be relied on to tell the truth. But here we are..
They cannot handle it with the resources being given. This is true for the red states like Texas and what not, the social services we do have struggle to handle the load. But we're choosing to let these systems struggle. We could solve it if we chose to do so.
In 2020 our population was ~330 million people. Even if 12 million people immigrated to the United States, that's an influx of 3.6%. In reality its probably closer to 4 or so million, so really more like 1.2%. We're supposedly the wealthiest country on the planet with so much opportunity and freedom and yet we can't handle adding far less than 5% of the population as migrants in five years? If that's the case, we're probably the poorest country on the planet, not the wealthiest.
And even then, we could choose to do something about that. We could do more to help people settle all across the US and be well supported to succeed. But we don't. So instead, we have people crowd the areas where we turn a blind eye to hiring illegal labor and have the social impacts concentrated there and then refuse to actually do anything to help those social costs.
But these are all things we choose to do. We could choose to do something else.
How do you decide who goes where? What stops them from moving back to the bigger cities? How to you limit demographic displacement?
The UK is doing this, and the US under Biden was trying at a smaller scale with Haitians in smaller towns. It doesn't work, and isn't so simple.
Once again, we're choosing to not have these social supports or social services. It's a choice. We could do it if we wanted, after all we're allegedly the wealthiest country on the planet but somehow can't seem to afford anything.
> How do you decide who goes where?
I'm not suggesting we force it to be a top-down forced decision. I'm often a pretty free-market and empowering people to make their own decisions kind of guy, when it makes sense. And sure, people will tend to cluster more in large cities, that happens even for non-migrants. But in the end, we're doing practically nothing to encourage people to spread out that social cost (or worse, encouraging for forcing the clustering), and that doing nothing is a choice. And then we're doing very little to support these places experiencing such large social costs, which is once again a decision.
All of this is stuff we could do differently, we just choose the status quo (or now choosing violence!) that doesn't work well for a lot of us. Sure seems to be making some people exceptionally wealthy though.
America is really struggling to support & enable a people, to create a social safety net. Opportunity is low. But often when immigrants come in from other places, they will put in enormous energy, that can bring some very sad towns back to life.
So sick of Americans empty-analysis and ignorance of externalities their society puts on others; overseas colleagues see it as white Taliban. They don't see people in streets over tariffs screwing up their lives, so they've started to tell their politicians Americans (as in the public) are not reliable actors. They don't realize it, but the American publics own credibility is shot, not just their politicians.
I have taken to cutting off friends and family and shit talking anyone in public that wants to socialize; do the politic work to put me on the hook for their healthcare, otherwise I refuse to bother with their existence. Withdrawing from people's lives is a forcing function for self reflection.
You all keep me off the hook caring you exist. I just have to help make line go up. Anything to do with you all as individuals is not my responsibility. That's the choice of the American people. I'm here to profit, not give a fuck you exist.
That's what my fellow Americans taught me through their feckless political effort. Illusory idea some invisible hand gives a shit based upon the gibberish from history they read by people who were wanking their literacy rather than inventing indoor plumbing.
your calcuation needs to account for ppl coming in on non immigrant visas too.
usa issued 10 million non-immigrant visas in 2024. not counting 5 million tourist visas.
There were not 12 million immigrants entering during the Biden administration. Please provide balanced proof.
The only people in NY that claimed we couldn’t handle it were the Mayor who was trying to get out of his blatant corruption by appealing to Trump.
Funny how that seems to have ended magically as soon as Trump was elected.
We all point to Texas's education department as a laughing stock of results. But we expect Texas to bear a massive part of the burden of low income non-English migrants while using the same measuring stick to compare. And we act like this is fair. And don't get me wrong, Texas' legislature is complicit for the failure! We should all do more to support these communities.
I do agree, it's largely a self inflicted problem. But things need to change to properly deal with the increase in those relying on public programs. They're underfunded, understaffed, and under supplied. We're not setting people up for success, and it shows.
It can't possibly be that hard to find Spanish speaking teachers in Texas.
When you can have 80% of the take home apay but have fewer parents issuing death threats while filling tacos at Taco Bell (and they pay for your community college to go elsewhere) it's no surprise teachers choose to go elsewhere.
Practically every school district in Texas is facing a qualified teacher shortage.
Of course, the Trump admin has responded to this by deciding not to fund the TQP grant program, which in part trains and places teachers in high-need areas like STEM, special ed, and bilingual ed. This struggle is mostly a self-inflicted policy choice.
What are you talking about?
https://homeland.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Septem...
And that does not account for got-aways, which easily number in the millions.
Please.
The Democrats, who love to lecture everybody about "protecting democracy", are attempting to sway voter demographics in their favor through illegal immigration. California used to be a Republican state till it was turned deep blue through immigration.
And one-party states produce the worst, most incompetent politicians, who rise to the top not through the battle of ideas, ability and accountability but through political favors and backroom deals.
Gavin Newsom is the perfect example of this.
I have no doubt these countries exist, but I'm deeply skeptical that they are imitable.
Cuba, the PRC, North Korea, Russia...
A number of European countries have military or paramilitary forces used for law enforcement when it comes to things such as quelling riots. Here is an example.
