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U.S. President Donald Trump dramatically escalated his administration’s conflict with Illinois’ top Democratic elected officials this week.
First he deployed hundreds of National Guard troops (some from Texas) to Chicago, Illinois. Then he called for the arrest of Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Both Illinois officials responded defiantly on social media, as seen below.
Trump is also threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act.
He’s already issued the alarming National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 as reported by Ken Klippenstein.
My question is: Are any of these people serious?
Trump is clearly intent on making an authoritarian power grab and is likely trying to bait political opponents into Quixotic acts of resistance.
ICE agents in Illinois have been caught committing “jackbootery” as NC posted on Tuesday.
The Democrats seem oblivious to the nature of kinetic reality and incapable of going beyond ineffectual rhetoric and lawsuits, so far.
The legal angle is egregiously pointless and impotent given the corrupt courts in the Trump 2.0 era.
But what if things escalate out of anyone’s control?
What if Trump or the Democrats “work themselves into a shoot?”
A work is everything that happens within the fictional world of wrestling. Everything you see on TV during a WWE show is a work and, with the advent of social media, more and more of what fans read from wrestlers on Twitter or Instagram is also a work. The thing about a work is that the goal is to elicit a response from the audience. When a wrestler is “working” in the ring they want the live audience to cheer them if they are a “babyface,” or good guy, and boo them if they are a heel.
…
A “shoot” is something real or legitimate. It breaks the fictional world of the work. It’s something not part of the show or part of the character.…wrestling fans want to get worked. Since the 1990s, most wrestling fans know that the WWE is scripted entertainment and that the performers in the ring are working together to tell a story through their matches. In short, we all know it’s a work. This has made it a lot harder for wrestlers and wrestling companies to work the fans and get the responses they want from them. The companies need those responses because it’s the emotional response and enjoyment of getting caught up in the show, in the work, that makes fans spend money. Getting worked is also the fun part of wrestling for fans. They want to get sucked into the fictional world of the show. Wrestling companies need to work the fans and the fans want to be worked.
American political partisans want to get worked.
We want to take our minds off the enshittification of our shared reality by imagining that we are on the verge of a definitive national political cataclysm, but the reality is no one living has any idea what such a thing would entail.
The Latest Tomfoolery
https://t.co/bVKM0nAR83 pic.twitter.com/wGjIVlXmAg
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 8, 2025
Pritzker put out a statement on Sunday as well:
“This evening, President Trump is ordering 400 members of the Texas National Guard for deployments to Illinois, Oregon, and other locations within the United States. No officials from the federal government called me directly to discuss or coordinate.
“We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion. It started with federal agents, it will soon include deploying federalized members of the Illinois National Guard against our wishes, and it will now involve sending in another state’s military troops.
“I call on Governor Abbott to immediately withdraw any support for this decision and refuse to coordinate. There is no reason a President should send military troops into a sovereign state without their knowledge, consent, or cooperation.
“The brave men and women who serve in our national guards must not be used as political props. This is a moment where every American must speak up and help stop this madness.”
Texas Governor Greg Abbott responded:
I fully authorized the President to call up 400 members of the Texas National Guard to ensure safety for federal officials.
You can either fully enforce protection for federal employees or get out of the way and let Texas Guard do it.
No Guard can match the training, skill, and… https://t.co/7SUk9XlMBn
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) October 6, 2025
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson spoke up too:
This is not the first time Trump has tried to have a Black man unjustly arrested. I’m not going anywhere. pic.twitter.com/MQdHtzis3t
— Mayor Brandon Johnson (@ChicagosMayor) October 8, 2025
Trump has previously deployed forces to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
Is the Clampdown Already Here?
Tucker Carlson, who’s recently been mixed up in “the political blender” due to his opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza, goes full Christian Nationalist and endorses Trump’s ICE antics in his latest video:
Why is America moving towards civil war?
For the same reason all countries that wind up in civil war get there because the differences between their population between people within their borders becomes too great to bear.
People decide I have nothing in common with people who live near me and I don’t want to live near them anymore. In other words, diversity difference is actually intolerable to most people. Not necessarily racial diversity, though sometimes that too, but diversity of all kinds.
It is not our strength. In fact, it is without question our weakness and it has always been. If you have nothing in common with your wife, do you have a stronger marriage? No. Of course, your marriage falls apart. And the same is true for countries.
And the truth about the United States is that on every level, beginning with a demographic level, the American population has less in common with itself, with one another than ever before.
…
So if you want to prevent a civil war, figure out what everybody or at least the bulk of the people in your nation have in common and emphasize that. And so what would that be in our case? Hard to know.In fact, at this stage, really the only realistic hope for national unity is spiritual revival. Is a place where most Americans wake up to realize that God exists and created every single person in the United States of America. And that’s what we have in common, our humanity.
Not because our common humanity is meaningful by itself, but because our common humanity comes from God and we’re created in his image. And only when people truly realize that will they hesitate before killing each other.
We hope that comes soon, but in the meantime, there is a step that the government at all levels, federal, state, and local, can take to restore at least a sense of calm in the midst of rising chaos.
