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I would like to eat my words for an earlier post I made in response to @grognard. Apologies if this does not belong in a top level post but I'm not sure where to put it. I believe it does deserve its own post as a general commentary on the credibility of people on the internet.
I was extremely confident that this twitter post was posted by a disinformation, grift, or bot account. But it seems highly likely that this account is who he says he is, and has the credentials claimed.
After some google searching, I found a Facebook account under the same name, listing Army SF credentials with more specific details. I also found that account commenting on army related posts from around a decade ago. To tie that Facebook to the Twitter, going back to older Twitter posts I see posts from years ago referencing disc golf and jiu jitsu, both of which are found on his Facebook. The profile picture is similar enough though I'm not good at analyzing faces. Eric's public Facebook is mostly political posts similar to the Twitter, but is tagged in several posts from other local people who have not made political posts.
If this is a fake account, they played the looooooong game. So given the unlikeliness of that, I believe that it's highly likely that this twitter account is who he says he is and has special forces experience. I won't share the details to protect privacy but if you really want to it wouldn't be hard to dig up the same info.
So i guess the moral of the story is, maybe believe people when they say something, especially if it's been boosted by smart or influential people, since hopefully someone else out there has done their due diligence. Or at least don't dismiss them immediately at first glance. (I'm still triggered from when Nate Silver posted a link to a fake article) I'm also wondering if this is the first "real" entirely AI written piece to truly go viral and break out into the mainstream. I'm not aware of this happening before, though maybe it has. And goshdarnit I really, really, hate people who dump a huge wall of chatgpt because you have no idea what they were actually trying to say.
Maybe one data point shouldn’t really change your willingness to believe Internet strangers?
Sure, this guy probably isn’t astroturfed. That doesn’t mean he’s honest or correct. Social media would have picked him up either way.
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I think that the Twitter poster's use of military jargon is doing a lot of heavy lifting in his argument. Here is his key claim about what the anti-ICE forces are doing:
Let's break it down:
I don't know how Signal works, so I'll leave this one without comment.
I mean yeah, this is just specialization of labor, well-understood by humans for many thousands of years. Pretty much anyone who has been on a sports team or has had a job understands the idea of having different members of the organization focus on what they're good at.
This can just mean "some people are sitting around watching the feds and telling each other online where the feds are and how many of them there are, and there are enough such people that at least some of them are active at any time of day or night".
I don't know what a chat rotation is, but regularly deleting your data is the kind of thing that plenty of tech-savvy people would think to do, and would also recommend to others. And there is usually no shortage of tech-savvy people in large political movements in the US.
I mean, I should hope so. You don't have to be a military professional to figure out that this is a good idea.
Well yeah, of course sympathetic locals are going to help. That kind of goes without saying.
"People meet at each other's houses to discuss what is happening and plan further steps". I mean, yeah? Of course they do.
Yeah, most of them have cars. It's pretty easy for them to get around.
I've often thought that plenty of people seem to 'play' reddit the way I used to play massively-multiplayer games, and they just somehow missed the more appropriate outlet for their energy which would have served them (and the rest of us) better. And this kind of thing we're hearing about with these activist signal chats seems to be similar, just spilling out into real life.
In the 90s/00s, I missed out on actual early MMOs, but played a text-based browser game called Archmage, with maybe tens of thousands of players around the world at its height of popularity. You would gain like 1 turn per 15 minutes, such that you couldn't really 'play' more than once or twice a day. So the game really ended up being more socially-interactive metagaming, where people formed guilds, mixed it up on public & private forums, hung out in IRC, etc. There was scheming, strategizing, wars, alliances, propaganda campaigns, spying & fake identities, all kinds of fun emergent creativity. Some people were the superstars who were actually good at the game, others were reliable at monitoring opponents' activity at different timezones, some people had the social skills for being good leaders & diplomats.
I think there's an inclination to suggest that people waste their time and energy on games like this, and should instead put it toward something real-world productive. But I guess I'm practically the opposite now, and think people who managed to miss finding a 'gaming' outlet for expending & refining this kind of social energy are actually shitting up the commons by 'playing' less appropriate venues. Team sports, fraternities, and large mixed-up workplaces are at least pretty good alternatives. Being in discord/signal rooms for subreddits or local activism, not so much.