Not technically military, closer to National Guard.
Obeying illegal orders to attack American citizens on American soil is certainly something, but it isn't law enforcement.
If this were actually about law enforcement, we would have passed the bipartisan border protection / immigration bill that has been on the table for eons.
I'd suggest doing some light reading on the reliability and integrity of the sources you prefer to get your 'news' from.
Do you actually have any source to support your claim? I mean, MAGA nuts have been swearing for over a decade that there was a torrent of illegal immigrants arriving each day into the country, and that somehow democrats were to blame, but even after Trump's fascist push with it's forced deportations of everyone including US citizens without due process the numbers barely reached 100k. And now we're seeing Trump's ICE thugs mobilizing a small army of agents to assault Home Depot parking lots?
Where are all those illegal immigrants?
Sure, it couldn't possibly be anything else like inflation after COVID (which happened globally) that caused incumbents to lose around the world. No, Dems just needed to get this one thing right and they're to blame for Trump. Sure.
I'm pro Trump and have been for many years. I just don't think we would have won if the Dems hadn't handed us the victory. Thank you Democrats!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...
That's led directly to the current mess because it taught people that the most important thing is to get into the country, regardless of legality, so you could be in place when the next amnesty came along.
They charges 4 low level managers with aiding illegal immigrants.
But I don't think the companies had to pay any fines or any owners face charges.
Why do you assume that that doesn’t happen?
- Chicago (2014) https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/chicago-area-company-fined...
- Texas (2012) https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/2-companies-admit-hiring-i...
- Colorado (2025) https://www.cpr.org/2025/04/30/ice-fines-colorado-janitorial...
etc.
ACSI fined $2M for the same amount paid as wages to illegal labor. How much profit did they make from that? Sounds more like the cost of doing business than any real crushing fine.
Put the management of these companies in prison for ~~knowingly~~ recklessly hiring illegal labor. Make it likely they will be audited and caught. Make it easier to get a work permit That will solve a lot of illegal migration.
Also for tech jobs like software engineering? Or only for manual labor?
This current structure of immigration status being tied and sponsored to your current employer is pretty messed up though. It does a lot to artificially drive down wages even more, these people aren't free to choose where they work.
You just provide proof of why it doesn't happen in the very first link. 300k fine for 604 illegal for a repeat offender. That's essentially saying: The cost to hire illegals is too small not to do it.
They were fined less than $400 per undocumented person they hired, or about a week and a half pay at minimum wage. That just sounds like a reasonable fee to hire someone without having to pay minimum wage, healthcare, payroll taxes, etc. If you put aside ethics, that sounds like the smart business move.
[1] https://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/how-do-undocumented-immigr...
It isn't remotely the problem or even in the same galaxy as needing this type of response.
The cause for the actions is racism. The protests are due to calling out racism and removing due process.
Anything else is denial or sophistry, that's the simple truth.
Your response is a straw man. Be better.
FWIW I don’t agree with OP in that there isn’t a single cause, but racism definitely plays a role.
And then "Anything else is denial" shows a myopic, closed minded viewpoint, suggesting any further discussion would be pointless. As is most internet chatter on this type of matter.
I never said that, but that's quite the strawman.
It would have been possible to reform the system, without deporting anyone the wrong color to a damn megaprison in a foreign country, or arresting people right at their court hearings, most who are here legally.
The way things are going, the protests are more than warranted, more than justified. As far as I'm concerned, anyone still defending a clear authoritarian is a traitor.
Please inform me how the US under democrats has NOT had "strong border policy"? Do you know what Obama did more than any president before him? He rounded up immigrants, placed them in front of judges to give them due process, and shipped them out of the country if they did not have a legal right to be here.
Sure is funny how that is "weak border policy"
It would seem most likely that the Marines were called strictly to protect federal buildings, facilities and agents. The problem I see is the latter category. I am personally fine with National Guard being used to protect people and infrastructure when appropriate and when confined to federal facilities, and I'm even fine with the use of military to protect federal facilities... however, the second active duty military engages civilians 'on the streets' we have martial law and that's a whole new can o worms with explosive possibilities for escalation.
Yes, there is.
> It would seem most likely that the Marines were called strictly to protect federal buildings, facilities and agents.
So, to engage civilians deemed a threat to federal buildings, facilities, and agents.
The distinction you are trying to draw does not exist, and is simply a very weak attempt to craft a mission that can be argued not to be using the military as a posse comitatus (even though it clearly is exactly that) for the sole purpose of reserving invoking the Insurrection Act until the aggressive use of federal forces has been successful in provoking a suitably dramatic incident.
Then businesses or even individuals could hire someone for an hour, a day or a year and pay them with no friction. And the check for eligibility would be automatic. Fees could be driven to very low levels by the fact that there is no creativity whatsoever in actually implementing the transfer.
But there’s a showstopping problem here: the US economy, especially agriculture, is highly dependent on employing people illegally. So a real solution to controlling illegal employment would also require the kind of immigration reform that actually allows useful immigration, and it would require a competently run nation database of employment eligibility, and good luck getting bipartisan consensus on that.
