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I don’t see how anyone intelligent can see the protests continuing when the NG can arrest and shoot people who interfere in a federal investigation. Nor do I believe that Newsom is going to avoid prosecution for siding with the protesters assaulting federal officers. They wanted this, they wanted to mess with the government because they have TDS. Now they can paint tge ground with the blood of protesters who want to LARP as rebels.
You don't think Newsom will avoid prosecution? What kinds of timeline and odds are you offering for this, because I'm eager to take the other side of that one.
He’s publicly supporting a group of rioters. It seems like at best to be incitement, and given that he asked the LA PD to go and protect rioters, might well be more serious.
That’s not incitement, not least because he’s called for nonviolence.
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We still do have a First Amendment, it still applies to public officials, and Brandenburg v. Ohio is still the controlling precedent. Unless Newsom says more or less "Come on out right now and wreck the place", he's reasonably safe from prosecution. And he's not dumb enough to step over the line. (Trump might be dumb enough to try to prosecute anyway, but probably not)
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Eh, George Wallace didn't get prosecuted, and defying immigration enforcement has infinitely more elite buy-in than resisting civil rights, enough to smooth over any degree to which Newsom is less shrewd at playing the game (The stand at the schoolhouse door was more carefully scripted LARP than real resistance.). Performative (save for the not so performative 1860s) displays in the name of states' rights have been a feature of Democratic Party politicking for more or less the entire history of the party.
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Have the police fire on the crowd. That always works, just look at history.
I think the issue is that it works iff the police obey the order, but that if they don't then it is instadeath for the regime's credibility. The chance that police (or troops) will refuse to fire on their own countrymen engaged in a protest half the population finds sympathetic is high enough that governments don't normally want to risk it.
One of the advantages of a large multinational empire is that you can post troops from province A to keep order in province B, so the troops don't see the locals as their own countrymen. This doesn't work in nation-states, but the same general approach applies - this is why Singapore uses Ghurkas as riot police.
I think sympathy is not exactly high. Here is a video of LAPD trampling a protester with their horses:
https://x.com/SilentlySirs/status/1931987304760881629
I've seen that incident noted out in the wild a few times, and so I'm guessing there's an effort to make it the signature image of this fiasco.
We'll see if that sticks. I was rather nonplussed by the video given what 'trampled by horses' conjures in my mind. I see a miscreant whose actions finally met their consequences in the middle of a firework-exploding fracas, and he is actually OK by the end of it.
I'm obviously based, but I think the currency of 'poor innocent protester hurt by fascists for literally no reason' is losing value.
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It looks like they clipped the part right before where it appears the protestor and two other guys with backpacks firebombed the mounted officers. It also seems like the fireworks that get mostly cropped out in that edit might be startling the horses. Although I'm not discounting that the third backpack guy wasn't with the other two. It isn't clear from the video but he gets pulled out from under the tree where the 30ft bolt of fire came from. https://streamable.com/e/bc1sog
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Can Trump dissolve the LAPD and replace it with the Feds until a new police force is assembled? Imagine resolving a long-standing problem practically by accident.
No, but he can put national guard there practically indefinitely. In any case the LAPD is presumably, like most police forces, very pro-Trump and moderately conservative even if the city that pays them definitely isn't. Police are a different stratum these days in large part because of the dysfunction of the social classes who would see policing as an attractive gig making those people unsuitable as cops. Young men get rejected from the police force for marijuana and minor wouldn't-even-be-noticed-otherwise crimes(duh) but also for gambling debt(a big, growing problem among the communities police recruit from most heavily). It's also not a super popular profession with big chunks of the public.
The police are their own social stratum and they protect their own. The actual sympathies of the LAPD aren't the issue, because those are mostly pro-Trump(and the rest are taking bribes). The civilian political leadership is Trump's obstacle.
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Is January 6th the only time that's worked?
Worked on the Bonus Army.
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I think it would have worked at Tiananmen square if anybody had ever protested there
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If you're trying to analogize based on yesterday's event's, it's unclear what crimes, if any, were committed, besides normal low-level protest crimes like failure to disperse and whatever charges you can levy against people throwing objects at police. Getting someone for interfering with an investigation or official duties would require showing both that the agent were actually engaged in official duties and that the person took a specific action to interfere. Realistically, this would look like ICE trying to make an arrest and the protestors physically impeding the officer from doing so. The reports I've read suggest that ICE was merely staging for a raid (which is itself just an interpolation from the authors; there's been no official word that I'm aware of) so there's no official duty at this point to interfere with. At this point it looks like there was a raid that was about to go down but got called off because of the protests. Charging everyone present because their protesting made it inconvenient to undertake a planned future action is already stretching the law beyond anything it's been used for in the past, but it comes with the additional complication that actions that you are claiming are obstruction are core First Amendment activities. So even if you could show that the elements of the crime were satisfied, you still might not be able to get a conviction due to constitutional issues.
I think the guys [EDIT later: in the famous video I surmise everyone has seen] standing in front of the ICE vehicle probably qualify. The agent was engaged in an official duty (going to/from some place) and standing in front of a vehicle is a pretty specific action to interfere with it.
The rest of the crowd egging them on are obviously not though.
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So if the cops arrest my neighbor, and I see them gathering outside, I can get between them and my neighbor and not have interfered? As long as the cops haven’t officially declared they’re now on official duty they just aren’t? It like, cool, I can loot a 7-11 and have twenty big guys “protest” outside and keep the cops out. It’s just ridiculous to me to say crowds of people can surround a bunch of cops, prevent them from even starting their official duties, and hide behind the first amendment even if they’re throwing rocks (which is assault).
If they're actively in the process of arresting him you'd be interfering. If they were gathering across the street in preparation for a raid, and a group of protestors gathered on the sidewalk in front of your neighbor's house, the police would have to ask them to move before they could be arrested for interfering, and at that they'd only have to move enough to let the police through. In the 7-11 raid the guys would have to let the cops in, but they couldn't be arrested for just protesting outside. The rock throwing would be covered by assault, and may also be impeding, but it would depend on the circumstances. Suppose for a moment that the protestors in LA knew nothing of the ICE raids, didn't know ICE was there, and were having an unrelated protest about environmental policy or something else totally unrelated to ICE. It did, however, make it difficult for ICE to execute the raid. Should all of the protestors in that scenario be charged with impeding official duties?
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Jan 6th?
I don't believe anyone from Jan 6 was charged with obstructing an ICE agent performing his official duties, or any corollary that would apply to the National Park Police or DC Police.
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I don’t think Newsom has actually done much- strongly worded notes in whatever direction are legal, and that’s basically all he did.
Not if they rise to the level of seditious conspiracy.
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I don't think whether Newsom has actually committed any specific federal crime is going to be a major factor in whether or not he draws the attention of federal law enforcement.
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Newsom is the last person I expect to put himself in legal jeopardy because he got carried away defending left-wing sacred values.
I would agree with that assessment.
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