On "Peaceful" Resistance
Let's take a brief walk through the resistance movements of the last century.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Amendment One, The Constitution of the United States, Ratified on December 15, 1791.
Can anyone blame Rosa Parks for the day she refused to move to the back of the bus? Could you blame her for the ensuing bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama? It was as justifiable as protests and demonstrations come.
From History.com:
On February 12, 1968, 1,300 Black sanitation workers in Memphis began a strike to demand better working conditions and higher pay. Their stand marked an early fight for financial justice for workers of color as part of the civil rights movement. The strike also drew Martin Luther King Jr. and fatefully became the setting for his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech and his assassination.
Hauling trash, sometimes in the pouring rain, was a taxing and dirty job. Yet the city of Memphis expected garbage collectors to work long hours for meager wages and without overtime pay. Their compensation, 65 cents per hour, was so low that many were eligible for welfare and food stamps.
The strikes were sparked after a couple weeks earlier two men, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, had taken shelter from the rain in the back of a trash truck, when the truck malfunctioned and crushed the men to death. The people were outraged, they had been lobbying the city for more up-to-date equipment for years.
Then the city refused to provide compensation to the families of the deceased workers. The worker's walked off the job in disgust.
From the King Institute at Stanford:
The night before his assassination in April 1968, Martin Luther King told a group of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee: “We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through” (King, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” 217). King believed the struggle in Memphis exposed the need for economic equality and social justice that he hoped his Poor People’s Campaign would highlight nationally.
If it hadn’t been for this, we might still be working 80+ hours a week at regular pay.
The Vietnam war demonstrations made perfect sense. They protested the invasion of a country we’d had no premise to invade. The Gulf of Tonkin attack for which we invaded hadn’t actually happened. It was fear of a culture we didn’t understand. For a thesis we’d had no proof of.
In the name of the people, they bombed villages. Massacred woman and children, and traumatized, not only the Vietnamese people, but the American soldiers who were led to believe they were carrying out a noble mission, only to find they were fleecing a country of their resources and enriching a military industrial-complex hungry for death.
Without this resistance they might’ve continued the war. The change in public sentiment at home, although late, led Nixon to start the withdrawal from Vietnam in 1969. All troops, however, wouldn’t be withdrawn until 1973, and Cambodia had been blown to bits.
The riots of 1992, you could find plenty of justification. The video of Rodney King being beaten by the LAPD had been shared far and wide. Way before social media. News station to news station aired the beating of King. A lucky catch before the age cell phone cameras.
There was an atmosphere of hate and discrimination between the LAPD and the black community. There’s been many movies, documentaries, books, depicting these events. An affluent Asian store owner shot and killed a young girl, named Latasha Harlins, because she was suspected of shoplifting.
Off the back of the Iran/Contra Affair it was uncovered that the CIA had been moving cocaine into the black community as a means to fund regime change in Guatemala without Congressional oversight.
The Asian storeowner was given probation. Rodney King’s attackers were let off. The CIA lied, and the black community, decimated by mass incarceration and the crack epidemic were told to “Just say No!"
What followed was the biggest protest California had seen since Watts was set fire in 1965.
By the way, the Watts Uprising, as it was coined, also made sense. They repealed the Rumford Fair Housing Act which stopped landlords and property owners from being able to refuse to rent, lease, or sell property to “colored people” as they referred to them. Based solely on this characteristic.
In California, housing segregation was rampant as a result of decades of racially discriminatory housing policies explicitly aimed at keeping people of color confined to urban ghettos and out of the expanding suburbs.
This brought about the act by the only black legislator in California. When it was repealed, all hell broke loose.
The “Battle of Seattle” 1999 made sense. They opposed the globalization created by NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Act, which turned out to be the most devastating piece of legislation and turned the working class to the unemployed class and turned places like Detroit and Gary, Indiana into a ghetto. Our jobs were shipped overseas, and we’re still trying to get them back.
The series of protests that became the Battle of Seattle surrounded the WTO Ministerial Conference of 1999, which convened at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle. The demonstrations were planned months in advance.
See, NAFTA and the WTO allowed big companies to ship their manufacturing overseas where they could get away with paying workers pennies on the dollar.
It’s the reason cell phones are made in enemy countries, and not a single chip manufacturer exists in America.
The authorities knew it was coming and came out in full force against the protestors. According to reporting “Delta Force,” the U.S. Army’s tier-one Special Operations force, was dispensed against the protestors.
Curfews were assigned and "no-protest zones" were established where anti-WTO buttons were not allowed to be worn.
Agents Provocateurs were sent into the crowds to invoke violence to give the police the ok to shut down the demonstrations by force.
On February 15th, 2003, the largest protest in history, according to Guinness, took place internationally to oppose the invasion of Iraq. Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Our troops were being sent to invade a regime who were not our enemies, to avenge an attack someone else had committed, and remove weapons that did not exist.
The protestors and demonstrators were right. History has vindicated them, every one of them.
Occupy Wall Street made sense. They protested the Wall Street bailouts given by the Obama administration while American homeowners were thrown out on their ass.
2020 made sense. Every one of us knew a George Floyd, had a friend, loved one, or could see a scenario where we could’ve been in that position personally.
Or Breonna Taylor, who had an ex-boyfriend who turned out to be bad news and after she’d already dumped his ass, was shot to death by the police for something that he had done.
January 6th, you can say what you want but those people believed their country was being taken away from them. Everything they were told by partisan actors on the right seemed to be confirmed by partisan actors on the left.
