okay that's a total of around twenty-six thousand people under arms. glhf occupying a country of three hundred and fifty million people. - ThreadSky

theophite.bsky.social • 5 days ago

okay that's a total of around twenty-six thousand people under arms. glhf occupying a country of three hundred and fifty million people.

Reposted from Trashmale

Proud Boys/similar groups/Jan 6ers are looking to be the modern SA. Erik Prince seems to be chomping at the bit to be Himmler and start his SS run camps.

Comments

tiredgenerally.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think they know that their best hope is doing a coup and hoping it sticks because they have basically no hope of building a mass movement to hold the country.

tiredgenerally.bsky.social•5 days ago

this isn’t even an ideological thing really, there is no group in america that has a hope at doing this because americans are remarkably non-ideological

martin509.bsky.social•5 days ago

Even Project 2025 - a less extreme vision than what a lot of these people are going for - kind of hinged on straight-up ordering the military to shoot protestors if civil unrest occurred

waterloowellington.bsky.social•5 days ago

They *can't* do a coup is the thing! Trumpism has a real muscle problem. There is no truly significant organization to provide their force. Without the military's active support, the only thing keeping them in place is Trump's legitimacy as president in Greater D.C.

troutgirl.bsky.social•5 days ago

And a substantial percentage of that 26k are not exactly in fighting shape. Unless you're fighting with drones, I guess.

dustyponcho.bsky.social•5 days ago

The diabetes has rotted their fingers, they can't steer a drone.

erichluepke.bsky.social•5 days ago

They couldn't occupy Chicago.

hamiltwan.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think I blocked the guy that kept telling me he'd estimated there were about 10 million secret militia members/proud boys waiting... somewhere. When I asked how he'd gotten that number, he told me I was naive to believe it wasn't probably higher.

venomousgoat.bsky.social•5 days ago

It's like 40K authors trying to describe troop numbers

hamiltwan.bsky.social•5 days ago

It's a battalion Micheal, how many people could it be, 100,000?

hamiltwan.bsky.social•5 days ago

Innumeracy is very clearly a problem.

tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social•5 days ago

Feel like they were accidentally estimating "number of committed racists who'd really like to express that violently at least once", which is a rather different thing than "organized militia member"

hamiltwan.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think that's probably a more accurate way to get the number, but I wish I'd screenshotted, because the guy very clearly thought there were some kind of secret weekend getaways with millions of right wing militia dudes training and complementing each other's Oakleys and tacti-hats.

danjac.bsky.social•5 days ago

You can do it if you also have a network of spies and informants.

danjac.bsky.social•5 days ago

Sure you need the storm troopers for crowd control and big roundups and deportations but you don't use them for the day to day mass control of the population.

alwaysberunning.bsky.social•5 days ago

Paramilitary gangs in Weimar Germany largely consisted of veteran killers just returned from the worst war in human history, a category that encompassed almost every man between 25 and 40. Nobody in the US remotely compares.

curiousaboutupdog.bsky.social•5 days ago

The people I've known who've done multiple tours of duty and seen combat were also showing up to BLM protests in 2020 and keeping their friends safe so uhhhh gfl with that fascists

richardcblair.bsky.social•5 days ago

Doesn’t exactly seem like Julius Caesar’s conquering army coming back from Gaul, and we are not the Roman Republic.

hydroxideblue.bsky.social•5 days ago

Probably the best theme of Andor was "they don't have enough guards"

tredain.bsky.social•5 days ago

.003%'ers more like.

