Troops with assault rifles
Just four months in and already they’re going for military takeover.
US national guard troops began to deploy in downtown Los Angeles after an immigration crackdown saw police use teargas on protesters in a move that has sent shockwaves though American politics.
Local television station ABC7 reported that national guard troops had started to arrive in downtown Los Angeles. It broadcast video of military trucks and troops with the helmeted soldiers wearing green camouflage uniforms, carrying assault rifles and handing out riot shields.
The troops paused at City Hall and drove through the Paramount neighborhood where protests had happened. The initial deployment represented about 300 troops at three different locations out of a total expected of 2,000. “There are approximately 300 California National Guard in Los Angeles currently,” Izzy Gardon, director of communications for California governor, Gavin Newsom, told CNN.
Protests. Not riots, not street fighting, not guerilla warfare, but protests. We are in fact allowed to protest.
The order to deploy the soldiers came from Donald Trump late on Saturday night and marks a stunning escalation in a broad crackdown on immigrants in the United States following raids across the country which have triggered protests.
Trump’s federalization of the guard troops is the first time an American president has used such power since the 1992 LA riots. At that time widespread violence broke out in reaction to the acquittal of four white police officers for brutally beating Black motorist Rodney King.
But that was then. Now we don’t wait for widespread violence, we just send the troops in because people are talking back.
Trump’s move has been followed by the threat of even more escalation. Earlier Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump’s controversial and hardline defense secretary, had raised the possibility of deploying US marines onto the streets of the Democrat-run state amid the protests that had erupted in the wake of raids from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) authorities in the state.
“Under President Trump, violence & destruction against federal agents & federal facilities will NOT be tolerated. It’s COMMON SENSE,” Hegseth wrote on social media.
“If violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized – they are on high alert,” Hegseth said.
The Marines.
This is how military coups begin.
Because taking sledgehammers and picks to city sidewalks to shatter concrete into ammunition to throw at people and vehicles is exactly what we all think of when we talk about a right to protest.
No it isn’t.
Has that happened? I haven’t been able to find any reporting that says it has.
Ok I’ve found one live update that says
As David Frum said, this is a dress rehearsal — and by that he means it’s a dress rehearsal for a military coup. And as California Governor Gavin Newsom warned, the federal government is looking for a spectacle — and by that he means Trump and his minions are seeking a spark to blame the upcoming Reichstag fire on.
This is how it happens, folks. Sinclair Lewis was right: it can happen here. History is repeating, as it does, no matter how much we’re forewarned.
The problem with history books is that they always look at it from hindsight. Historians have tragically failed at conveying to the public what it looks like — what it feels like — when history happens in real-time. Momentousness only exists in the rearview mirror. They mostly just feel like ordinary moments when you’re inside them. You have to imagine their momentousness, by projecting yourself into the future, looking back. That’s a lot of work, and it’s a lot of abstract thinking. Most people can’t do that.
Well, here we are. It feels not quite real, but instead muted and muffled, and not exciting enough to quicken the pulse, to make people take action. It doesn’t have the slick editing of a John Wick action movie. The lack of cinematic gloss has somehow made us unable to react appropriately to the emergency. We expect to be prompted by Hans Zimmer’s booming music cues and J.J. Abrams’s glossy lens flares. Fascism is supposed to have the vibe of a big-budget, red-band movie trailer. But it doesn’t.
For me, the moment brings to mind Don DeLillo. White Noise. I was annoyed to hell by that damned book when I read it (in the early 2000s, decades after it came out). But I think back now, and I have to concede: he nailed it. A family of neurotic, intellectual academics unable to process a real world disaster, because they’re so knotted up inside their own minds. He wrote it in the pre-Internet era, when that kind of brain-pickling was mostly limited to elite university campuses. But in the social media age, we’re all prisoners of idea-world.
When our brains are saturated by abstract ideas, we don’t know how to react when a Big Thing happens in the actual real world. We struggle to process what is real. We’re numb to it all.
Simulacra and simulation. Spectacle and hyperreality. Oh, dear god, the postmodernists actually had a fucking point, didn’t they. Maybe in this terrible universe, Foucault gets the last laugh after all.
Fuck!
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Troops with assault […]
Nullius, we have police to deal with this shit and they are dealing with it. There’s no excuse for calling up the Guard (and the military proper it seems) without the consent of the state’s government. We all know what this is really about, just like we know the attempt to destroy Harvard has fuck all to do with antisemitism: it’s all pre-text.
When the other side is equipped with deadly weapons and is using them, then that IS exactly what *I* think of when protecting my right to protest.