Cross-posted from "Nina going off today" by @seahorse@midwest.social in !antifascism@midwest.social
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2025
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I'm not saying "I hope he keeps being a fascist", i'm saying "I hope he keeps being obvious about his fascism". If there's someone running around pantsing people, I'd rather them be doing it in broad daylight while screaming "i'm gonna pull everyone's pants down!" than them doing it in the cover of night where nobody sees what's happening.
Lol ok, granted, but Trump's been boasting about the strength of his response this whole time, so then I guess I hope Trump keeps taking credit for the actions of the local jackboots? Is there a point to this?
What are you talking about? We have a ton of judges who have publicly endorsed the unitary executive theory, and Trump has been publicly threatening the judges who haven't gotten in line. They've unconstitutionally raided multiple courthouses against direct court order and flaunted their willful disregard of their rulings. Yea, the US governmental structure is different, but you're delusional if you think it's functioning as an actual check on executive overreach and abuse.
Yep. What Trump has been doing in LA with the National Guard is largely regarded as unconstitutional, since the 'legal framework' he's using as justification could be so broadly applied that State sovereignty and the constitutional restriction on keeping a standing army are functionally dissolved (similar to the Nazis who claimed there was a national emergency to dissolve their own parliamentary checks on power). It would basically be up to his discretion on what constitutes 'insurrectionist activities', and checked only by the judiciary (who would rule on its applicability and constitutionality) and congress via impeachment. It functionally does not matter if the judiciary rules it unconstitutional if congress refuses to enforce it, and congress functionally cannot impeach when a majority of representatives are complicit or otherwise held in line by threats of retaliation by the president and his capitalist collaborators. Basically - what the US is experiencing is a multi-layered failure of our constitution to render checks to the President, who is now abusing this failure to solidify his hold on power. Sure would be pretty pointless if we waited until it was a complete constitutional failure.
Those are two things you absolutely would not be doing if you're concerned about the optics of a resistance movement, which was the point being communicated. And anyway, why wouldn't you be obscuring your identity while committing a felony?
Lmao, the intent of black bloc is absolutely not an acknowledgement of peaceful protest, it's an acknowledgement that violence is necessary against oppressive capitalist systems and state violence. But while we're on the point, weren't you just lecturing us on the bad optics of unruly protests, and suddenly you're singing the praises of the premier movement for openly violent resistance? Give me a fucking break. Black bloc is predicated on creating chaos, and famously referred to as 'piggyback' protest because they will embed themselves in larger demonstrations. I'd be happy to discuss good protest practices if you weren't whinging about the "bad optics" of broken glass and vandalized cars, especially while you're simultaneously claiming to support a tactic used to explicitly do those things at protests.
Fuck off shitlib, go concern troll somewhere else.
Yeah you're stuck in the 80s. That type of black blocs wasn't a tactic, it was Autonomous Marxists jacking off. They were starting shit on May Day for the purpose of starting shit. It had the net result of lowering attendance to union marches because, circling back to my very first comment: Not that many people fancy dodging burning trash cans. Name comes from the federal prosecutor describing them as "Schwarzer Block", the translation and weird lack of k came later.
As a modern tactic the black bloc is, as I said, a lightning rod. Marching alongside, holding still, if police act up they're shielding other protestors by engaging. Yes, it acknowledges that violence is necessary to defend a protest. Defence being the key word, here.
You're ignoring like 30 years of development in protest tactics. What you're trying to do, we've been there. Doesn't work.
There's a prayer vigil planned for today, isn't there, what are you going to do? Come there in black, mingle with the grandmas, and start throwing molotov cocktails? You know who does that kind of thing? Agent provocateurs. That's why I've been calling you a fed.
I'm not even going to get into it with you about the specifics of black bloc and it's uses, because the point i'm making is the same either way.
Let's pretend there's black bloc present at the LA protests, exactly like you're saying. LAPD and NG are there, and being advertised as an 'anti-insurrectionist' force by the fed, and if protestors do nothing but stand their ground, jackboots start shooting nonlethals, teargassing and zip-tying groups of 'normie' protestors.
What is black bloc doing to mitigate this?
I'm just trying to imagine what you think black bloc is, even by your own definition, that somehow doesn't involve even just optically violent engagement with police. If they're supposed to be a lightning rod to take the heat off normie protestors, how does that not still get used as justification for militarized escalation by police? Even if they're just standing there acting as shields and not actually engaging, it still sure sounds like something that can be used to justify more violent enforcement. A video of a mysterious group of protestors in all black and motorcycle helmates and makeshift shields disobeying police orders for dispersal and lobbing teargas canisters back at law enforcement? Sounds like a riot, better send in the marines. A group of black bloc breaking off from the main protest to break shop windows and lure police away from demonstrators? Sounds like looters and opportunists trying to fuck shit up, better send in the water cannons. If there's a house fire a mile away, media is going to implicate the protest with it. In what world does black bloc somehow not contribute to that media fodder?