The employers/government don't do this because the prices of existing goods depend on that cheap labor. Money printing (deficit spending) through the economy has created many chaotic distortions and as a result of currency debasement has pushed the profit margins down close to zero for many businesses concentrating them in few hands.
These businesses can continue functioning for a time thanks to money-printer loans they receive in the form of non-reserve based debt to a primary dealer, but that doesn't solve the issue that the price of good inputs and the amount of money that gets circulated through work in the economy is insufficient to purchase basic necessities (its sieving, which often happens before a deflationary collapse).
On top of this already floundering problem which we cannot address, we have a demographics problem. The old, infirm, and disabled outnumber the young who work. There is no way forward without replacement as the costs of the old far exceed the young, and the only means to do so is through taxing immigrants who come here to work.
On top of this, China wants to go to war to retake Taiwan, and so securing the border is a critical national security interest/threat.
Its called a debt trap, any historian can tell you about how this and other behaviors towards empire (hegemony) culminate in destructive cycles.
The baby boomers as a cohort largely caused this, and have been orchestrating it in leadership so that the consequences of their choices don't hit until after they die.
- Recall back to the old republican party of just 20 years ago, GW Bush wanted a guest worker program.
- Recall back to just a year and a half ago, a big bill was in congress to drastically ramp up employment laws and increase border funds - funny enough that was rejected. That rejection by the republican party _increased_ illegal immigration
- The deportation rate under BOTH Obama and Biden has been higher to date compared to the current (second) Trump administration.
So, if you want higher deportation and laws to increase border security - apparently we need to go back to the previous administration... The facts are seemingly all very topsy turvy compared to the narrative.
you think tyson foods is paying ppl cash under the table?
Afterwards, and from the outside, it looks and sounds like ... well read some history about attempts to 'restore proper order'. The outcome and progression is entirely and sadly predictable.
It's been about 80 years since WWII. Are we doomed to repeat this on an 80 year cycle, when the last generation who went through this passes from the scene?
So - maybe not doomed to an 80 year cycle, as life expectancy changes, and/or as cultural memory changes due to more/better records.
But in broad strokes... yes.
The current US generation didn't go to a full blown war; and the US did little infighting in the previous decade (that requires mass mobilization). Think about it this way: Trump wants to lower the interest rate and ease monetary policy in good times. Putin maintain high rates despite him having a full blown war. Trump has never experienced hyper-inflation but Putin did.
Have fun reading about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
P.s. China never deployed the military in the Hong Kong insurrection.
Finally, the American people fights for democracy, after centuries of oppresion. /s
That said, what the current administration is doing is almost like they're following a manual other countries followed on their road to nationalistic decline and all the right people in places of power seem to know this. I wonder if they're ready for it? My observation is that the previous administration had four years to pass laws and measures based on trump's first four years and they didn't, which tells me there is really no stopping what is to come.
The planned decline of America won't be like other countries because of post-WW2 "super power" repositioning of country and it's critical role in global trade, communications and finance. All of humanity might suffer, at least that's my fear.
On the other hand, I like to think that if things turn sour and gruesome very fast, the American public might react to that well enough to make a u-turn.
I'm in LA right now. If I didn't read the news I wouldn't know anything is up.
It wouldn't, you'd need to change the food industry for that to happen.
However I don't really like walking everywhere or taking public transportation so LA is the perfect city for me because it has many municipal places I can park my car and then walk around.
Let me explain LA to you since you clearly don't understand it.
LA is a combination of many smaller cities. Each one, on it's own is a small micro city with everything you would expect. You can live in Santa Monica, Pasadena, Burbank, Sherman oaks, West Hollywood, Ktown, Beverly Hills, Sawtelle, etc. each one of those places has a very vibrant and walkable area with cute shops and restaurants and easy public transportation. If you live in those places you don't necessarily need a car.
The problem with LA is that you might want to go from one of these places to another and the walk would take a very long time because LA county is bigger than Delaware and Rhode Island. But you can walk it if you want.
LA is currently the only city in North America building new subway lines. And is doing so rapidly.
You and I have different definitions of walkable.
That is demonstrably false. As I type this comment I can hear the sounds of excavators digging out a station for a new subway line in Toronto.
> However I don't really like walking everywhere
Hint: If you don't like walking, then your city is not walkable. In actually walkable places, everyone likes to walk because it's so much better.
Downtown is walkable. Hollywood is walkable. Echo Park is walkable. Pasadena is walkable. Santa Monica is walkable. Long Beach is walkable. Culver City is walkable. Bevery Hills is walkable. Glendale is walkable. Burbank is walkable.
In the same way that Everest is walkable. None are walkable cities by any reasonable definition.
Graph: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat...
Republicans get primaried for supporting Dems.
This creates the reality which is sold in their information and news networks. Dems always have bad bills, and see - no Republican is supporting it.
Why? If we had a couple more Manchins and Sinemas right now, you know what we'd have? A majority.
One, we did a lot with one Manchin and one Sinema. (To the degree the former had concerns, it was well-founded ones over the inflationary effects of the Inflation Reduction Act.)
Two, not doing anything beats the status quo. A weak majority would be a check on the executive. We’re paying the price for ideological purism.
