cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/31339435
By Orlando Mayorquín and Jesus Jiménez
Reporting from Los Angeles
Published June 6, 2025 Updated June 7, 2025, 11:10 a.m. ET"The raid at the clothing wholesaler began about 9:15 a.m. in the Fashion District, less than two miles from Los Angeles City Hall.
It was an extraordinary show of force. Dozens of federal agents wearing helmets and green camouflage arrived in two hulking armored trucks and other unmarked vehicles, and were soon approached by a crowd of immigrant activists and supporters. Some agents carried riot shields and others held rifles, as well as shotguns that appeared to be loaded with less-than-lethal ammunition."
I’m curious what you see as the winning strategy here. Truly. You can pm me it if you want.
First and foremost, we need more numbers. Our largest peaceful protest was only 1.5% of our population at 5M people. Violent or non-violent, we will change nothing with those numbers.
The largest demographic in those protests were boomers, older people that would not be capable of, nor interested in, fighting. We use publicly available websites, shared on every social media platform, and that the most commitment we’ve seen so far. Violent revolution would require secured communication channels, losing additional numbers in the process.
People calling for violence truly don’t understand how few would show up. They’d quickly be hunted and incarcerated with such small numbers. The threats of violence would the keep most people in their houses, afraid to protest for fear of their safety, effectively suppressing peaceful resistance.
Calling for violence before we have the commitment is exactly how Hitler chipped away at wave after wave, and is precisely Trump’s plan. He first dispatched ICE to downtown LA, not skid row where they’d be more likely to find criminal immigrants. They raided a corporate business and several public schools first to gain the attention of the media, then against the governor’s wishes, dispatched the National Guard. We cannot be dumb enough to walk into an obvious trap set by the dumbest president in the history of our nation.
I’m just now getting back to respond to notifications on here. Do you think the june 14th no-kings protest was enough?
Also, what do we do once we have lots of people? Controlling optics to accumulate confidence and focused, actionable outrage into positivity is good. But what then? Because I’m worried about what team Trump is working on, now that his pp is more shriveled from his metaphorical birthday spanking.
It was over 3.5%. Now we need to maintain it. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world
Tldr: against a fascist, much, much more lawbreaking and potentially rebellion has to take place, not just protesting.
Idealizing the solution as simply protesting nonviolently is…naive. It’s a good start, but by absolutely no means the end goal.
It seems that BBC article doesn’t quite do more than correlation over history, and doesn’t touch so much on what it seems to largely point to, which is “civil disobedience”.
I felt compelled to define that term, so I looked into it, and the underlying theories and differing philosophies that seem to contrast each other.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_disobedience
Civil, specifically nonviolent, Disobedience seems to be pointed at regulation and policy, rather than a fascist coup on the government. Read the Wikipedia article’s section on Theory. It’s complicated and seems to be excerpts of various authors and philosophers trying to define and correlate how to correctly apply morality over law to the goal of successful change.
Howard Zinn, notably does not condemn means of violence: rejects any “easy and righteous dismissal of violence”.
It’s not a map of political change, by any means, but I think blind adherence and blind condemnation without strategy is going to backfire in the long-run if it fails, which, even when nonviolence civil disobedience is applied to simple policy change (which this is not, it is violence from the bourgeoisie who have claimed all of the top political power positions in government) only has about a 50% success rate in history; if this movement fails and people place all their hopes on legal (civil disobedience is very clearly, overwhelmingly illegal, it’s in the name) and nonviolent protesting in large numbers, their spirits may be crushed.
I saw questionable picketing signs on Saturday, and the corrective level of commitment to what I believe to be bordering on revolution, is… There will be many who are awake and willing to do what is actually right, but there are also many who remain asleep with weak constitutions and who will face a terrifying and harsh reality.
I wish this weren’t the case, and I do believe protesting in massive numbers is the correct start for most people. But, escalation is almost all but ensured, and we must not naively be unprepared.