I agree with you that being an IRL Reddit anti-ICE protestor constitutes “shitting up the commons thinking life is a video game”, but I am simultaneously self-aware enough to realise that I only think this because it’s an objective I disagree with. If these were right-wing Reddit LARPers going out to help ICE round up foreigners then I’d consider it a heartening efflorescence of organic civic virtue.
As Dilos said of the Arcadians: brave amateurs, they do their part
Yeah originally I wrote "local inane activism", to leave room for causes that might be more deserving, but then edited that out to remove the subjective animosity. Though that just leaves it implied, if there are causes that someone feels deserve social-game-like energy. In this example at least, I would consider it more of a civic virtue for energized right-wingers to just join ICE rather than scheming & organizing into roles in backchannels to help them. Maybe to those who view ICE as the modern KKK, where regular people join up to get agency to 'just do stuff', it's basically the same thing.
Ultimately my pitch is slightly different than people acting like real life is a video game: it's that many people have a kind of energy that online social games are the perfect outlet for in the modern world, and not knowing that & missing out on them (or at least team sports, scouts, something) to scratch that itch leaves people obnoxiously channeling that unrefined energy elsewhere (even if I agree with a cause, LARPing is obnoxious, and I even cringe at past antics we got up to which were thankfully contained in games/sports). But that could also be totally wrong, and my case would be in shambles if it turns out Pretti or Good or some powermods were epic WoW raiders or something, back in their day.
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I think the Twitter poster's point is that these anti-ICE protests are being widely represented in the popular media as spontaneous grassroots affairs, when in fact they are much more organised and coordinated than that. Do spontaneous grassroots protests organically converge on "specialisation of labour", vetting the people attending the protest, purging chat history so there's no digital paper trail? Not in my experience. If his assessment of how these protests are being organised and coordinated is accurate (and you aren't disputing that it is, merely that the fact that they are is worthy of comment), they sound materially different from a great many leftist protest movements, many of which inevitably degenerate into directionless rioting and/or People's Front of Judea/Judean People's Front squabbling.
The Twitter poster's point, whether he is flesh and blood in realspace or bundle of bits in cyperspace, is that the right wing has absolutely nothing comparable. Leftoids organize and fight, rightoids are trusting the plan, polishing their guns and waiting for big boog.
Are there no more armed militias? They were a huge deal for decades. Where did they all go?
Most of the more moderate ones won their local political fights and effectively "went legit" and a bunch of the more radical ones that used to make the news ended up being some variant of this Far Side Cartoon upon inspection.
There are few still out there, but much like Heinlein's anarchists, the serious ones aren't walking the street (or posting on the internet) they are up in the hills and best left alone.
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Filled to the brim with FBI agents and informants. To the point it causes problems in prosecutions since the FBI informants did so much of the alleged illegal actions.
Google has decided not to give me a link showing this despite my efforts, but by memory I recall that the prosecutors asserted that breaking open the door to a federal park building is a serious crime. Which is true. But, the individual who broke the door open in the Oregon Bundy standoff was working for the FBI and not a defendant. They had guns; but an FBI informant gave them the guns. Etc, etc. The defendants all got acquittals. Too many informants per right wing would-be victim of an actual government conspiracy muddies the waters on what the "militia members" are actually responsible for.
Something similar happened in the Gretchen Whitmer FBI kidnapping scheme. Those COINTELPRO victims who went to trial had good success at getting acquitted.
My favorite part of that trial was when, after the FBI denied having a sniper in place, the defense produced internal FBI communications talking about the sniper and suddenly they were all, oh, you mean that sniper! Whoopsie!
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When the right wing attempts to organize, the FBI infiltrates and breaks it up.
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Sounds like you're not actually disputing any of his observations, as much as trying to dismiss their relevance to the conclusion because they individually make sense as tools.
Which is how most professional military, and paramilitary, things turn out to work when broke down into individual components. There are no magical secret ninja techniques to running a military, or an insurgency. At its heart, it's all a combination of individually simple, logical concepts that make sense with just a bid of explanation. It does not require a college degree, not least because they are often constructed to be executed by people without such credentials.
And yet, there remains a wide gulf between professional/competent organizations and those that fumble about. A large part of that comes from not only having the drive to actually make sure everything that needs to be done gets done, but also knowing the scope of things that needs to get done for a specific ends, and how to organize the allocation of tasks of develop those particular means, as opposed to getting drawn into irrelevant rabbit holes. That is where the indication of exceptional understanding, and deliberate intent, comes in.