Simplifying: Congress was never meant to be deadlocked on simple party lines. It was always meant to have people figuring out ways to work together, even at the expense of the party, but in favor of their constituents.
Better than party discipline would be more effective intra-party debate, discussion, consensus processes etc. It's probably slower than line enforcement tho'.
If you cannot accept an idea because it was brought forward by a political competitor, you lack the necessary detachment to make good decisions.
Sometimes party discipline is sensible for political pragmatism, but in all other cases democracy is the better solution. It should be handled with care.
Partisanship is only something to be concerned with when you're dealing with functioning political parties. In America, I think the bare minimum for a political party should be that it believes in the ideals of America: a government by and for the people.
MAGA is not that, it's an explicit rejection of the ideals of the American revolution. Fundamentally they have a vision for America run by a king who has absolute authority over state, congress, and the judicial system.
There's no meeting of the minds that can be had with such a perspective, our forefathers figured that out and started the American Revolution over it.
Yup. We let the pointers take precedence to the point that that they don't actually point at anything, we just like how they look.
Democrats could not do it. If they had done it, they would be as bad as Trump is now.
You make it sound like "our democracy was never perfect, so obviously we always just had a mad emperor all along"...
It's like, if you built a bridge to carry 10,000 tons because you need it to carry 10,000 tons, and then it turns out it's starting to fall apart under 5,000 tons, it doesn't make sense to me to say that you should just fix it so it securely holds 5,000 tons, or if it breaks just restore it to hold 5,000 tons. You need to rebuild it so it can do what you need it to do.
America hasn't actually come that far.
A lot of people have decided that what Trump is doing is good. A lot have decided that it is evil. It is not so clear cut.
Yeah, the decline of the British Empire is starting to look sedate and well-managed compared to this.
I'm sure because the USA was there to pick up any slack that Britain dropped, in a way that China is not doing with the USA.
Maybe bc americans WON'T and SHOULDN'T settle for a decline - they should violently rebel against this mindset and claw they way UPWARDS - there's more room for more growth, even if you lose #1 status and have to settle for #2 for a while you can still catch up etc.
It's good that at least the US and China are NOT infected with this degrowth and "cyclical history" mindvirus that seems to be doing the rounds in Europe and elsewhere... keep being a bastion of endless progress brothers, fight the good fight! There's a whole light cone to eat/infect (if not for us the for the successors we'll build)! Whoop, whoop!
Jokes aside though, most of the open world we live in today owes its existence to ideas, mindsets, $$$ and tech exported from the US, and I'm sure there's way more cool stuff to come from you once you properly clean up the parasitic individuals and institutions that have infected your society. Purge on and keep growing, fight for a deservedly big chunk of the Dyson sphere and beyond!
The signs are there, that this is global situation before WW1 or WW2 - status quo has to change, balance of power has to change - USA does not want to start to implement any of those changes and those who are way smarter than me think that USA should stay away from epicenter of anything and join for the spoils only part.
Suffer compared to what? That's the alternative? Number 1 stays number 1?
The world works in peaks and troughs, swings and roundabouts. What goes up must come down. Time marches on, change happens. This comes with suffering, but is also the definition of progress.
Nothing is the best forever, and the one's at the top who don't acknowledge that are the ones with the hardest fall ahead. That applies to complacent SV leadership as much as it applies to the average American citizen.
I can't fault this way of thinking about the world: change is inevitable, you have to roll with it. If I accept it though, the idea of "planned decline of America" is interesting to think about. If you're at the top, decline is inevitable, it's the only direction. What's the only thing you can do to mitigate the pain of the inevitable? Try plan to work with it. Not sure how I feel about this way of thinking, it feels pragmatic if nothing else.
Decline is not inevitable. others like China can rise, there could be multiple successful and wealthy countries. heck, even in a decline, america can become like germany instead of like venezuela. the decline you're thinking of is a lot nicer than what I'm thinking of I think.
Preventing a decline requires established institutions to function as designed. America is not declining because it's like the roman empire, it is declining because the corporate ruling class are strangling the nation for short term profits. It isn't "we the corporations of america" it is "we the people". They've assaulted the foundation of the wealthiest most powerful empire in history and it is collapsing as a result.
And Elon Musk, former presidential vizir. There's clearly power in Twitter, but it leans right as well.
Things could have been much different.
However much you think that did or didn't cross the line from "fortification" to fraud isn't the point. The point is that if they hadn't done so much of it, Trump would have won the election (in the electoral college, which is what matters), and he would be a footnote now, after spending his second term building a few more miles of border wall and probably not a lot else.
[1] https://time.com/magazine/us/5936018/february-15th-2021-vol-...
Biden insisted on running for a second term, against earlier promises, and failed to build up a strong successor during his first term. The Dems were in a very difficult position. Biden and his inner circle are the ones to blame here. What a historic fuck up!
Not rally. The choice between her and 45 should have been clear as day. She might have not been everybody's first choice, but she was more than qualified, more than competent, especially given the alternative. It shouldn't have even been a question, at all. But with how rampant misinformation is and how rare critical thinking is, here we are.
Reminds me of the old joke about California's 4 seasons: Earthquake, fire, riots, and drought.