At the same time that the public was radicalized by the obvious lies from the expert-class, public health officials, doctors, scientists, and the news media, when those same people then said to “trust us” about the election too, a majority percentage said “fuck that! You just told me that Covid believes Black Lives Matter. Now you’re telling me the election was free and fair. I’m listening to the other guy that you liars told me not to trust.”
I came out of that period a hardened revolutionary that now fact checked the local weather man.
I might’ve been one of those indicted if I’d been there on January 6th, 2021.
The campus protests currently taking place make perfect sense to me. For almost two years now, the images of children being slaughtered under the rubble in Gaza, from bombs that we paid for with our blood, sweat, and tears.
Being told that if we oppose that we are the same thing as Adolf Hitler. That praying for protection for the “children of Gaza and Israel” means that you are a supporter of terrorism, or opposing the support of the genocide of a people with your tax dollars makes you “antisemitic filth.”
Protesting that makes sense, to me.
So, what the fuck is happening in LA? Is this… real?
I mean, are these protests organic?
Or are they organized by
and the Brookings Institute?
First off, I had no clue there was ICE protests happening until I seen a picture of what I thought was a pro-Palestine protestor on top of a burning cop car with a Palestinian flag flying. I thought, oh damn! Good pic, but I don’t know if that’s good for the Palestinians. Burning cop cars?! I think they’re getting enough bad press.
Then I started seeing all the videos out of LA, kicked myself directly in the teeth for mistaking a Mexican flag for a Palestinian flag.
Right after this year’s inauguration, I don’t who I was following, but I was getting notifications from Threads and a couple people I was following were posting warnings of locations of upcoming ICE raids.
One of the posts kinda blew my mind, it showed such irresponsible disregard for reality, it said, “ICE raids in” blah blah blah “DO NOT COMPLY! THEY HAVE NO LEGAL PRESIDENCE. RESIST AT ALL COSTS!”
I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Someone is calling for these people to resist Federal agents. I’ve been arrested many times, what I have learned is those brave dumb souls never win in the end.
So, I commented “Please DO NOT LISTEN TO THIS CRAZY PERSON! Always comply with the person holding the gun. They can shoot you dead and walk away unscathed. Ignore this.”
So, these riots have been bubbling right beneath the surface since Inauguration Day.
It seems they are now breaking out in major cities across the country.
What I’m hearing from reporting is Stephen Miller said, he wants the Federal agents to stop targeting only criminals and start raiding workplaces that are known to hire illegal immigrants, Home Depot, 7/11 etc. leading to a raid of a Home Depot in Los Angeles sparking the unrest in LA that has now spread to Austin, Dallas, Denver, Philidelphia, Seattle, Santa Ana, CA, Boston, Washington D.C, New York City, and Chicago.
Here’s Forbes on what’s happening:
Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, referred to the demonstrations as an “insurrection,” and said they are “all the proof you need that mass migration unravels societies,” while highlighting footage of protesters waving Mexican flags in posts on X, painting a dark narrative that the U.S. is being taken over by undocumented migrants.
He attacked lawmakers in so-called sanctuary cities, accusing “the government of the state of California” of having “aided, abetted and conspired to facilitate the invasion of the United States,” writing “we will take back America.”
The arrests coincide with a push from Miller for ICE to dramatically increase arrests and use aggressive tactics, such as workplace raids like the one conducted at a Westlake Home Depot over the weekend that led to the protests in Los Angeles, according to multiple reports about Miller’s directives.
Miller recently set a new “minimum” arrest figure for ICE of 3,000 per day, double the quota set in January, and threatened to fire ICE field office leaders with the least amount of arrests, NBC News reported, citing unnamed sources who participated in a meeting with Miller last month.
In the meeting, Miller urged officials to broaden arrest targets to include noncriminal migrants, according to NBC, even as the Trump administration has defended its mass deportation push by claiming it’s targeting those accused of serious crimes or gang affiliation.
Miller pushed ICE officials to conduct broad sweeps at workplaces like Home Depot, 7-Eleven and others that employ day laborers, and do essentially whatever they need to make more arrests, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the meeting,
I’ve heard reports of Marines being called in and the National Guard. This is worrisome. If you are not worried about the military being deployed on citizens, allow me to include one more anecdote from the past.
The Kent State Massacre
On May 4, 1970, during a demonstration against the Vietnam War, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed Kent State University students, killing four and injuring nine. The shootings occurred in the context of a politically charged period, following President Nixon's announcement that the US would invade Cambodia. The day before the shootings, National Guard troops were called to the campus to quell riots.
Here’s the thing and the way I see all of this,
The Federal Government, every arm of it, is oppressive by its nature.
The more efficient the government works the more oppressive it is.
The videos I am seeing coming out of these protests are “No Holds Barred” from the police.
That’s without the military present. Maybe they’ve gotten more aggressive, maybe it’s because they don’t see these people as citizens but the riot police breaking up these protests are coming in a lot more aggressive than usual.
Maybe it’s because they aren’t the ones being protested this time. Maybe that caused them to show a lot more restraint than we realized, but these motherfuckers aren’t playing no games.
I’m praying everyone out there stays as safe as possible and that these police find some compassion in their hearts.
Anyone stuck in one of these third world countries, who’ve been fed the bullshit line about “America, land of the free” you’d wanna come here too.
Imagine you didn’t know anything else, you heard how free and amazing America was, you get here and you’re like, “Yea, it’s just like they told me! I got a job at Home Depot, first day!”
Then the very next day the place gets raided by ICE.
The day after that you get shot by rubber bullets.
All I know is America is really ruining their propaganda about how dreamy this place is.
Thank you for reading.
Editor-in-Chief