So when you say things like this-
In response to this-
That the [specialization of labor] is developing a shared database, which entails a host of specialized efforts, and developing specialized reconnaissance efforts for the deliberate purpose of the database, which entails a host of allocation decisions, is far more important than the presence of [specialization of labor]. [Specialization of labor] is a means, not a reason, to develop such a database.
'Just specialization of labor' could be found anywhere, in any protest movement. Not any given protest movement has a reason to develop the means to build vehicle databases of law enforcement agencies. Even fewer have a need to develop such a database for the purpose of establishing real-time tracking networks of law enforcement agencies in the process of their work. Even fewer yet have a legal basis to use said real-time tracking networks for the purpose of targeting law enforcement agencies in the middle of their activities with the intent of disrupting those activities.
And because these reasons, needs, and basis are so rare, all the steps and sub-steps required to do them are not obvious common knowledge. They are not obvious common knowledge for people even when they intend to disrupt ongoing law enforcement agencies. The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan underwent darwinian evolution to such collections of both deliberate targetting and operational security precisely because all the required elements were not inherently obvious to the people who got taken out.
In turn, we know that Americans don't know all these techniques either. You yourself admit to not recognizing the implications of signal chat caps or the call rotations. We have various Americans openly publishing their participation and crowdfunding off of it, which both the funders and fundees would recognize as a terrible idea if they actually cared about the OPSEC. Protestors are consistently inconsistent about whether they need face masks to protect their identity or not. They are not subject to darwinian organizational evolution.
These are not the people who know the various insurgency mechanics to start building into the organizing infrastructure. They do not know the 'sensible' things, or the importance of enforcing it with regularity, or the longer why's behind various guidance. They merely fall into the architecture that was set up for the purpose.
That architecture, in turn, required both specialized knowledge, and intent. No one 'accidentally' develops a government license plate tracking network. That the people who have are coincidentally cribbing from insurgency network practices is, as the tweet says, concerning.
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Regrettable, how the idea of a well-organized militia of private citizens is now so demonized. Civilian self-organization and initiative used to be the big selling points of the American way of life. I guess the US has grown used to dealing with either inept drama queens or actual enemy state actors (or propping up "organic resistance" themselves).
Most of what's being cited as "resupply depots" on twitter look more like the snack table at a fun run 5k or a landscaping cleanup day at a small church. That people on the online right see this as "professional logistics" is deeply blackpilling for me, one of those moments.
Exaggerating the competence / strength of your enemy benefits everyone. It makes your victory more heroic if you win and your defeat more forgivable if you lose, and your enemy won’t get mad at being portrayed as more badass than they actually were either.
This should blackpill you no more that Herodotus blackpills you for claiming that Xerxes’ army numbered a million men, and they drank the rivers dry and their marches caused earthquakes.
No you don’t understand, the snack-table level of organization basically is special forces-tier guerilla tactics compared to what conservatives are working with. Hell, it’s practically black magic cast by wizards. Conservative/right wing organization is a joke. The actual official Republican parties of most states aren’t nearly as organized as this one signal group chat. You’re lucky to have a monthly dinner club that a few people bother to show up to. It’s completely feckless.
And this isn’t a “getting ratfucked by feds” problem. I’m not talking about paramilitaries here. Even the lamest of the lamestream conservatives are completely allergic to any kind of organization. That’s what happens when you spend forty years dismissing organizing as something only communists do. The constant conservative sneering about Barack Obama being a Community Organzier as if that’s some kind of made up job was a telling red flag.
And as for right wing paramilitaries, they don’t exist. I’ve heard people say “well they don’t want to get ratfucked by feds so they keep a low profile”. Bullshit, they just don’t exist. Military veterans have their heads wedged so far up their own asses all they care about is their VA benefits and alcoholism. Further right wing radicals just bitch online. There’s no there there. The only ratfucking by glowies going on is the operation convincing you that these groups exist at all, not infiltrating and breaking them up.
Rugged individualism doesn't lend itself to joining hands in solidarity.
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It's entirely possible and in fact extremely likely he's who he really is and it's still disinformation/grift. There's selection bias here, if 95 of 100 Army SF people are reasonable and epistemically virtuous, 4 in 100 are a bit crazy but don't post on social media, and 1 decides to go all out telling ChatGPT to add color to their uninformed speculation and post it on twitter, you'll only see the 1.