No it's not. They just like slavery. If it was about states rights they wouldn't support sending in the military.
What I find shocking about comments like yours is the reminder that propaganda works. Someone in the republican party decided "guys, advocating for slavery openly doesn't go over well, let's tell them it's actually about states rights", and loads of people actually believed it.
I'm not in support of administration or MAGA.
But, to be pedantic, you can be for states' rights, but against states overstepping Federal powers.
Immigration is, currently, a Federal power.
Who is and is not a citizen is not a state's decision.
Just because you're in favor of state's rights (I am), does not mean you think every single issue should be a state's issue.
Maybe you'd like each state to fund their own SS and Medicare. But that's not how it is. And it's unlikely to ever happen.
It was the Democratic party that historically supported slavery and opposed the civil rights movement. The "states rights" euphemism was invented by the Democratic party not the Republican party.
There's no need to give legitimacy to the lie.
In the end, it will come down to SNCOs and NCOs to make the decision because the Marines try to push down "battlefield" decisions to as close to the action as possible. Of any service, I expect your average Marine to be able to make independent decisions in the moment. That may or may not be a good thing.
We'll see how far Project 2025 will go within Trump's term. I'm not optimistic.
> Whoever, except in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress, willfully uses any part of the Army, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, or the Space Force as a posse comitatus or otherwise to execute the laws shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.
None of this is legally established.
Broad immunity for official acts, and absolute immunity for core Constitutional powers. Nothing about "all charges" or self or preëmptive pardons.
> the current court seems very sympathetic to the unitary executive theory
UET concerns itself with how much power the President has to exercise executive power [1]. Not the boundaries of executive power per se.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory#Termi...
True. But the kicker is that the president has an effective Carte Blanche to determine what is an official act.
I think this is where the interpretation of the ruling is wrong: common reading is that it gave the president more power.
Textually, whether it does or doesn't entirely turns on the definition of an "official act" which the Supreme Court very notably left for lower courts to determine on a case by case basis.
>> The immunity [for official acts] the Court has recognized therefore extends to the “outer perimeter” of the President’s official responsibilities, covering actions so long as they are “not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.” Blassingame v. Trump, 87 F. 4th 1, 13 (CADC).
Including in Trump v United States, which was still ongoing at the time Trump won reelection.
>> On Trump’s view, the alleged conduct [of contacting state and other election officials] qualifies as official because it was undertaken to ensure the integrity and proper administration of the federal election. As the Government sees it, however, Trump can point to no plausible source of authority enabling the President to take such actions. Determining whose characterization may be correct, and with respect to which conduct, requires a fact-specific analysis of the indictment’s extensive and interrelated allegations. The Court accordingly remands to the District Court to determine in the first instance whether Trump’s conduct in this area qualifies as official or unofficial.
>> Whether the communications alleged in the indictment involve official conduct may depend on the content and context of each. This necessarily factbound analysis is best performed initially by the District Court. The Court therefore remands to the District Court to determine in the first instance whether this alleged conduct is official or unofficial. [...] Unlike Trump’s alleged interactions with the Justice Department, this alleged conduct cannot be neatly categorized as falling within a particular Presidential function. The necessary analysis is instead fact specific, requiring assessment of numerous alleged interactions with a wide variety of state officials and private persons.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf p5+, p24
Since it was dismissed without prejudice, it's entirely possible a subsequent Department of Justice reopens it and proceeds with the District Court fact finding the Supreme Court directed.
Trump v. United States was decided with respect to "a federal case that was ultimately dismissed by federal district court judge" [1]. It was about the limits of U.S. executive power. Not "every DA in the country."
The only check on presidential power that seems to exist is the impeachment process
Yes. Abrego Garcia is back in America, isn’t he?
By our courts. That is the difference between the President defying the courts to disappear a suspect and due process.
Then you're empowering the President to detain someone solely on suspicion of being a noncitizen. Which will be mighty convenient for a future President when someone says or does something they don't like. (Irrespective of whether they are or are not a citizen.)
Also, these Marines are being deployed against American citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble and speak. Whenever the bill comes in, it will easily have costed many orders of magnitude more than the cost of even a death-row inmate.
You're describing expedited removal, a power enacted by the IIRIRA of 1996 [1].
It only applies to those who "make no claim to lawful permanent resident status, and do not seek asylum or express a fear of persecution." It requires specific procedures be followed that are absolutely not being followed by ICE right now.
The only way to go after them (given the current SCOTUS, who made the ruling above), is impeachment. And for that, the president has to do something so bad that 67 senators are willing to find the president guilty.
They are arguing there's an insurrenction in California.
A statement like "The government is scrambling to justify an unnecessary escalation, driven solely by a president who has praised violent authoritarian leaders, by labeling it an 'insurrection.' When asked for evidence, officials mocked reporters and threatened to exclude them from future briefings." offers verifiable context and reflects the serious threat posed by a leader who appears intent on pushing the country toward chaos.
>> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
People can say whatever they want. Only violent actions qualify as insurrection.
We have seen what happens to the traitors flying the Confederate flag.
They are listened to, cuddled, and pardoned.
