Great long-read in Vanity Fair on the origins and current issues with law enforcement fraternal orders, which are not unions in the usual sense, but are conflated with them because they handle wage and pension negotiations as well as legal protection for their members.
I have long advocated against street protests, perhaps counter to "liberal" convention. Here's why:
The real clarifier is that the Kenosha Keystone Kops let Rittenhouse walk right past them with his AR-15, hands in the air, muttering that he'd shot someone. Okay kid, see ya tomorrow! Stay hydrated! This is where they're at. This is how they're aligned. And no one's gonna do a goddamned thing about it. Remember, Rittenhouse was already planning to become a cop, just as soon as he turned eighteen. Imagine that fucking freak with the power and authority over everyone else's lives.
Imagine how many just like him are already in law enforcement across the country.
It's only a small step from "militia" to "death squad," and most of that step entails ensuring that there won't be any consequences for your actions, because you have explicit support from law enforcement personnel. This little puke had his mommy drive him and his big-boy gun across the state line to "protect property" in Kenosha where again, the local "authorities" not only waved him on through with his gun to have some fun, but are also on video essentially deputizing the local (armed) militia.
This isn't even the first instance of this sort of thing this week, law enforcement outsourcing their job duties to local fascist gangs. Portland and Boise saw the same earlier in the week, cops standing by while armed insurgents attacked unarmed protesters and destroyed government property.
Different rules for different people, you see. And when you have a paramilitarized group that is automatically unaccountable for any crime its members commit, because even elected representatives are terrified of them, you have a problem in the making. El Salvador, Bosnia, Brazil.
I think we're damned either way, whether people take to the streets or not. There's precious little evidence that it works though. And with all due respect to John Lewis, please spare me the "good trouble" guff. Point me to a single protest since the civil rights protests that actually worked. Did the Vietnam protests of 1968-70 work? No, Nixon got re-elected and we weren't completely out of there until 1975. Millions of people around the world protested the second Iraq war. Countless people rotated through the Occupy Wall Street protests, and as you can see, the financial-grift industry was completely decimated by their noble efforts. The pussy-hat protests sure showed Trump a thing or two, right? He learned his lesson.
And this magical summer, for all the millions of people who've showed up to get their skulls cracked and teeth kicked in, whaddaya got? A few toppled statues and four Minneapolis cops who finally got arrested. Out of them, only Derek Chauvin will do any time at all -- and I'll bet you my next paycheck he gets more time for tax fraud than for murdering George Floyd.
I'm not saying do nothing, or that all hope is lost. I'm saying that being a street pinata will never the move the needle. Even if you martyred yourself to the cause, they'll forget your name a week later, and millions of dirtbags will happily spring to the defense of your murderer, whether their actions were accorded under "proper" legal authoritah, or handed off to some incel piece of shit.
There is nothing in this hollow state worth losing an eye or a finger or your life over, not any more. Just keep in mind at all times who and what these fucking monsters really are, that some of them appear on CNN, or hang out with Washington Post columnists. A decent society would have tarred and feathered scumbags like Jesse Kelly and Kurt Schlichter long ago. Instead they get rewarded with money and media appearances and hundreds of thousands of followers. When I talk about boycotting the outlets and their sponsors that give these animals a soapbox, I am not bullshitting. It's all or nothing, folks.
Don't kid yourself about people being "tricked" or "manipulated" or any of that shit. Any society that lets scumbags run the show has become profoundly indecent by definition, and again is therefore not worth getting injured or killed for. Save yourself and either find ways to insulate yourself from them, or to escape. But get out of the street already. Stop being fodder for fascist cops and their death squad buddies.