There's a big difference between an unhinged boomer's rant, grifting, and state sponsored disinformation. All three have their danger in different ways, but I definitely misidentified this one initially.
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That guy had an interesting interview on Rumble talking about identifying this as an insurgency. (Starts at 35:30 or so)
Edit: "Your average person on the street doesn't know how to do this. There has to be a cadre teaching them."
Protestors in Australia have been organising into role-based teams for years. These guys, for example: https://disruptlandforces.org/our-commitment/
They had spotters, volunteers to be arrested, financing to get their legal fees paid for, organisers, logistics people who were caching immobile vehicles that were later used to block traffic, "legal observers", medics etc. They rented a nearby location to use as a base and store supplies like water, banners, paint, etc.
Their spotters were going around the facility working out if they could infiltrate it or cause mischief for the attendees. There are rumours they even paid for a stall inside under a false business name and were going to use their lanyards/business credentials to get in and set off fire alarms or flares etc.
So I disagree with the implication that you need shadowy influencers teaching this behaviour. You can have 15 lefties sitting around, playing "war" for a few weekends, who will work most of this out. The Disrupt Land Forces crew had "professional grievance collectors"/"Professional protestors" consulting with them and running training. These guys weren't exactly ex-NKVD assets or anything. Just people who had been going to protests for 20 years and had an idea of how to disrupt police operations for these events.
I agree, I think there are plenty of Leftist "Community Organizers," "Activists" etc. with the know-how to set this up. But I think there's another issue which does require a shadowy influencer, which is that there needs to be some degree of consensus as to who should lead the activities. Because I can assure you that in a movement this large, there are many many people who think they should be running the show and are willing to damage the movement as a whole if it will help them seize the reigns.
My guess is that Soros or someone like him is using his money to choose the leadership. Because if there are one or two organizations with the money to fly people around; bail people out of jail; buy equipment; and so on, it kind of forms a natural Schelling point.
I think that without something like this in place, a movement this large and with this many hysterical unhinged people would have a really hard time accomplishing anything at all.
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Which is not at all the same as "so a bunch of teachers, shop-keepers, and Ordinary Decent Citizens attended a meeting in the school hall about what was going on and decided that they'd work to protest, and they spontaneously pulled out of the air good organisational tactics".
Have you ever tried to get parents to join something like the Parent-Teacher Association? Like pulling teeth. Ordinary people may have some loose kind of "so we all agree, we'll meet here next Tuesday" organising going on, but by next Tuesday half of them won't turn up. The guy keeping the rota for who does the hour's protesting outside the facility goes on holiday. Minnie says she knows she signed up for 3-5 pm on Wednesday but sorry, she has to take her dog to the vet.
For this kind of organised and consistent action, you need somebody (several somebodies) who already know what they're doing and how to identify the people who will consistently turn up and do what they're told. Maybe that is "someone who has been going to protests for 20 years and has an idea of how to disrupt police operations", but what you're missing is that those 20 years are training. Ordinary Bill and Sally who are vaguely outraged and horrified and turn up to the first meeting in the school hall don't know this stuff. They need the 'professional antifa black bloc veteran' to tell them what to do and how to do it and, most importantly, make sure they do turn up to do it.
For example, this post off Tumblr reblogging an article from "New York" magazine speaking of "muscle memory" from the Floyd protests. You don't need foreign spies or specially trained secret agents, just a hard core of committed activists who recruit the normies when the events are favourable to do so:
I guess the NYmag photographer was lucky that a mob didn't descend on her car under the assumption she was an ICE agent. But that's the kind of thing likely to happen sooner or later. But what "officials" were these, going from room to room gridding out neighbourhoods? School officials?
And the danger is in the attitudes on show elsewhere, the same attitudes that got Good (and possibly Pretti) killed; if the disruption is successful and the ICE agents leave without engaging with the protesters, this shows they are cowardly bullies (see bolded part below). If they do engage, they're Nazi stormtroopers. That's what gets you the disconnect in the reports around Good's shooting: she and her partner can turn up for verbal and physical interaction with the Bad Guys, who are not supposed to do anything in return, hence the shock about "real bullets":
I'm not sure we disagree on anything. I am saying that these methods are well understood in far-left protest-attendee circles. And trying to make flaky 20 year olds show up on time is a skill most Target managers have grappled with.