> The authority for the President to use the military in cases of insurrection comes primarily from the Insurrection Act, codified in 10 U.S. Code §§ 251-255. This act provides the statutory exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act.
> When unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce federal laws in any state by ordinary judicial proceedings. (10 U.S.C. § 252)
> When an insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy in a state hinders the execution of state and federal laws, depriving people of their constitutional rights, and the state authorities are unable, fail, or refuse to protect those rights. (10 U.S.C. § 253)
> When an insurrection opposes or obstructs the execution of U.S. laws or impedes the course of justice under those laws. (10 U.S.C. § 253)
The last time this Act was used was in 1992 during the Los Angeles riots and it withstood all legal contests. This time around it is a stated intent of these rioters to specifically obstruct federal law enforcement efforts. That's their stated goal which they are very consistent and very loud about in interviews. This clearly satisfies the criteria for the Insurrection Act.
I understand that this is a concerning action, but the law is black and white. If the U.S. and Congress and the House didn't want Presidents to have this power, the country has had more than 200 years to amend it.
> Is there an official definition?
> the law is black and white.
Kind of like using the Insurrection Act to suspend habeas corpus and then threatening judges if they dare to question its legality?
> This time around it is a stated intent of these rioters to specifically obstruct federal law enforcement efforts.
Or, one might argue, "petition the Government for a redress of grievances".
The President does not have a legal right to suspend habeas corpus. Only Congress.
> Or, one might argue, "petition the Government for a redress of grievances".
No, a petition is a piece of paper or in verb form, lobbying politicians. Burning down cities and attacking officers does not fall under the definition.
The argument seems to be more of a no-confidence move because the Californians can't keep order. They'll presumably treat the wording seriously but I think the "form of rebellion" is more a jab at the people who keep harping on about insurrections. Looks like a bad argument from any angle I can think of (they aren't invited and there isn't an actual rebellion to put down).
Whenever...the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States; the President may call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary to ... execute those laws.
A very interesting article about this situation from a Georgetown law professor was posted somewhere deep in this discussion and is well worth reading.
The professor is strongly opposed to the deployment, and calls it "dangerous" and "pernicious" among other things. Nonetheless, he "thinks the federal government has both the constitutional and statutory authority to override local and state governments when it comes to law and order" and that "this [clause] is better understood as a purely administrative provision than it is as giving a substantive veto to the governor."
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/156-federalizing-the-californ...
In an interview with All Things Considered host Juana Summers, Newsom said the mobilization order was not done with communication to or approval by his office. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/06/09/nx-s1-5428342/per-california-...
I'm pretty sure you were aware of this but cite the Posse Comitatus Act to make it sound like what Trump is doing is illegal.
You can absolutely argue that what he's doing is unnecessary, disproportional, evil, provocative, etc, but it's not illegal.
Super unclear.
Governor Wallace of Alabama was overtly rejecting a court order to desegregate. There was a law passed by the Congress. A U.S. court making an order. And the U.S. President enforcing it, including with the military. Wallace was defying the U.S., not just President Eisenhower.
The facts and circumstances here are different. The immigration laws being enforced are clear. But the Marines aren't being deployed against illegal immigrants, they're being deployed against mostly-American protesters. There have been zero court actions specific to these protests. This is being entirely done by the President. Moreover, neither Newsom nor Bass are interfering with ICE. So it's a bit ridiculous to compare a former Confederate state's governor personally blocking a U.S. court decision to mostly-peaceful protesters (and where not, being processed by local and state law enforcement) exercising their Constutional rights to speech and assembly while ICE continues to do what it does relatively unimpeded.
Without invoking it, it just is not relevant here.
This is where I find the extremely lawful mindset idiotic. Laws try to encode good behaviour, but can't define it.
To fill in the negative side of authorities, Trump cannot use the mobilized Marines to enforce US laws (aka act in a law enforcement capacity).
As you said, they are restricted to protecting federal buildings and federal agents.
After the first Gulf War they sent us to Greensboro, NC to march in some parade and no one argued against that either because we weren't being used in any law enforcement capacity. Honestly, if we were there for 'riot control' I doubt they would have given us such a warm welcome.
No one is bringing people in, the flags being waved aren't all Mexican and the Mexican flags are a variety of different sizes and the LA local community, including its ~3.5 million residents of Mexican ethnicity, has quite a few Mexican flags of all shapes and sizes without needing any people or flags brought in from outside.
> Isn't that the very place they are trying to stay out of and wouldn't a Mexican flag imply an invasion from Mexico?
Mexican flags are a common symbol of pride in and solidarity with the community of Mexican ethnicity, rather than serving as agents of Mexico-the-republic, just as Confederate flags are a common symbol of pride in the White racist community, rather than serving as agents of the long-defunct putative regime.
> It feel like I am watching a movie produced by really lazy script writers.
Yeah, well, I won't comment on the “really lazy” part, but unless you are present watching it with your own eyes, you absolutely are watching something packaged for you as propaganda: everything you are seeing is edited to present a narrative by the people presenting it.
That much I can agree with for sure. I've watched media that align left, center, right along with YT influencers that align left center and right. Each spin their own yarn. One would think they are all looking at different events but I can see what they are looking at.
