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Notes -
Major Protests in Las Angeles
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/live-blog/paramount-california-home-depot-protest-rcna211650
Earlier the LAPD had to rescue a group of federal agents surrounded by, ahem, 'boisterous' protestors.
In response, the feds are federalizing the national guard to deploy to LA:
Gov. Newsom doesn't like the idea:
Of course, that last bit is patently false- see above- but the current situation on the ground is very much fog of war.
So why this protest now? As far as I can tell, this all started when federal agents arrested David Huerta for obstructing an ICE raid(https://ktla.com/news/local-news/union-president-among-44-arrested-in-los-angeles-ice-raids/). David Huerta, for those of you who don't know, is president of the SEIU, America's more aggressively left wing federation of labor unions(the AFL-CIO is moderately pro-Trump). He released the following statement:
Maybe-maybe not a call to arms, but the SEIU absolutely does not play around when it comes to protests, so put two and two together- and the union released its own statement, separately, which is more clearly combative:
Again, not unlawful incitement. But most people would interpret that as mildly threatening. Newsom is maintaining that this was an arrest for 'observing'- patently a lie, given video evidence.
This has the potential to be a domestic test of Trump. I'm of the impression that the SEIU, like most unions, Does Not Play By The Rules when it would mean not getting their way, so selective prosecution under RICO is possible, but more than likely Trump will just make himself look strong and Newsom weak by cracking down on LA protestors. This is a pretty core federal power and assaulting a federal law enforcement officer is almost definitionally something with federal jurisdiction for prosecution; presumably the feds can access the database of everyone who clashed with the LAPD to charge them too.
I'm eagerly waiting for all the deeply sincere civil libertarians who were minted on January 6th, 2020, to come forward and angrily denounce these insurrectionists. I expect calls for Palantir to have them all IDed and then rounded up and fed into a woodchipper of a prosecution storm, including random grandmas who just happened to be at the protest, but too close to someone obstructing federal business.
Trump sends in the National Guard, Newsome looks like a pussy.
It is a strain to compare a large protest which involves people obstructing and assaulting law enforcement to a large protest which involves people breaking into the country's main legislative building. Whatever you think about the severity of either, they are firstly surely quite different in nature, and secondly the former is quite common across Western countries while the latter is very rare.
Nah. The singling out of "main legislative building" is nothing more than special pleading aimed at pretending one is different from the other, when they are very clearly not.
Well, I think that pretending that the seat of one of the branches of government is nothing special just so you can equivocate is special pleading. If it's so non-special, why do protesters not storm it more often? Manifestly, doing so would shut down a central government function that pisses a lot of people off, and guarantee eyeballs in a way that torching some random police station in bumfuck nowhere won't.
Other countries also hold that legislatures are special: in Germany, for example, where there is otherwise a fairly strong right to public protest, there is a special cutout prohibiting assemblies in a certain radius around federal and state legislatures and the constitutional court. This has been in place since 1920.
Oh no. I think it IS special, just in the opposite manner. There is no reason for anyone to protest a Binny's Beverage Depot in Chicago and take 300 bottles of Tequila because a cop stepped on a black guy too long in Minnesota. OTOH, protesting the seat of government over their proceedings is inherently legitimate activity. Therefore, the question turns more to how an ordinary protest turned into a riot and a riot turned into a bunch of unarmed, uncoordinated, people essentially sacked a 18th century fort.
As to the first question, I would say its about 20% that the J6 protestors were a more animated group of folks than the average protestor, but thats not a very good explanation. They really werent a particularly aggressive group, and very few professional agitators were in the group. Law enforcement's failures explain a lot more. They were severely understaffed, as you can see on video and as was testified by many witnesses at the Congressional hearings (multiple requests for additional staffing were denied). Given that, they were also incompetently deployed. You can see multiple teams of 2-5 police standing behind a couple of those metal gates they use at Six Flags to make sure people queue in an orderly fashion. This is not actually a crowd control device. Given the size of the crowd, those poorly thought out isolated positions would have been overwhelmed with no violence at all. And, of course, they were. And that is what led to the escalation, because the retreating police from those idiotic positions were the first to physically engage with protestors in an aggressive manner.
So now we have multiple rapidly collapsing "defensive" positions with police having the obvious fallback position of the building's doors. If they can just close those and lock them. No amount of people shoving, kicking, etc can get into the building. You'd need a SWAT battering ram to start to have a chance, and even that would probably be inadequate, those doors are thick and heavy. BUT, of course, the doors are never closed and people just kind of flood in right behind the retreating police. Often you can see people entering the building while officers just kinda stand there at the door watching. In other words, the entrants at that point shouldn't even qualify as trespassers or rioters. They are, implicitly, invitees, as the local authorities have implicitly blessed their entrance.
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