I'm just trying to balance out the WOs implication that this is America's Helmand province, or that insurgents might be arming themselves to the teeth, with an IED campaign just around the corner.
I am critical of these groups, believe me. They say they want peace, but they want war. They are incapable of having the kind of conversations that people on this forum consider critical for humanity. Every value is a disvalue, every truth, a lie. Every type of integrity a vilness of soul.
But at the end of the day they're strongest when taking over institutions, moving words around, and forcing compliance through abstract policy. I just don't see the American left as capable of what the WO is implying. These are small people.
I do and don't agree with you. Doubtless some of the extreme lefties would like it to be so, that now finally even the normies have had enough and are going to rise up, but that's not going to happen. It's not Northern Ireland or the US during the Civil Rights era and the days of the Symbionese Liberation Army. There won't be underground militias and the October Revolution.
On the other hand, the professional agitators do seem to have a field of opportunity in Minneapolis (as to the rest even of Minnesota, I don't know how widespread the activities of ICE are). So if they send in organisers to help out concerned citizens, this gives them the seed of setting up cells for guerrilla warfare. If you can talk even a few outraged and committed protesters into "transport this package in your car to the Whipple building, don't worry, this is for The Cause", then we might see bombing campaigns in Minneapolis.
If the FBI have any ability at all, it shouldn't happen - but it can't be ruled out as impossible. Maybe the likes of our "do some protesting in the morning, visit museums in the afternoon" guy won't go that far, but his wife (by his own admission) is much more involved with her 'clear moral conscience'. Work on her to the point that she'll agree that, for the sake of deported four year olds and diabetic abuelas and those great people she met in the Middle Eastern restaurant who are in danger from the jackbooted fascist thug torturer murderers, she'll just take that one little step further into working for The Cause... and we'll see.
EDIT: I don't mean 'they can get her to agree to bomb people' but make it about 'it's only property damage, nobody will get hurt, we're just going to destroy infrastructure, is property more valuable than lives?' and I can see it happening.
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This kind of tracks. There's a floating body of knowledge that gets spread around left wing direct action organisations and its likely organically evolved over decades. Activists wear different hats depending on the protest of the week and which 'organisation' is best assigned to it. Being nebulous is part of their playbook.
It does make sense that there would be an interest by rival foreign powers to fund and support activist infrastructure in Western countries, but an incentive doesn't necessarily dictate that it is omni-prevalent.
I do think security services should investigate though. If I was the FBI I'd create a task force that includes ex-Green Berets and CIA SAD 'color revolution specialists' and go digging if they haven't already. If its American citizens acting autonomously, then fine, but if there are foreign agitators then pull them out root and stem.
We did in Australia and as I said in another comment, it wasn't so much former Iraqi tortures or NKVD agents. Just 55 year old women and 60 year old men who had been living off their fruitstall money in the NSW hinterlands for 20 years and attending protests as their "job".
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What do you mean, those are the shadowy influencers teaching this behavior!
a) Normal people don't have time to do this shit for 20 years. They are almost certainly sponsored by someone top-down.
b) If they were ex-NKVD, how would you know?
In Europe, normal people, almost all with low-income jobs or on welfare, have time to do this sort of shit every weekend for nine months of the year. They are setting out to commit more violent actions than American protestors, under much greater surveillance, and often dealing with police far more willing to use force than US cops. They aren't limited to one city, but travel around on their own expense committing violence all around the country and across the continent. They have no multi-million(/billion?)-dollar infrastructure behind them as American protestors have, no systematic legal support at all, and the media hates them rather than running cover.
Why do they do this? Because they want to beat up fans of other soccer teams.
The analogy isn't perfect, but what I want to say is that it's really not that hard for someone, even on a low income, to do this sort of thing if it's their main hobby. The full-spectrum infrastructural support from the leftist machine helps a lot, of course, and many of these people are given bullshit jobs by that machine in part so they can agitate, but it's not necessary for motivated people. This also probably goes some way to explaining why, in my experience, so much more of the resources of the leftist machine are dedicated to motivating people to become agitators compared to what's paid out to support actual agitators.
I'll say. Unless something changed since I followed these fine folk, these fights are mutual combat. There's not much to coordinate when both sides just want to pommel each other for shits and giggles.
Soccer hooliganism is very illegal in Europe, actually, and these clubs are well coordinated. There’s a book about it, I can’t remember the name.