I have long advocated against street protests, perhaps counter to "liberal" convention. Here's why:
Indeed, for American policing to function, physical assault is an important tool, but as important is intimidation—the threat of physical assault and the psychological terror it engenders. And for those tools to work, they require the premise of impunity, elevating the police officer as a different kind of being, one unencumbered by the laws of civic comportment or even the basic laws of reality. It requires not only that Alabama state troopers beat John Lewis after he marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1965, fracturing his skull—it requires a system that defines Lewis as the criminal in that scenario, and the trooper as the guardian of safety and order. It requires not only that a Chicago police officer, guarding a statue of Christopher Columbus this past July, be able to punch 18-year-old Miracle Boyd in the mouth, knocking out her front teeth—it requires us to see the video and know that the officer will go unnamed and unpunished. It requires not only that a New York City police officer crack 20-year-old Dounya Zayer’s head against the pavement, causing her to have a seizure—it requires a commanding officer to watch and do nothing. It requires Lynch to refer to the officer who shoved Zayer as someone “whose boss sent him out there to do a job, who was put in a bad situation during a chaotic time,” and to refer to the decision to charge him with assault as “dereliction of duty.” For the police to act as they do, and for the body politic to accept it, requires not only fear or force but a reconfiguration of the very fabric of reality as we know it.You can add teen terrorist Kyle Rittenhouse to that equation now, and observe the immediate wave of support this little monster got for his actions, and gain perhaps a clearer understanding of what you're up against, what the scope and scale of it all really is. Yes, some of them are trolls and/or bots. Some of them.
The real clarifier is that the Kenosha Keystone Kops let Rittenhouse walk right past them with his AR-15, hands in the air, muttering that he'd shot someone. Okay kid, see ya tomorrow! Stay hydrated! This is where they're at. This is how they're aligned. And no one's gonna do a goddamned thing about it. Remember, Rittenhouse was already planning to become a cop, just as soon as he turned eighteen. Imagine that fucking freak with the power and authority over everyone else's lives.
Imagine how many just like him are already in law enforcement across the country.
It's only a small step from "militia" to "death squad," and most of that step entails ensuring that there won't be any consequences for your actions, because you have explicit support from law enforcement personnel. This little puke had his mommy drive him and his big-boy gun across the state line to "protect property" in Kenosha where again, the local "authorities" not only waved him on through with his gun to have some fun, but are also on video essentially deputizing the local (armed) militia.
This isn't even the first instance of this sort of thing this week, law enforcement outsourcing their job duties to local fascist gangs. Portland and Boise saw the same earlier in the week, cops standing by while armed insurgents attacked unarmed protesters and destroyed government property.
Different rules for different people, you see. And when you have a paramilitarized group that is automatically unaccountable for any crime its members commit, because even elected representatives are terrified of them, you have a problem in the making. El Salvador, Bosnia, Brazil.
I think we're damned either way, whether people take to the streets or not. There's precious little evidence that it works though. And with all due respect to John Lewis, please spare me the "good trouble" guff. Point me to a single protest since the civil rights protests that actually worked. Did the Vietnam protests of 1968-70 work? No, Nixon got re-elected and we weren't completely out of there until 1975. Millions of people around the world protested the second Iraq war. Countless people rotated through the Occupy Wall Street protests, and as you can see, the financial-grift industry was completely decimated by their noble efforts. The pussy-hat protests sure showed Trump a thing or two, right? He learned his lesson.
And this magical summer, for all the millions of people who've showed up to get their skulls cracked and teeth kicked in, whaddaya got? A few toppled statues and four Minneapolis cops who finally got arrested. Out of them, only Derek Chauvin will do any time at all -- and I'll bet you my next paycheck he gets more time for tax fraud than for murdering George Floyd.
I'm not saying do nothing, or that all hope is lost. I'm saying that being a street pinata will never the move the needle. Even if you martyred yourself to the cause, they'll forget your name a week later, and millions of dirtbags will happily spring to the defense of your murderer, whether their actions were accorded under "proper" legal authoritah, or handed off to some incel piece of shit.
There is nothing in this hollow state worth losing an eye or a finger or your life over, not any more. Just keep in mind at all times who and what these fucking monsters really are, that some of them appear on CNN, or hang out with Washington Post columnists. A decent society would have tarred and feathered scumbags like Jesse Kelly and Kurt Schlichter long ago. Instead they get rewarded with money and media appearances and hundreds of thousands of followers. When I talk about boycotting the outlets and their sponsors that give these animals a soapbox, I am not bullshitting. It's all or nothing, folks.
Don't kid yourself about people being "tricked" or "manipulated" or any of that shit. Any society that lets scumbags run the show has become profoundly indecent by definition, and again is therefore not worth getting injured or killed for. Save yourself and either find ways to insulate yourself from them, or to escape. But get out of the street already. Stop being fodder for fascist cops and their death squad buddies.
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