…
So out of chaos comes what? Democracy, spontaneous order. No. Imposed order. Dictatorship. Of course, each and every time that’s what happens out of chaos. People beg for a strong man. There’s always someone willing to oblige. And that’s exactly what they get. And that’s exactly what we’re going to get unless some kind of order is restored. Which is another way of saying restoring order is not a step toward totalitarianism. It may be the only way to prevent it, but we need to do it now.
Trump and his Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller are believed by some to be deliberately provoking confrontation as a pretext for further authoritarian measures.
Thomas Edsall expressed that view in The New York Times:
Over the past four weeks, he has initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate and defund the opposition.
Trump’s assault on the left combines the use of the available tools of violent conflict — the military, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE in particular — with the prosecution of critics (and people he just doesn’t like), cuts of essential funds for liberal institutions, the use of regulation to threaten businesses with bankruptcy, the criminalization of free speech and the blackmailing of corporate America into obedience.
Two days after the assassination of Charlie Kirk last month, Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, went on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Show to describe in great detail how the administration plans to deal with its domestic opponents: “We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you have broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
For Trump and his allies, recent developments, including the government shutdown, the indictment of James Comey and the assassination of Kirk, are openings to escalate the attack on institutions and programs identified with liberalism and the Democratic Party. For the MAGA right, any crisis is an opportunity. In fact, every crisis is.
Miles Taylor, Department of Homeland Security chief of staff for part of Trump’s first term is among the “it’s a set up” chorus:
I co-wrote Trump’s first anti-terrorism plan in 2017-18. He’s not trying to stop “left-wing” terrorism. He is staging it.
His troop deployments are a false flag — meant to provoke a response in order to justify harsh crackdowns.
This is now very obvious.
— Miles Taylor (@MilesTaylorUSA) October 7, 2025
U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) took to the Senate floor to “explain Trump’s plan”:
- Turn the justice system into a political witch hunt operation that punishes critics for free speech and immunizes loyalists for actual criminality.
- Use government power to compel the media to tell only the regime’s narrative and to silence critics.
- Use the military to perform political intimidation in places with high levels of opposition to the regime.
- Seize control of Congress’s spending and tax powers to use those powers to reward loyalists and punish opponents.
- Rig the rules and the information. Tilt the election playing field your way and destroy the idea of truth.
Murphy, who seems to be running for President, wrapped with a hopeful, and peaceful, plan to resist:
Step 5 of the plan:
Rig the rules and the information. Tilt the election playing field your way and destroy the idea of truth. pic.twitter.com/q5hxc0E8aI
— Chris Murphy 🟧 (@ChrisMurphyCT) October 8, 2025
As Tom Neuburger wrote yesterday:
“The American Hard Right has never, ever been stronger. The feast is before them, all laid. They have the presidency. They have Trump, a master intimidator, and so they have Congress (look up “men fit to be slaves”). They have Roberts and most of his Court. They have power of the purse at last, and crime without price. They act like kings. They have a timid pretend opposition, so tied to their money and privilege they’re afraid to offend (by which I mean piss off their donors).
And the people, the last obstacle? They’re outraged, true, but they don’t rush to the streets in a way that disrupts the state.
Can Trump Really Pull It Off?
In her introduction to Neuburger’s piece, Yves was basically skeptical of Team Trump’s ability to pull off a clampdown, but she warned that “this team, if nothing else, is possessed by hubris. So they could well try a much bigger power grab backed by force. Even if it fails, the damage could still be vast in human and institutional terms.”
Will Schryver has long been a skeptic of the current administration’s ability to pull off a crackdown:
I want to emphatically reiterate that I am convinced an authoritarian federal government could not long sustain a totalitarian crackdown on "dissent" in America.
It would be a human, material, and logistical challenge beyond their capacity.
But that doesn't mean they won't try.
— Will Schryver (@imetatronink) September 22, 2025
There are also those in the national security apparatus who say they plan to resist including Brigadier General Alan R. Gronewol, “Oregon’s top military leader” who testified on September 30:
Speaking before a state Senate subcommittee, Brigadier General Alan R. Gronewold told legislators that before deployment, the two companies of soldiers would be trained in “protective crowd control.” That training is now up in the air as Gov. Tina Kotek on Tuesday ordered troops to go home after a federal judge ruled over the weekend that Trump had no authority to call them up.
Gronewold said Guard soldiers serve two purposes: “One, to defend America, and two, to protect Oregonians. And so by serving in this mission, they will be protecting any protesters at the ICE facility.”
However the prospects for organized resistance are dim as Aurelian convincingly argued recently when discussing some recent unrest in France:
…the fundamental problem faced by ordinary people today trying to influence those in power. A minimum degree of consensus and organisation is necessary if anything is to be achieved, but consensus and organisation don’t just appear magically: they have to be developed and practised. In the past, opposition political parties and trades unions often provided the basis of this organisation: as far as anyone can see, Mélenchon and other political figures primarily used last week’s protests to further their own interests. For all that the Internet was supposed to bring people together (and the Gilets jaunes which we’ll get to in moment could not have happened without it) the Internet doesn’t promote consensus or organisation automatically: indeed, there’s some evidence that it’s a divisive force in such cases.
