David Huerta Released, Battle For USA Not Under Military Occupation Goes On
Somebody wake up the Democrats, this is a big deal.
Day Five and the federal invasion of Los Angeles is intensifying! The crowds of protestors are dwindling, but the US military has only just begun its attempted invasion and occupation of the city.
Yesterday Pete Hegseth announced he planned to bring in 700 MARINES to invade and then do who-knows-what, as all they can (legally) do is guard federal personnel and property. Stand around and desensitize everybody to military occupation, we guess, until somebody gets shot like at Kent State, because the Marines are trained to do battle and kill people in a war, not occupy American cities.
There are also 2,000 members of the National Guard coming in, oh wait, now Trump says 4,000, arriving over the objections of the governor, mayor, and LAPD. And Hegseth (HIC) made no apparent plans to feed or house his newly commandeered troops, forcing them to sleep on concrete floors. And now protests are popping up all over the country! Is Dear Leader now going to send in the military to invade anywhere and everywhere there are protestors in his own fucking country? You bet he will if he can!
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and scholar on fascist and authoritarian movements:
You create a sense of existential fear that social anarchy is spreading, that criminal gangs are taking over. This is the language of authoritarianism all over the world.
What is the only recourse to violent mobs and agitators? Using all the force of the state. Thus we have the vision of the national guard, armed to the teeth. It’s like a war zone. That’s on purpose, it’s habituating Americans to see those armed forces as being in combat on the streets of American cities.
Yes, those criminal terrorist gangs of day laborers at the Home Depot and workers at a doughnut shop. Of all the Reichstag fires, this is the most pathetically flimsy pretext for takeover ever.
One positive-ish development: Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and United Service Workers West (USWW) California president David Huerta was released from custody yesterday, on a ridiculous $50k bond. Huerta was violently arrested in front of the Ambiance Apparel garment warehouse in downtown LA on Friday, and charged with FELONY Conspiracy to Impede an Officer, which comes with a maximum penalty of up to six years in federal prison (unless you’re a Trump supporter on January 6, of course).
Law enforcement, it is both dick-swinging powerful but also threatened to death by a 58-year-old man who is using his First Amendment right to stand on a public sidewalk and say words. He is the one they start shoving at the 11-second mark below, then they throw him to the ground, injuring him to the point he was briefly hospitalized. Throwing people onto concrete like that is fucking dangerous and could have killed him, and if anybody else did that, they’d probably be charged with attempted murder:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Notice how the goon squad is perfectly capable of simply moving the other people out of the way, but made a point of targeting him violently in particular.
Huerta put out a statement after he was released from the hospital:
“What happened to me is not about me; this is about something much bigger. This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice. And we all have to stand on the right side of justice.”
This bullshit energized union leaders all over the country, and they’re now organizing and participating in rallies all over the country: New York, Washington DC, Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Denver, Harrisburg, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, Oregon, Raleigh-Durham, Sacramento, San Francisco, Seattle, and St Paul, Minnesota.
And Huerta’s arrest energized the Democrats. Kinda. They wrote a letter DEMANDING ANSWERS, anyway. And Adam Schiff showed up for Huerta’s bail hearing.
“It looks like the Justice Department wants to try and make an example out of him," Sen. Adam Schiff told reporters, before attending Huerta’s court hearing Monday in Los Angeles. “But this is part of the Trump playbook. They selectively use the Justice Department to go after their adversaries. It’s what they do,” he said, which is what you’d say after your cat leaves you a dead mouse on the bathroom floor.
And afterwards he said that Trump should get back to THE GROCERIES and his dumb tariffs, instead of inflaming LA.
Is it wrong to want some stronger language here, at what feels like a hair-on-fire moment?
Senator Alex Padilla gets it.
That’s right, the next stop after Los Angeles is YOUR TOWN, America!
And Jasmine Crockett.
Hakeem Jeffries brought some more heat in a statement:
“This is the United States of America and we will not be intimidated by a wannabe dictator in the executive branch. House Democrats will stand with David Huerta for as long as it takes until the charges are dropped, and the rogue federal actions that have been unleashed will be completely investigated and exposed.”