I think you're just a shitlib who enjoys larping as an anarchist. An anarchist would not be blowing smoke for local governments trying to stop fascism with bullshit legal threats and bureaucratic legalese, and they sure as fuck wouldn't be running around complaining about the "bad optics" of clashing with police during an anti-police protest. We're literally protesting against unprovoked police violence and oppression, the police were already escalating before the protests started.
Again - just fuck off
It splits the whole thing. Liberals can have their prayer vigil while the police is busy. Especially with jackboots, with individual motivation and not "crack down on them and I mean everyone" being the order from above, all you have to do is occupy them, they just want to have fun. Scratch that itch. Use their toys.
And then liberal media can go on waxing about non-violent protest, about that beautiful prayer vigil, how nice that is. Before, they couldn't: Because there was no clear delineation, the vigil and the riot couldn't be told apart. Thus you enable things getting air time, positive or at least neutral coverage, that would otherwise be swept under the rug.
And before you go on and say "but the whole US media landscape is captured by capital interest and racists" -- yes. And the capitalists want their immigrants. They don't, in principle, mind speaking of "ICE excesses".
What I think is the actual issue here is an American incapability to actually organise. Last time you had a civil rights movement with any sort of discipline was, well, the civil rights movement. MLK, Black Panthers, etc. I suggest reading up a bit on what they did instead of jacking off to pseudo-insurrectionist fantasies.
You act as if that was something that never happens elsewhere. As if others haven't found ways to deal with it. Me saying "Telling everyone to just throw stones is a stupid idea" is not an opinion, it's observed history. It has been tried. It doesn't work. Other approaches work better. But Americans, in their infinite wisdom, will do the right thing only after having exhausted every other possibility. Listening and learning from other people's experience? Why, what's the point, America is so exceptionally exceptional nothing could ever apply to you. Protesting with discipline, diversion, and de-escalation tactics cannot work because you have more people per capita or something. I retract that "fed" and will simply call you "yank".
It absolutely does not. Anything that happens in LA is being attributed to protestors, and it's been that way for every protest in the US since before the 1950's. Any protest with more than a couple hundred people either doesn't get covered by US news or it gets implicated with every act of violence and vandalism for the entire city. That's not even me being hyperbolic, US media will even uncritically report on completely unrelated events as if they are a part of a large protest. It's not as if black bloc is a uniform that makes them invisible to protest coverage.
I don't actually disagree, but I think our hyper-connected social media makes it practically impossible to avoid the kind of cross-contamination that soils the optics of even a well-organized protest here. Maybe it's different overseas, but from what I've seen written about it in our media you have the same problem.
Nobody has said they should.
I've grown bored with this disagreement. I think I'll just leave you with a MLK quote I think is relevant.
"The tactic that we're not employing in LA has no effect in LA".
On the live feeds I watched I spotted exactly one protester who might have had training. She was good at leading a chant, that's it. Noone had an understanding of the larger situation, everyone was driving by the seat of their pants.
Now, of course, it's too late to build those structures, build professionalism, but in the civil rights era you had it. Rosa Parks didn't just decide one morning to sit in the front of the bus, the thing had been prepared for months and months. Everything was gamed out, people trained to have the right reaction in every circumstance, the whole shebang.
Fun fact: I actually played "Greenpeace and police" on the primary school schoolyard. About ten people sit down, hook into each other's arms, four or five "cops" try to separate them. That's the kind of cultural diffusion you want, enough dissemination of tactics through workshops that primary school kids pick up random fun exercises as a game.
Indeed, it is relevant: Because you still haven't learned how to make yourself heard.
That's not a call to violence. It's a call to get out of a comfortable rut and fight for justice, equality, and humanity. Show me an MLK quote where he says "Yo dudes, just riot, man". Especially the black civil rights movement was vulnerable to being portrayed as violent (racist stereotypes and everything). How did they get around that? Did Rosa Parks spit in the face of the cop who arrested her?
"Protests were overwhelmingly peaceful with riots at the fringes". The social media sphere is its own battleground, the AfD basically employs the same fake news outrage tactics as the MAGA sphere does in the US. No, you won't get Fox News to change its narrative and to stop just making things up, but that's not the only news network you have. Achieving anything on the social media front requires consistency and reach, honestly not my speciality. Ask someone who has never used a dial-up modem. Centrist-compatible edgy meme accounts with the occasional leap into the radical when the opportunity is right? Broad outreach is crucial otherwise the important stuff will stay in your bubble.
Also never forget that Antifa action can look like this. People do love to laugh at fascists, also liberals, even plenty of conservatives, give them plenty of opportunity to do so. Nick their clothes while they're bathing, the whole republic was snickering. Those things are click magnets as you can see them being picked up even by US media.