It’s worth recalling how this kind of thing would once have been organised, say in the 80s or 90s. Protests in those days were articulated around two main pillars: organisations and community. Last week’s protests would have been organised by the trades unions and the Socialist or Communist parties (OK, often in competition with each other) and would have been professionally organised, with synchronised demonstrations, massive rallies addressed by political leaders, banners, flags, hand-outs and articulated demands with lots of media coverage. It might not have achieved an enormous amount in the end, and there would certainly have been a performative element, but it would not have been damp squib like last week’s episode.
This doesn’t bode well given the rapidly building technological advantage ICE has over the American citizenry, via 404 Media:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has bought access to a surveillance tool that is updated every day with billions of pieces of location data from hundreds of millions of mobile phones, according to ICE documents reviewed by 404 Media.
The documents explicitly show that ICE is choosing this product over others offered by the contractor’s competitors because it gives ICE essentially an “all-in-one” tool for searching both masses of location data and information taken from social media. The documents also show that ICE is planning to once again use location data remotely harvested from peoples’ smartphones after previously saying it had stopped the practice.
…
The new documents provide much more detail about the sort of location data ICE will now have access to, and why ICE chose to buy access to this vast dataset from Penlink specifically.
“Without an all-in-one tool that provides comprehensive web investigations capabilities and automated analysis of location-based data within specified geographic areas, intelligence teams face significant operational challenges,” the document reads. The agency said that the issue with other companies was that they required analysts to “manually collect and correlate data from fragmented sources,” which increased the chance of missing “connections between online behaviors and physical movements.”
I’m tempted to close with a quote from Yasha Levine, but I’ll make it the penultimate point as it’s a bummer:
We are all too far removed from issues that matter most to us and have no power over the forces that govern our lives. And so everyone’s political energies are directed into the Spectacle — to bear witness, to rage, to comment, to learn, to obsessively read, to mock, to argue with people on line. In fact you could say the lack of political power is inversely proportional to the amount of time we spend in the Spectacle. The Spectacle gives us the illusion of power…of doing something…of projecting our will and being into the world.
On a slightly more hopeful note, I’ll quote Ian Welsh from 2019 who presciently predicted the impact of drones on modern war (as confirmed confirmed just this week by Haig Hovaness for Naked Capitalism who showed how the Ukrainians had an early DIY edge in the drone wars that has only recently been surpassed by Russian industrial might) and argued they were a weapon for the weak:
Governments may force drone registration and so on, but they are an easy, cheap tech to make with off-the-shelf parts. Currently, they can’t be stopped easily by conventional militaries, and it will be impossible to harden all targets against them in the perceivable future. They will make both terror attacks and assassinations quite simple.
I always thought the US was foolish for developing this technology. They made it happen much faster than it would have otherwise, and while initially it was (and still is) useful to them, in the end it will be a technology that terrorizes them and other powerful governments.
That last is just by way of pointing out that it’s never been 2025 before, the United States has never been what it is before, and there is absolutely no way to predict the outcome of a full-on civil conflagration in America except that it will be dreadful and we’ll all wish it never happened.
I never understood why Trump would get involved in the Chicago metro area including the ‘collar counties’ – on any policy. Everything about it is what the locals wanted, certainly east of I-39 and north of I-80.
I never understood why Eisenhower dispatched the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock.
Trump tries going full authoritarianism
Fails
Then Silicon Valley comes in and ‘saves us’ with technofeudalism
I think that’s how this plays out.
+1
The administration’s support was fragmenting and Trump’s fear of persecution or retributions that plagued his last term are mixed together in these moves.
Then, there all manner of other agendas.
Part of the administration’s support base consists of evangelicals. They want the politicians they support to somehow help slow or stop the fall in church attendance over the decades: https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/report/the-great-falling-away-the-decline-religious-services-attendance-the-united
Additionally, as I mentioned yesterday, mid term election campaigns are about to really get rolling. Most mainstream political operatives in the USA only know how to operate in an environment with a well-defined Team Red vs Team Blue to present in media.
Things like the people agreeing about the genocide and economic issues like inflation is not an environment that is good for their pocketbooks.
And, finally, as some are noticing, turn off social media and there is no “civil war”.
Maybe it’s the Trump opponents who are always “working themselves up into a shoot” and not just lately. To be sure Tucker Carlson is quite capable of spouting nonsense (and also some truths) but your link is perhaps more to the point. Some of us have been anecdotally observing that religion is on the decline, not the upsurge, although it’s true I don’t live in Texas where all those glory shouting short wave radio operators reside. The Reagan era was a lot more religious and yet there was no civil war then either.
We do have a problem with our increasingly unhinged POTUS. The best response is probably for everyone else to remain as sane as possible.
“Mid-term election campaigns are about to really get rolling. Most mainstream political operatives in the USA only know how to operate in an environment with a well-defined Team Red vs Team Blue to present in media.”
I’m talking about the entire mainstream electoral complex.
Pritzker looks like he’s micro-dosing on Ozempic.
And given how Pritzker says the “DC Dem. talking point of the day” every time he’s on camera, he’s angling for 2028.
IMO. YMMV
Agreed – there is an awful lot of posturing going on here from both sides.