The galaxy is watching.
That said, California should have been on top of this situation. It looks like Newsom is willing to sacrifice the safety of his citizens in an attempt to score political points.
If the civilian court wants to make an example out of the military member they can opt to keep the case in their court. This can happen if the crime was egregious or there are some other circumstances. Plus, any additional civil suit brought by a victim or their family will always be a civilian lawsuit.
There are times where things are different- in particular, there are times in which something is only a crime in one system but not the other. You can be court-martialled for failing to follow orders, but this is not a civilian crime.
In terms of shooting a civilian, it probably depends on the circumstances. If the Marine was given an order to shoot and had some legitimate feeling reason to do so in the moment, the military would probably do their best to protect the marine, but it would probably be a civilian court trying them (the military won’t take a case if they don’t intend to follow through). Note that for this to be the case, there is probably now an officer who gave an illegal order and the officer would probably be tried for a crime. But there are conceivable ways in which a marine can shoot someone under lawful orders and not really have done anything wrong- self defense is the likely scenario. If a protestor starts shooting a gun toward a marine then they will get return fire.
If the marine were to disregard his orders and shoot someone because he’s trigger happy, then the military is probably going to ask to take the case, throw him in prison for life while demoting him down to E1 (the lowest rank), and generally ruin his life as much as they can. They really crack down on this kind of thing because they rely on discipline to make things work. Marines are generally trained to do as they are told, no matter how much it sucks. And marines that don’t do as they’re told get examples made out of them so that everyone else knows to follow orders.
At least that’s what would have happened in the past, but with the current president who knows how it would turn out. Because the state may choose not to let the case go- the president can pardon a federal/military crime, but not state crimes. So California might keep the case because then the president couldn’t let him off easy.
If they have orders to fire, then there will be no court, they just have to fill out an after-action report detailing what happened.
If you want to manufacture a wholesale lie like this, at least make it believable. I know it's hard to grapple with the fact that America elected a pedophile and convicted rapist as it's president, but you'll need more than tough words to blame it on Israel.
What happened immediately before Trump started sending in armed groups to the streets of Los Angeles was Trump getting credibly accused by Elon Musk of associating with Jeffrey Epstein.
So the correct title here is "Marines deployed to LA in response to Trump's association with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein being widely discussed on Twitter".
This allows people to correctly infer cause and effect, and most importantly, intent.
If they just protested, nobody would care at all.
And, it’s also naive to think that all the protesters are on the same side. Instigators are from either no side and the other side.
During the George Floyd protests I was walking home and witnessed agitators turn a peaceful protest violent within minutes. There were at most 10 of them out of a crowd of 500. When I got home, the news described the protest as being a violent one.
You and a lot of people here need to look more critically at what you are seeing online and in the news.
That way when agitators show up they can be seen as visually different and distinct.
During CHAZ/CHOP in seattle, I lived across town, if I didn't watch the news I wouldn't have known anything was happening. My GF lived within two blocks of the 'zone', it didn't effect her one bit. In fact it was a bit of a party atmosphere in the area with all the painting of street murals and all. Eventually some kids decided to agitate the situation by stealing a car (i think that's what the final determination was) and tear assing all over (like literally off roading into the park in and around occupied tents). This riled up the 2nd amendment types who declared themselves the CHOP/CHAZ police and they shot the kids. It was tragic and it sullied the whole situation.
To watch the national news you would have thought that all of seattle was on literal fire and there were roving gangs all over the city. Don't trust the broadcast media narrative of these situations.
Now go and check the actual damage, not from the BS propaganda source you're watching. It's a lot more than "a couple Waymo".
It's not just a few waymos. Whole stores broken in and looted, a bunch of cars burned, a bunch of police cars smashed, a bunch of police officers and ICE agents injured, sidewalks destroyed, streets blocked and are full of trash.
Stop the gaslighting.
Obviously, such a narrative is very boring. So we don't see it. In reality, though, the damage is quite small. Similar to BLM in the past, in which almost all protests saw no damage at all.
And, elephant in the room - there's a 0% chance that the fucking marines are going to de-escalate anything. You think Trump wants less violence, less destruction? No, he wants MORE of it.
It's not the police that started it. You're pretending like the law enforcement is the cause of it all. It's not. Rioting started before any police arrived.
Hyped antagonism between both sides on purpose. Check.
Remember Ghorman
Burning the city? Check Incopetent mayor not doing its job? check Incopetent governor watching the caos unfold? Check.
They think this is a problem only for blue collar workers, that they cannot empathize with.
2. Even if it WAS 1 billion people or whatever - why is that bad? The magic question you can never answer.
Is it bad because "white genocide"? Is it bad because jobs? Is it bad because those people are criminals? What's the threat here?
Because, from where I'm standing, these people don't hurt anything. In fact, they're very productive members of society! They work hard, harder than fucking lazy fat white Americans, I'll tell you that. They're modest. They're kind. They don't commit crimes because they're scared shitless of being deported. So what's the problem?
"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. "
Some see a Mexican invasion as the protesters are carrying flags of Mexico. Not sure why they’d expect that to garner support.
