#AMA, How We Protest Now
Nancy's in LA, covering the ICE protests
Got questions? Bring ‘em to our first YouTube live starting… 15 minutes from now, 7:30pm PT/10:30ET.
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Got questions? Bring ‘em to our first YouTube live starting… 15 minutes from now, 7:30pm PT/10:30ET.
No posts
I hate that I missed this opportunity to ask some questions, especially after listening to the Bromance episode today as well. Hopefully I can ask them now and perhaps you'll be able to get to them another day. Thank you for putting yourself in harms way for us and for all your readers elsewhere.
First off, youtube live stream issue. Without knowing exactly what device you are streaming from and some other details, my main recommendation to people before we do streams is to restart your device, that normally helps solve the majority of problems that people have.
I have questions that might sound like I'm on one side or the other and I'm really not. As I said in my comments to the Bromance page, the way Sarah was talking about her unsureness of what is going on is similar to mine.
Questions:
1) I get the feeling that you felt like Trump escalated this first with the guard presence. My understanding of the order of the events is as follows:
A) ICE raids happen (feel free to say this is a provocation but if they are rounding up illegals, I would say that this is in their job description...I'm for Open Borders and/or very limited restrictions myself...but I think that is not a majority opinion, most people want less immigration these days for whatever reasons)
B) Protestors in Paramount and at the ICE HQ turn violent fairly quickly, especially against ICE..throwing rocks at their caravans, etc. It did not seem like the LAPD were stopping this or were able to...scenes of people throwing stones down off the bridge down into the highway...definitely blocking interstate traffic which I think some would say is maybe worse than the direct violence
C) My feelings were this violence was happening against federal officials with little help from local cops and then Trump called for the national guard. I won't argue that he was intending to do this anyway, but I do feel like things were violent before the guard happened.
I guess I struggle with what seemed like a lot of violence against federal officials, with little help from local government. I'm not saying calling the Guard in is right or the best move, I guess I'm just saying based off what I was seeing in the news, I could understand that...What do you think?
2) I get the sense that both sides have been gearing up for this fight and they both want it to happen as much as possible. I think so much of this gets put on Trump, but do you not think the Left also thinks we are already in a fascist country and are ready to fight (they justify it b/c they say its already happening but it takes 2 to tango and I think one can make something happen by saying its going to happen). That is what I'm feeling like from my lefty friends which is most of my friend group even though I'm libertarian.
3) Do you feel like the additional presence of troops is tamping down some of the looting compared to 2020? And I'm against violence as well, and again I don't condone any of this on either side, but if the presence was less and they didn't chase the "night shift", do you really think they'd do less destruction? At what point can you just not do anything and survive politically? Granted, yes, I'd much rather them stand back and have high definition video of everyone and then go prosecute people the next day/week, etc, but I'm not sure others would be okay with that.
Thank you again Nancy, and stay safe out there.
This episode is going to be analyzed into the ground long after the smoke has cleared and, like other commenters, I'm unable to ascertain at this point how violent things got before Trump ordered in the National Guard. This will be the crux of the debate, with the left predictably claiming that Trump just made things worse and the right saying that things were already out of control.
Here's one aspect of this Charlie-Foxtrot that I'm ready to take issue with though. Send in the Marines! This to me is unnecessary dick-waving on Trump's part. The Marines are designed with a specific mission and it is NOT crowd control, or "keeping the lid on things". They are trained to spearhead an invasion, to kill people and break things. If Trump goes so far as to invoke the Insurrection Act, and if my understanding of that is correct that it more or less gives the military police powers, things could get very ugly.