I like the wrestling analogy, especially since Trump is still playing reality show for the ratings and has been directly involved with the WWE. The problem is that these posturing billionaires are playing with fire. As we’ve seen in real life recently, very, very bad things can happen when someone doesn’t realize it’s all supposed to be just a big show – https://www.espn.com/mma/story/_/id/46313062/rampage-jackson-son-raja-arrested-assaulting-pro-wrestler
He 100% is and I’ll do a post on it eventually.
Pritzker was born in 1965, so 63 in 2028.
1965 is a odd year; not really a boomer (IMO), not really a Gen X (IMO).
He’ll probably suffer the Andrew Cuomo effect in the primaries (ie, too “Boomer” and Establishment for anyone under 40), cuz Pritzker’s only skill is using his family cash to manage the Illinois/Chicago Tammany Hall-style, Democratic Machine.
I disagree on Pritzker being skill-less. I “moderately support” Pritzker as Governor, view his as “moderately Actually Good”, not just another “Lesser Evil”. Pritzker might actually be a moderate lesser version of FD Roosevelt, in terms of a class traitor despite being a silver-spoon nepo-baby from an oligarch family.
Perhaps I am putting a low bar on US politrickians in the Neoliberal Reaganomics era, but hear me out.
Pritzker promised 1 $15 state min wage & 2 cannabis legalization in his 2018 Governor campaign. Within 6 months, Pritzker actually DELIVERED these campaign promises of actually good policy which HELPS most people/the 99%. Contrast with the Presidents Reagan to Trump. If they promised any good major policy on the campaign, it was merely flip-flopping lies (see Obama’s public option & end Iraq war, Trump45 “the government will provide healthcare” MedicareForAll & “will bring back manufacturing jobs”, Biden’s $15 wage & public option).
In addition, since then imho Pritzker has had good pro-people instincts/policy such as banning of book bans, allowing adults to get Novavax 2025-26 Covid vaccine, free public tuition for a BS degree at IL public universities like U of IL-Chicago for high school grads whose family make under $70K & this resisting Trump’s anti-Constitutional no-due-process kidnapping of Chicago residents.
I would prefer to have a true strong social democrat like Bernie Sanders/Rashida Tlaib/Jill Stein. But I will give the possibly “moderate social democrat?” Pritzker his props.
And FDR himself wasn’t really a “class traitor”. He was a ” tough-love class rescuer”.
He saved his fellow overclass members from possibly physical extermination at the expense of some of their money and power. And they didn’t appreciate it and couldn’t even see it.
I remember reading a quote once where FDR once compared himself to a lifeguard at the beach who rescues a drowning person who berates him for not rescuing his hat too.
I don’t know if that quote is findable anywhere.
I’m wondering when all of this hits the debate:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers/
Just presenting some of the red meat that’s been previously thrown out there in the media. I’m not that familiar with “tabletmag” beyond once seeing this article.
I’m surprised the connections haven’t been pushed to the forefront.
Tablet is a pro-Zionist publication, far from the worst of its ilk, but something to keep in mind.
And yea, I’m aware of Jennifer Pritzker and have been grappling with how best to present her story, which will definitely be used against JB should he run for Prez.
Perhaps the Chicago mayor can request UN peacekeeping troops?
No,no, no. Don’t wanna do that. Conservatives have been fantasizing on the possibility of UN troops occupying parts of America for decades now and would go full “Red Dawn” – but with UN troops instead of Russkies or North Korean troops.
I think the US would veto a Security Council vote on the deployment of UN peacekeeping troops to Chicago, so it’s not like it would actually happen. I think the Trump administration would be caught off-guard by the request. Fear (of a Red Dawn scenario) shouldn’t be a motivating factor in the abandonment of the struggle for human rights.
THere is a “long-tail” when it comes to murder in the USA.
1) Take the top 10 cities for homicides.
2. Remove NYC cuz per capita, NYC is low;.
3) the USA’s murder rate, ex-those top 9 cities is almost at European levels.
DC Democrats do a disservice to their urban precariat base by pretending that crime is not an issue. And while any murder is bad, the USA is not the “Escape from New York” dystopia that some Republicans make it seems—-though it sure feels that way with the headlines on some days
The murder rate is a fraction of what it was in the 1970s-1990s. We might have unleaded gasoline to thank for that (although the case is far from proven.)
One city whose crime rate was stubbornly high but has recently seen dramatic improvements is Baltimore. The mayor has done all those soft-on-crime things that Trump and his ilk hate:
Agreed. DC resident here who only very occasionally visits Baltimore but has been horrified by the poverty and dysfunction of our sister city. Happy to hear some good news because “Charm City” does have much to offer.
I think that Trump is sharing Biden’s contempt of the possibility of a Civil war. When asked about it Biden said that it was the government that had the F-35s and I think that Trump is thinking the same – that he can draw on the power of the Feds to bring military & para-military force to bear on any people, groups or States that he wants to. And that makes him willing to do a triple gainer into the Rubicon.
Even though there are people in his admin like the odious Stephen Miller who seem keen to unleash lethal force against Americans I doubt Trump will push it that far. But if he does try to use military/para-military force against domestic “enemies” and a number of soldiers refuse to obey orders and take the side of said “enemies”, or a roadside bomb say takes out a bunch of ICE guys, that’s when it really kicks off.