Some see violence against police / military
Some see poor people being abused by people in power.
Some see violence against powerless people
Some see actors staging fake protests (see thread for proof that some people see this)
Some see political posturing
And let's not even mention the reason behind it all: ICE's torture center, and the multiple raids they carry in the city, to abduct legal immigrants.
What happened was that people took clips of events in specific cities at specific times and then tried to extrapolate that out. When, in reality, most protests had no violence. Meanwhile, police were shooting rubber bullets at people while the people were just standing there.
Even now, with these "riots", most of the clips I'm seeing are actually from BLM protests years ago. Does anybody know this? Is anybody fact-checking anything? Apparently not. But, for gullible authoritarians that's all it takes. Show them a picture of a car on fire and their mind will hop and skip out of their ear.
In many cases, “events” performed by people later (or concurrently, but to too little attention) unmasked as white supremacist provocateurs aiming to discredit the BLM protests and/or provoke violent racial conflict, not the actual BLM protestors.
How extensive is the violence of the protests? I saw some images shared of cars that were burned, maybe some buildings damaged. But also lots of images from other protests from previous years. Are the images of the same 3 cars and storefronts or many? Trump says the riots are out of control, Newsom says the protests are largely peaceful.
A basic claude search suggests the overall level of violence is moderate, and smaller than many recent protests [link](https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/ef220c3d-c6d9-4b4b-bb3f-2...)
How much of a strain do undocumented immigrants place on the US? You can answer this question from a financial and criminal point of view. From the point of view of crime, Trump and ICE are parading every violent undocumented immigrant they can, but that is not statistics. Do undocumented immigrants account for a significant portion of violent crime in the country?
Studies overwhelmingly show that undocumented immigrants are significantly less violent than the general population [link](https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/a92623b8-5c02-4c3a-84ae-f...)
From a financial point of view, what resources are undocumented immigrants straining, and is it to a significant degree?
The economic picture is much more nuanced. On the cost side, a criticized study (FAIR) reported the cost at about $182bn annually (this is likely an over-estimate). For comparison, undocumented immigrants pay about $100bn in taxes, boost the GDP, and create jobs. Mass deportation is estimated to cost $315Bn.
Studies show that the impact on wages is small.
The biggest cost factor ($78bn but estimates vary) seems to be K-12 education, and that is mostly born by states. [link](https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/29f10fcf-c8a7-4655-979f-b...).
The last time we got a "C" (70%) was December 2001. That probably means something regarding what this poll is measuring.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ru/6/61/Victoria_Nula...
We may be smart techies but the arguments here about politics seem awfully reductive. We're out of our lane on most of this. What's with all the hate here?
The commentary here feels like its sliding it's way towards Reddit. Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe it's accidental, or maybe it's on purpose?
Hoping not to lose my faith in the quality of discourse on this website.
In fact, I feel like HN is much worse about promoting echo chamber behavior than Reddit, due to the visibility differences between a comment being downvoted/flagged dead, as opposed to merely being greyed out and collapsed.
If you haven't noticed it before now, it's because the incentive structure is weighed heavily in favor of the echo chamber. Those who engage in good faith eventually get tired of their comments being hidden by an unaccountable mob and leave - and to be clear, I am speaking in the past tense, as in this has already happened to HN several times over.
You either think sending the military to break up protests against the wishes of the governor and mayor and against the bounds of the constituion is a problem, or you are insane.
When ICE wears masks and whisks people off the street and sends them to overseas torture camps without warning or due process, you are either opposed or insane.
There's honestly no room for nuance on this. We're reaching the point where Trump is sending the military to enforce his unconstitutional actions. Things are awful right now and are about to get so much worse.
To be clear- if you support what's happening here: you are a bad person. i genuinely hate you.
This is the kind of political reductionism I was referring to. It's not OK to "genuinely hate" a person (or group of people) you've never even met, based on a single binary opinion you hold.. that's some serious "othering" going on. People aren't so black and white.
If your comment was meant as sarcasm I don't get it.
And idk, but I'm just saying what I feel. I don't think its unique to this forum, more just what's going on in society.
The issues happening are not the type of thing where we can agree to disagre. There isn't a middle road. The ideologies behind it are based on hate and fear and greed. America's not going to be a democracy much longer and friends of mine are in life threatening danger.
I could not be friends with someone who supported this IRL or online.
Watching this unfold here is reminding me strongly of the Ghorman plotline in Andor S2: "You need a resistance you can count on to do the wrong thing at the right time."
Seems to be some kind of tradition to send Marines every 33 years to LA.
gnabgib•22h ago
Trump deploys National Guard as Los Angeles protests against immigration agents (105 points, 2 days ago, 50 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44214230
The National Guard Deployment in LA Is a Threat to Democracy (15 points, 7 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44230137
(Although you'd think 2000 National Guard troops would be enough without the 700 Marines)
woodruffw•22h ago
The President can of course dispatch the military for domestic law enforcement, but to do so he needs to establish a legal exception, like the Insurrection Act. That hasn't happened yet.
[1]: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/poss...
onli•15h ago
The USA is a dictatorship now, the trump cult has won. Let's hope it crumbles fast.
mac3n•22h ago