(Yes I know it's ~.006, roll with it people)

maxp94.bsky.social•5 days ago

The question is, will there by anything left to salvage by the time an appreciable percentage of the population is willing to run into truncheons and bullets?

waterloowellington.bsky.social•5 days ago

Americans have very little taste for political violence! And yes, that absolutely includes MAGA, though they have a large component chickenhawks. Yes, some people are violent and are in militias, but it is a pitiful # on a macroscale.

proptermalone.bsky.social•5 days ago

you either get cops everywhere on board with the project or you don’t have the bodies. and cops are not I think on board for this, it’s a real different job than the one they signed up for

starshine.bsky.social•5 days ago

cops also lack the capacity. cops can do a lot of crowd/riot but them escalating violence only brings out more people. youd need thousands of kent states before that stopped being true, and cops were already near their capacity in 2020. this would presumably be larger

starshine.bsky.social•5 days ago

crowd/riot control**

tomek-here.bsky.social•5 days ago

Also the cops and their families are likely to be impacted by these cuts. Can the administration *at least* make up to them so that the income lost by their parents/spouses? And how much would it have to pay them to beat up their neighbors?
How does that happen wrt/ decentralized nature of it?

rossindetroit.bsky.social•5 days ago

We’re far from the kind of civil unrest that would motivate a typical cop to get out from behind the wheel of his cruiser and exert. So far.

thoreauaway.bsky.social•5 days ago

Very glad that my closest major city is Boston, a rare metropolitan example of American police actually being under civilian control

pfish.zone•5 days ago

not perfect, but certainly better than a lot of places

qed2.bsky.social•5 days ago

still, we should be laying groundwork now, so that when the order comes down there's a decision tree we've planted where all paths lead in the right direction

nhashem.bsky.social•5 days ago

The modal police officer voted for Trump because they're annoyed "Hollywood is too woke" and they stopped making as many cool cop shows on TV (which is the reason he became a cop). He did not think his vote for Trump meant volunteering as tribute to join a MAGA death squad.

maxp94.bsky.social•5 days ago

Local PDs are so infested with Neo-Nazis and militias that the FBI was refusing to work with them on cases that concerned either of those two groups

lowrhoufo.bsky.social•5 days ago

The dumbest thing is that I think you're both right

nhashem.bsky.social•4 days ago

I think we're both right too, I used the word "modal" for a reason! There are 100,000 uniformed police officers in the country, the statistical mode of them voted for Trump but aren't going to volunteer for death squads. They're not even volunteering to cooperate with ICE deportations right now.

sentientpotato.bsky.social•5 days ago

Exactly so

You cannot correctly understand the situation without realizing that *both* of those statements are exactly 100% accurate

jmelville.science•5 days ago

if Christopher Browning's book abt the role of reserve police battalions in the Holocaust taught me anything, it's that ~70% of "ordinary" cops would halfheartedly watch and wince while ~10% of mouth-frothing sadists eagerly commit industrial genocide

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/ordinary-men-christopher-r-browning

jmelville.science•5 days ago

optimistically ~20% are conscientious objectors who would actively shirk their duties or feign illness. they might look the other way while some prisoners escape but they would not actively attempt to stop the murder

turtlebee.bsky.social•5 days ago

you also have to get the city and state governments of all the liberal cities and states. they are not going to accept cops going off and being shock troops for trump, and they do have the power to stop that.

turtlebee.bsky.social•5 days ago

like to people think California and Illinois are just going to like "yeah cool, do your thing"? Hell when it was just Portland and the weakest fucking mayor ever the feds struggled to maintain presence of a few downtown blocks during covid WFH times which made them practically deserted.

maxp94.bsky.social•5 days ago

Since when do these cities have that kind of power over their PDs?

selectstarman.bsky.social•5 days ago

Are city governments actually in control of their police forces?

cyneheard.bsky.social•5 days ago

Perfect control? Not always, but cops would have to occupy basically every local government building at that point, they don't have the manpower to do that in the face of massive unrest.

coasterspaul.bsky.social•5 days ago

cops often being lazy and prioritizing their own safety could end up being a saving grace here!

peark.es•5 days ago

Also: local control over salaries.