Just pointing out the number of otherwise intelligent, level headed people in my life – and my own family – who literally believe that Biden, and Obama before him deliberately brought “illegals” into the good ol’ US of A to rape and murder and kill people by selling drugs.
How am I supposed to get along with people who are delusional?
I’ve had surprisingly good luck by listening and trying to identify their information sources. Sometimes I’ve been pleasantly surprised, sometimes horrified. Sometimes the info sources are pure bilge but often there are fact sets and view points I was oblivious to.
I’ve had far worse luck with my NYT, NPR, MSNBC disinformed liberal friends and family.
You could try pointing out that various recent US administrations changed the rules to allow in people legally from countries that the US would like to destabilize in order to provide cheap labor for their corporate donors and keep the working class already in the US down.
I don’t see this as a potential civil war; the number of people who would actually take up arms against fellow citizens must be very low. Yes there are some (both pro/anti Trump) but few.
There is no actual insurrection, and (whether Trump does the Act thing or not) there won’t be one. Plenty more randomish violence to come though.
What it does look like is an increasingly brutal government cracking down on its perceived enemies. And a set of institutions unwilling or unable to prevent the abuses, extra-judicial actions, and anti-democratic slide.
Thiel and Miller may dream of a new Reich, but I think they radically misjudge grassroots MAGA.
This is government-on-citizen (and immigrant) violence.
Related(ish) I was reading this today about Thiel’s antichrist obsession. A lot of detail on his love of Girard and Carl Schmitt (!). I found the bit about scapegoats interesting. I do think they’ve had real
success scapegoating immigrants, trans people and the nebulous Antifa.
According to Girard’s mimetic theory, Schmitt was trying to solve an unsolvable political problem. Schmitt’s support of Hitler was effectively a bet that cranking up the volume on the scapegoat mechanism could work—that Germany would achieve social stability by channeling all of its fury toward Jews, the Roma, foreign powers, and all the other enemies that the Nazis designated as poisonous to the Reich.
This seems very familiar. Vance is another misreader of Girard and almost as soon as he was VP-nom was tweeting about Haitians eating pets.
Also contains this gem of a Thiel quote:
“Perhaps if you talk too much about Armageddon, you are secretly pushing the agenda of the Antichrist.”
Somebody give him a mirror.
never forget that civil wars are not spontaneous popular uprisings vs governments nor are they blocks of citizens attacking one another.
Civil wars are intra-elite battles and require both sides to have access to major levers of power.
If Dem governors and mayors had any idea that they need to have direct control over their city police forces, state troopers and national guards we might be in that kind of situation.
As is, other than the Oregon general, my bet is most PDs and NGs are all-in with Trump minus some token opposition in the officer corps.
I’m sitting here looking at Chris Murphy’s explanation of Trump’s “plan”, and I distinctly remember Democrats engaging in tactics #1, #2, #4, and #5 during the Biden era, sometimes to an even greater degree. They were only obviously less bad on #3 (use of the military).
Are there any leadership left in Washington that isn’t dominated by psychopaths? Gah! A pox on both their houses.
one thought I had recently was that some of this is kayfabe. the rich want us to believe there is a difference between dems & repubs, again.
obviously not kayfabe for those being oppressed, but…
Never underestimate the power of divide & conquer kayfabe.
True dat. The plebs must be distracted and divided while the kleptocratic oligarchy hoover up what is left of assets and wealth in the US, and what is left of Bill of Rights is gutted. The illusion of choice, illusion of democracy and the rule of law must be maintained to mobilize the masses into acting against their own interests. The oligarchy spend a lot of time and resources making sure that happens, but the ROI is exponential. That’s politics
What’s clear based on ICE’s all-encompassing capture of data is that if you are going to a protest it’s probably a good idea to leave your cell phone at home
at a minimum. might be time to throw the thing away entirely.
But the cell phone is the thing that captures the imagery that is then used to influence public opinion. But an an old cell phone, that is no longer connected to the internet, nor will be in the future could be used.
there are also such things as digital cameras with no internet connection (common in th 2000s, some still work) and even film cameras.
A digicam with realtime internet upload connection can allow the digicammer to upload video evidence in realtime to various faraway servers beyond the immediate reach of on-site authorities who will take every digicam away from digicammers and destroy those digicams to keep non-uploaded evidence from being see-able later.
So digicams with no internet connection are not an answer.
touche. great point
Perhaps a protest-load of people could divide the digi-camming labor. Some could use cell phones to upload in real time. Others could use no-internet-connection video digicams. Perhaps the authorities would be more alert to one than to the other.
Perhaps some of “both types” of digi-cams could be visible, some could be “badly hidden” as if hidden-attempted by people who don’t know how to hide things, and some could be invisibly hidden for real. That would also enhance the chance of some digi-video images and sounds getting past the info-digi containment barriers.