Huerta himself gave a statement after his release; he is most concerned about all of the people still in the jail, who are not being allowed to see lawyers.
“I just want to say that when we're here, there's protests outside, that means in there they're in lockdown right now. They're in lockdown, they cannot come out of their cells not even to eat. [...] There's also the risk they also cannot see their lawyers, and to a certain extent they cannot also do court hearings that are so important, because had I not had my court hearing today I not would be standing here today. Justice, will, we will have our time for justice, but we must do it in a way that we demonstrate the power of working people across this country and stand united. And I just want to tell my members of USWW that I hope — I don't know if the right word is forgiveness — that it was not my intention to get arrested, and I hope that I have not put them in harm’s way.”
Detained people inside not being able to see lawyers because there are protests outside? Ridiculous load of crap if true. The building is not under siege, and even if it were, there is Zoom, which we all used for two years during the Trump Plague just fine.
The charging documents for Huerta are out now, and whoops, in the DOJ’s haste, they did not redact the name of the DHS supervisory agent of Trump’s secret police. His name is Ryan Ribner, and he once got an award from Eric Holder for his very good cyber-crime investigating. But now the administration isn’t interested in investigating that kind of thing any more, so all of his identity-theft security expertise is apparently being used for this now.
The charging documents heave with drama trying VERY HARD to make it sound like Huerta DID CRIMES, even though they list no actual crimes. Huerta is accused of talking and texting on his phone, which Ribner suspects was to coordinate protests (LEGAL), yelling in English and Spanish (LEGAL), being nine miles away from his place of employment (LEGAL), reaching through the gate (maybe misdemeanor trespassing), telling protestors that they were allowed to be on a public sidewalk (LEGAL), being on a public sidewalk himself (LEGAL), and telling ICE officers to take off their fucking masks. And telling them, “What are you going to do? You can't arrest all of us.” Also legal, and true, and pissed them the fuck off.
The regime is hotpants to escalate conflict into full-blown civil war, because in the immortal words of Commander Adama of Battlestar Galactica: “There's a reason you separate the military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people."
This regime has, of course, always seen the people as their enemy. Watch dog-shooting Kristi Noem’s Mar-a-Lago face say that the people of Los Angeles are CRIMINALS.
Reminder, immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born people, areas with more immigrants have less crime, and overstaying a visa or being undocumented in the country is a civil infraction, not a crime.
The only invading force here is the federal government, and the only people doing violence are police, who have been setting off explosions, teargassing people and shooting at them with non-lethal bullets, hitting at least three journalists (and in one case very obviously deliberately, and in the head, which they are not supposed to be aiming for).
And who is committing all the property damage? We do not know, but this guy looks like it is not his first time breaking car windows, and the guy busting windows with a very strong skateboard sure looks to be in three-percenter type garb, and inciting violence is the entire right-wing paramilitary group raison d'être. Remember the Minneapolis umbrella man who was a white supremacist? If the property-damagers all turned out to be white supremacists itching for violent civil war it would be the most predictable thing ever.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Because this is going to be their playbook for asserting federal control everywhere, and if they can get away with it in California, the sky’s the limit. The regime is all about boundary-testing, like a toddler or abusive lover.
What next for California, this takeover and descent into fascism intensifying by the day? We can only wait and see. And speak out, and protest.
[LA Times / Democracy Now ]
"... Stand around and desensitize everybody to military occupation, we guess, until somebody gets shot like at Kent State ..."
That massacre rang like a bell throughout America. We were in 5th grade, and we staged a sit-in during recess, refusing to return to class. In a circle, interlocking arms, chanting "Hell no, we won't go!" Not quite original, but come on, 5th graders, dude. And then Richard Massey, the anarchist that he was, sabotaged one of the grounds sprinklers, so it blasted water into the air.
The parents and teachers then realized that the fucking Nam then got real, not from all the college-age kids protesting, but when the 5th grader boys rose up. The rigged sprinkler was simply icing on the cake.
Protester told the soldiers -
"You took an oath to the Constitution
... not to the fascists in the White House"
https://youtube.com/shorts/8STFRSygtOA?si=qglgjaLCi8zOxyeC