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Mutual combat that is very much illegal, with additional penalties over 'standard' mutual combat, and often involves fighting cops! It was far more intense back in the day, but despite that, in the modern setup (where sometimes hooligan groups will even coordinate with each other where they'll meet to fight), there's still a fair amount of organization involved. The coordination involved is in avoiding getting identified/arrested by the cops in the process of doing that mutual combat, or in avoiding that while beating up random people, as also often happens.
Anyway, your point was about the time and expenses involved in being a protestor, and I submit that hooligans have more onerous financial investments required (tickets, beer, trains, flights, beer, hotels, beer), generally on lower incomes, and the time requirement is not terribly dissimilar (the main difference being protesting in the week during work hours, but that burden is spread across a lot of protestors and your typical US protestor probably doesn't need to take time off work - they're retired, or unemployed, or a student, or a bartender, or have shift work).
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Political activists are not, by definition, "normal people". This activity is not extraordinary expensive, the "sponsorship" is coming from their moms (or, for the veterans, some low effort no show jobs).
If they were ex-NKVD, it would mean that comrade Lysenko was right, that glorious Soviet biology really discovered secret of eternal youth. Awesome news!
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There are tens of millions of adults in the United States who are either completely unemployed or work part-time, and are not students.
Not 'normal people', but I've met career protestors working line level paper pushing jobs in the local government. They just take sick days to go and protest. Plenty of retirees out and about on the streets at these things blowing
rapeICE whistles.These aren't organisers though. They're what Yuri Bezmenov would call 'useful idiots' and would be lined up and shot come the revolution.
Edit: Sorry I was meant to be replying to the poster above you. I need some rest.
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The overwhelming majority most of them are that way due to some form of a dysfunction, or at best, because they have dependents to take care of. They're not going to be managing dispatches and databases.
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Lol true. I thought the WO was implying that an e.g. foreign expert in insurgencies was teaching them. Not the 55 year old grievance collector in this case.
The two people who were the defacto leaders have been doing these kinds of protests for decades while living on basically environmentally neutral hippie compounds out in rural australia. They're not normal, they're not "sponsored', they just do this kind of bullshit because they really like to.
We checked and you'd need to take my word.
These groups do think of themselves as insurgents against authorities. But I'm just saying the temperature of the message should be read a lot cooler than "and this is now Fallujah".
They're still comprised mostly of cringe, unemployed, lefties.
Hold on there, just how many Australian state operatives are hanging out over here?
Just one, I believe Dean is a US operative, not Australian. I wouldn’t be shocked if we had one from another country but if so he hasn’t made it obvious.
Didn't Ashlel say he's one (though I suppose it's been a while since he posted here)? And I thought Dean wasn't one from any country.
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It definitely has that chatgpt voice, which is suspicious enough that I have trouble skimming through all of it. To be charitable, maybe he learned to write from chatgpt, or maybe it was proofread/rephrased by the LLM (I have noticed LLMs getting more aggressive at "proofreading" my writing nowadays. It is getting harder to ask for only minor edits.)
I am highly confident that every single token in that output went through chatgpt and there are literally zero words that were typed manually directly into the output.
Not sure how much human stuff went into chatgpt, or how much the output was reviewed.
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...or maybe ChatGPT learned to write from him?
Zero chance a boomer in the army wrote like this before the chatgpt era.
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You know, that tweet actually gives me a lot of hope. Without assuming intent, Trump is currently in a position where he has the power to create clients (instituting broad tariffs, but then making carveouts for just the companies that agree to bend the knee; going after illegal immigrants, but only in the places and workplaces that are politically opposed to him), and the cultural conditions around ICE's formation make it a force intrinsically predisposed to become his personal army (he got them a massive increase in funding, he got them their massive signing bonuses, and they're very aware that maintaining those things requires keeping his opponents out of power.) I'm therefore heartened to see the formation of a unified, counterbalancing force. I thought the blue tribe was too limp-wristed and fractious to ever gather the hard power required to physically (as opposed to memetically) counter the tribe of the 2nd amendment, but I'm glad to be wrong. I would obviously prefer that both sides disarm, but I'm sure that's impossible because-- among other reasons-- people are going to reply to me arguing that Trump is responding to some n-2 step on the escalation ladder and disarmament would necessarily require the blue tribe to not just disband their current militias, but also willingly bring into effect exactly the kind of deportation actions the current militia is trying to prevent.
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