Protesters and demonstrators might also want to work out how to deal with field-mobile deafness-inducing eardrum splitter-melters. ” Acoustic weapons ”
https://lethalindisguise.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/LID2-Factsheets-Acoustic-Weapons.pdf
Protesters and demonstrators might also want to work out how to deal with Raytheon’s field-mobile ” Oven-Ray of Death”. Wikipedia has a little article titled:
” Active Denial System”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
I have read somewhere that water absorbs microwaves. If the authorities begin deploying the Raytheon ” Oven-ray of Death” against large groups of people, any further such large groups of people might want to all be carrying ” distilled water fire extinguishers” so as to fill the air around themselves with water mist in order to absorb all the crowd-control/ crowd-cook microwaves.
https://www.uline.com/BL_4205/Water-Mist-Fire-Extinguisher?pricode=WC5400&utm_source=Bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_term=water%20mist%20fire%20extinguisher&utm_campaign=Facilities%20Maintenance&AdKeyword=water%20mist%20fire%20extinguisher&AdMatchtype=e&msclkid=695c6e9d88d01f51d4a00675b773d81b
Now, I would NEVer EVer go on to suggest something so UTTerly ilLEgal as to have mini-drone pilots ready and able to fly little bomb drones / drone bombs right up next to the Oven Death-Ray operator and then detonate them. So don’t even THINK about it. I mention this as the sort of thing which citizen-people must NE-ver E-ver do. Or even THINK about.
If you use social media, move the sim (with your number) to a 2nd phone and use the 2nd phone for calls and texts.
Ideally buy this outright so it isn’t preloaded with junk apps that can’t be deleted.
Delete unwanted apps, disable cloud backup.
New old stock non-carrier previous generation iPhone is best value for money/safety**.
Get another sim/number for the first phone with FB etc on it. The bulk of the tracking is associated with these social media apps.
** Make sure it is sold as new unlocked in original sealed box. Check the full wording carefully, not just the headline. The “in a plain box” sales are refurbs, even if they claim to be new.
Need to also keep the 2nd phone and the SocMedia phone separated as the feds track phones that are frequently in the same location as being likely owned by the same person.
I’m curious if the metal boxes that protect car key fobs from being jacked would work to isolate the two phones?
But can they track a phone that doesn’t have a SIM card in it?
If I read the article about how they caught the Long Island serial killer, correctly, yes.
Turn off the cell radio and the wifi radio (for some reason that is called “turn on airplane mode”). Also turn off the GPS (“location services”).
“Figure out what everybody or at least the bulk of the people have in common and emphasize that.” Yes.
Obviously neither party has followed that advice, and Tucker himself then goes immediately off the rails by presuming that common bond should be religion (the euphemism “spiritual” should fool no one) in a nation whose founding myths and political contract emphasize religious tolerance and yes, diversity. Equally obviously, celebrating drag shows and gender-altering hormone therapy for children is not going to bring together the bulk of the people.
The bulk of people do seem to love cute animal videos, though, and when I used to volunteer for animal rescues I noticed that I was working alongside people with (to me) absolutely hair-raising political opinions who also loved dogs. I counted this a good thing.
So maybe both parties should encourage volunteering at an animal rescue, or for park cleanups or other very local, very tangible collaborations?
Oh, but volunteering is now the sole province of the comfortably retired, otherwise privileged, or completely saintly because we’ve made sure that most can’t survive without multiple jobs. So maybe we establish policies that allow ordinary people the material security that makes constructive civic engagement possible?
That, of course, is crazy talk. So anti-American religious conformity it is!
I see what you did there, Tucker. And how the identitarians are pushing in the same direction. And now you’ll have to excuse me because I need to answer some texts from my sewing group.
Dear Going…
Volunteering at an animal shelter is an excellent bridge builder, as you say.
So is joining the volunteer fire department. You meet all sorts as a volunteer, and nobody asks about your politics when their house is on fire!
This quote from Carlson, “Not because our common humanity is meaningful by itself…” perfectly expresses a gap in worldview that many well-meaning activists / liberals / progressives I’ve worked with fail to grasp and strategize for. I think It’s difficult for those who understand that our common humanity is a bond, to accept that anyone can view the world differently, which drives the hope that reason can reach them.
IMHO, Carlson specifically said that so he could interject yet another myth-based solution to a problem caused by those who profess belief in said myths.
Any anthropologist will tell you humans strive to cooperate and live together peacefully. NC just had a linked article few days ago about that. Violence and war are purveys of the religious and powerful to keep their wealth.
In a prosperous and fulfilled society, differences in race, religion, and ideology could likely be overcome. However, in a country where income inequality is increasing and poverty is widespread, every difference among its citizens becomes a source of conflict.
Today, we are all Palestinians. We live under a regime that wants us dead. The premise of this post is to question whether the situation will disintegrate into a “shoot.” I think that we had better be asking when and where the “shoot” will begin, if only to avoid being caught up in the cross-fire.
During Trump’s divorce from Ivana Vanity Fair quoted his late mother Mary as asking her, “What kind of son have I created?” Mary’s granddaughter, also named Mary Trump, has told us: he is a monster completely devoid of empathy for other human beings. He is already having people killed without legal justification.
The open question is whether there are enough honorable people left in the military to resist carrying out unlawful orders that do violence to the constitution they swore an oath to uphold and the people they have a duty to defend. Given the record of the self-aggrandizing glory-hounds like McChrystal and Petraeus who metastasized from the “all-volunteer” cosplay wars of the past quarter century, I am doubtful that there is enough honor left in the American officer corps to save us.