paco-button.bsky.social•5 days ago

Even the worst cops & soldiers have a tiny, complicated notion that they are actually the good guys. I'm not sure how many will be able to blindly shoot Americans in their hometowns, regardless of the maga nonsense they post on Facebook.

snufkinlib.bsky.social•5 days ago

Why would modern fascism have armed militias, which were a universal feature of 20s-30s politics

ijspurcell.bsky.social•5 days ago

The only places where cops are on board with this, they don't need the cops on board with this.

kyleiphd.bsky.social•5 days ago

Also want to note the Brownshirts were already violently enforcing the will of the party *before* they elected Hitler. It's quite another thing I think to spring a violent militia enforcement campaign on the country *after* the election, as popularity only continues to worsen. J6'rs - not beloved.

giziti.bsky.social•5 days ago

having their motto be that they've got to get home safe every night is at odds with being an actual fighting force.

giziti.bsky.social•5 days ago

A soldier won't fire on protestors for sport but will go in at Uvalde.

giziti.bsky.social•5 days ago

there are unfortunate exceptions

piggenres.bsky.social•5 days ago

Yeah there are a lot of bad cops, and the career itself makes even good people capricious. But for the most part they just want to protect themselves first and foremost. Signing up to be an army is not the kind of head banging they want to do

fourdeltavictor.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think I saw a stat that there are more trans service members in the US military than total militia groups in the US. Good luck w that one chief.

immaculatepizza.bsky.social•5 days ago

FAFO indeed

shadow27.bsky.social•5 days ago

According to the news, there won't be any Trans service members in the US military soon. Trump is kicking them all out.

cyanescens.bsky.social•5 days ago

We gladly welcome all of these trans soldiers—and all their military training—into the Free American Army.

Your skills are going to be needed soon by people who accept you & want you to live in safety and freedom

kass.cloverdalelane.com•5 days ago

The lowest estimate, 1500, of serving trans people it's more than ten times the number of militias, 52 active militias according to SPLC.

The upper estimates of trans people in the military seems to be ~15,000. I'd bet there are more or about the same amount of trans soldiers to militia members.

tektology-enjoyer.bsky.social•5 days ago

I think the Double Bind that they're caught in is that they can't quite replace the proper military with Drones + Mercs + Fascist paramilitaries yet, but Trump is probably their only shot at getting into office (these scum are profoundly unpopular), so they have to risk jumping the gun.

waterloowellington.bsky.social•5 days ago

"can't quite replace". They are not even in the vague ballpark of enough manpower! In per-capita terms, Mussolini had 80X as many blackshirts and Hitler had 250X as many stormtroopers when they seized power.

waterloowellington.bsky.social•5 days ago

They are utterly unable to do hard authoritarianism. What might work if they were more sensible is *soft* authoritarianism like Hungary or Turkey. And that doesn't require largescale use of force.

trashmale.bsky.social•4 days ago

You're right, there aren't a lot of them.

I'm happy to see so many commenters ready to fight back. I think a lot of people that aren't traditionally activists would be willing to stand up to a Nazi on their block.

But if those groups are empowered by law to commit violence, I'm less sure.

1/3

trashmale.bsky.social•4 days ago

I keep thinking about Holocaust survivors.

How many times they thought "this is the moment people see through the lies". How many thought they could keep their heads low & ride it out.

For too many, it wasn't until they got off the trains they realized it was all too real & all too late.

2/3

trashmale.bsky.social•4 days ago

I want to believe we're going to stop it before it gets "too bad".

But it's getting hard to not feel like we're watching that moment go by.

I desperately hope I'm wrong.

3/3

trashmale.bsky.social•4 days ago

I'M JUST A BIG FELLA HAVING BIG FEELINGS RIGHT NOW, OKAY?

mdwallach.bsky.social•5 days ago

Always wise to do a undermanned oppressive system while creating programs that will walk you through making an IED.

dustyponcho.bsky.social•5 days ago

It's not like it's hard, you can buy gunpowder off the shelf.

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