David in Friday Harbor: Yes. “The open question is whether there are enough honorable people left in the military to resist carrying out unlawful orders that do violence to the constitution they swore an oath to uphold and the people they have a duty to defend. Given the record of the self-aggrandizing glory-hounds like McChrystal and Petraeus who metastasized from the “all-volunteer” cosplay wars of the past quarter century, I am doubtful that there is enough honor left in the American officer corps to save us.”
The reputation of the Chicago Police Department, the National Guard(s), and the military is swirling down a sewer. Too many years of obsequious “Thank you for your service,” and not enough questions like, “Do you know what is in the Bill of Rights?”
Observations:
–How does one end the culture of impunity? By ending the culture of impunity. Arrest some of these dignitaries. Arrest the National Guard of Texas. When they squawk, say, “Meet you in court!”
–Otherwise, what we are talking about here is a revisit of the Democrats and the Penny-Loafer Riots during the ballot counts in Florida during the Bush-Gore race. The *Democratic* mayor of Miami could have had the Penny Loafer Brigade arrested. Did he? No.
–Chicago supposedly has the world’s busiest airport at O’Hare (since surpassed, I s’pose). The city is still a main crossroads / chokepoint for the railroads. So: Shut down O’Hare and Midway plus Union Station and the railyards. But bourgeois politicians would rather play on Xitter. One must never deny chances for insider trading by Nancy Pelosi and various Republican worthies.
–Social media truly are a swamp of pointless pollution, aren’t they? It’s all opinion all the time, and even I get tired of listening in my head to my own opinions. Imagine how much I want to hear from Heather Cox Richardson and Bari Weiss.
–All of this civil war talk puts me off. In Italy, and particularly in the Undisclosed Region, the fall of Mussolini in 1943 meant a civil war within the larger war. There are plaques on buildings to honor assassinated average citizens. There are “stumbling blocks” (bronze plaques) in the sidewalks to honor those dragged away into the concentration camps, many never to return. One cannot talk of civil war lightly. When I was in Gubbio, in Umbria, I went to the monument to the forty average citizens dragged off by the Germans and slaughtered in a reprisal. In wishing for the glamor of a civil war, one starts to come off like a nouvelle Scarlett O’Hara, sending the valiant soldiers off to defeat Yankee aggression and having Hattie McDaniel make a nice hot toddy. Suddenly, one is sewing drapes into frocks, and one discovers that rebels don’t care enough to avoid burning down Prelate Tucker’s mansion, or the Hamptons, or Tara, or any number of luxury hotels.
–And yet: Let justice be done, even if the heavens should fall.
Re: the Penny-Loafer Riots (I’ve usually heard them called the Brooks Brothers riots).
At the time I was working for a public affairs firm that employed major Dem and GOP insiders and I recall two of the Dem insiders getting into a shouting match because Gore had refused to green-light the unleashing of a number of well-muscled individuals from the AFL-CIO and Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition who were in place in Dade County and more than ready to wreck the GOP staffers (including current Supreme Brett Kavanaugh) who disrupted the vote count.
Nat Wilson Turner: You are correct. Brooks Brothers riots.
I don’t know why I fixated on penny loafers.
And, yes, but it wasn’t a question of sending in the AFL-CIO or black activists as enforcers. Gore should have insisted on the Miami police department doing its job.
And here we are: We Serve and Protect now means, We Are the Occupying Army.
I’m sorry, but Gore WAS insisting on the Miami PD doing their jobs, that was the substance of the whole argument. The realists knew that was naive and pointless.
As per the Aurelian quote in the piece:
Citizen law enforcement should not automatically be outsourced to police departments that were designed to protect property and not people.
Your comments about the ‘43-‘45 situation in Italy are chillingly on point, Reality Czar. One didn’t even need to be a combatant to be disappeared into a concentration camp or to be given a Wehrmacht reprisal bullet to the head.
I for one, dread the prospect of a civil war. It’s why I moved to an island a stone’s throw from Canada and keep a fast boat fully fueled at the dock. At my advanced age, better to be a refugee than a martyr…
re: Carlson’s, “In fact, at this stage, really the only realistic hope for national unity is spiritual revival. Is a place where most Americans wake up to realize that God exists and created every single person in the United States of America. And that’s what we have in common, our humanity.”
jfk. it’s pretty obvious that economic insecurity and extortion is what binds the masses. the battling oligarchs, blue v red, and their corporate media are too busy bombarding us with threats of imminent civil with the intention that nobody notices, let alone builds community, understanding and action around this overwhelming commonality.
and re: the Feds have F-35s:
jfk, again! did we not all watch a bunch of afghans and mujahadin with long-guns and ieds run us out of their country after we spent trillions? hardware doesn’t stand for much. feds should know better that they FA’d and surely FO’d, in military parlance. but they certainly didn’t learn anything.
also the lessons of the Ukraine war are that cheap drones trump almost every other weapon including armored vehicles and tanks.
Shhhhhhhhh!
@Nat, I’m a bit confused about the title. “To work oneself into a shoot” appears to mean that you work the fake drama to such an extent that you have to cop to the fact that it’s all fake, and that’s the “shoot”. (from the linked story about the lady wrestler snob debutant versus the Canadian patrol officer) So with that meaning, what is the ” shoot” that is in danger of being worked into?
Or is the “shoot” in the title more of a abbreviated reference to a shootout, like a revolution or civil war?
Just a small curiousity, and either way it’s a great article with interesting discussion as well
Sorry to confuse, “work yourself into a shoot” means you took the play-acting so far that you got yourself into a real wrestling match, or at least one where your performance partner is actually trying to hurt you.
It dates from the 1910s-1930s era when there was a real tension between actual shoots and increasingly common works. Often in those days a kayfabe champ would forget that he was only wearing the belt because of the kindness of the better wrestlers who were “putting him over” by letting him win, when the paper champ went too far, he would sometimes get put in his place.
They also frequently had issues with “shooters” who would sometimes seize the moment in a match when they were supposed to “put over” the preferred performer but would use their actual skills to win the match, causing headaches for the promoters.
The example of the lady wrestler isn’t a perfect fit which is why I didn’t excerpt the whole thing. Her story took place in the modern post-kayfabe era when most fans consider themselves “in on it” (although we never really are) and she had to apologize for some of her verbal play-acting.
thanks for the kind words about the piece.
If Trump’s brains were dynamite, he wouldn’t have enough to blow off his MAGA hat.
If Trump’s brains were dynamite, and he doesn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize, he would have plastic surgery in order to replace it with C-4. :)
“If peaceful change is made impossible, violent change will be inevitable”.
Murphy always shows up at the party.
I have noticed that the more someone tries to control what is outside of them, the less control they have over what happens inside of themselves.
IF and it is a big if, ICE manages to track and control every person in America, some vital systems will simply stop working.
Because those systems require the active cooperation of the public to function.
Stay safe and enjoy the show, while you can.
I suspect lots of ICEs, Magas, Talibangelicals, Proud Boys, etc. as well as some of the people just beneath Trump ( such as Stephen Miller) would like a “shoot” to get the party started for real. If they can’t trigger their targets into giving them one, they will engineer their own Gleiwitz or domestic dry land ” Gulf of Tonkin” to point to as the “shoot” they need to declare the party started.
That is why so many Black people are avoiding the protests entirely and are considering each antiBlack outrage from the TrumpAdmin as a provocation designed to lure them out onto the streets, which so far they have not done.
This is very true. Black folks know which citizens’ heads end up on the chopping block in this country. Every. Single. Time.
It’s obvious the feckless Democrats (both centrist and progressive) are not allies to be counted on in a crunch.
I also hope it’s obvious that what the late Glen Ford of The Black Agenda Report called the “Black Misleadership Class” cannot be trusted one bit.
The twinned fates of the martyrs of Ferguson and the grifters of the official BLM orgs are so sick and sad.
Many of the best, bravest, and most selfless organizers of resistance came to tragic, mysterious (yet obvious) ends at the hands of we all know who.
Meanwhile, the loudmouths, the leeches, the grifters stole and squandered millions of dollars and even more social capital.
The relentless, racist, revisionist history of the protests has become the sole narrative of what happened when a large majority of Americans stood up together in outrage at a series of racist murders committed with impunity and were met with agents provocateurs, police riots, systematic misreporting of events in the media, disorganization, fools, looters, and indifferent to hostile politicians of both parties.
Clyburn and Obama rigged the election for Biden and then kept quiet when AIPAC systematically kept out or took out the best young Black leaders in bought election after bought election. How is Nina Turner not in Congress? Cori Bush? How is Riche Torres in? Hakeem Jeffries?
They were so dazzling and efficient at keeping Sanders out, but couldn’t manage to stop Kamala Harris from seizing the nomination and pissing away $1.5 billion in 15 weeks in a campaign that completed the discrediting of establishment Democrats.
And now here we are, being fed into the wood chipper, divided we fall.
The endless cynical abuse of identity politics in the service of the status quo helped Trump win in 2024 as much as Facebook or CNN helped him in 2016.
It’s all so sick and heartbreaking.
I think many of us have a feel for just how crushed the Reconstruction era interracial alliance of southern populists must have felt by 1900, after fighting so hard and coming so close and losing so badly, except we didn’t accomplish a fraction of what they did in their era.
I fear we may be crushed even more thoroughly, if more subtly, via mind control, drugs, and despair.
And if necessary they’ll resort to guns and camps and bombs.
But I don’t think the American right is any more on the top of its game than the left.
The blender is going to spit up unexpected outcomes.
Buckle up.
Nat Wilson Turner: Yes. Exactly. To put it more bluntly than you have, why should U.S. black people head out into the streets to save white asses — from what white people have been voting for for years, and especially since the beginning of the Great War on Terror?
The blender is going to spit up unexpected outcomes.
Yes. And a more amusing reminder: I worked on several projects with a wonderful editor who used to use the expression “Clowns in a blender” to describe bad book designs and bad layout of spreads within a book. So you can expect days and days of Brightly Colored Purée of Stupidity. Especially on FaceBoo, on Ytube, and on the Xitter.