Trump has said he wants to use active duty U.S. troops to quell protests and round up immigrants. Will the military comply?
By Michael Hirsh / POLITICO Reader Supported News / January 13, 2025
The last time an American president deployed the U.S. military domestically under the Insurrection Act — during the deadly Los Angeles riots in 1992 — Douglas Ollivant was there. Ollivant, then a young Army first lieutenant, says things went fairly smoothly because it was somebody else — the cops — doing the head-cracking to restore order, not his 7th Infantry Division. He and his troops didn’t have to detain or shoot at anyone.
“There was real sensitivity about keeping federal troops away from the front lines,” said Ollivant, who was ordered in by President George H.W. Bush as rioters in central-south LA set fire to buildings, assaulted police and bystanders, pelted cars with rocks and smashed store windows in the aftermath of the videotaped police beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist. “They tried to keep us in support roles, backing up the police.”
By the end of six days of rioting, 63 people were dead and 2,383 injured — though reportedly none at the hands of the military.
But some in the U.S. military fear next time could be different. According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
On Nov. 18, two weeks after the election, Trump confirmed he plans to declare a national emergency and use the military for the mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
One fear is that domestic deployment of active-duty troops could lead to bloodshed given that the regular military is mainly trained to shoot at and kill foreign enemies. The only way to prevent that is establishing clear “rules of engagement” for domestic deployments that outline how much force troops can use — especially considering constitutional restraints protecting U.S. citizens and residents — against what kinds of people in what kinds of situations. And establishing those new rules would require a lot more training, in the view of many in the military community.
“Everything I hear is that our training is in the shitter,” says retired Army Lt. Gen. Marvin Covault, who commanded the 7th Infantry Division in 1992 in what was called “Joint Task Force LA.” “I’m not sure we have the kind of discipline now, and at every leader level, that we had 32 years ago. That concerns me about the people you’re going to put on the ground.”
In an interview, Covault said he was careful to avoid lethal force in Los Angeles by emphasizing to his soldiers they were now “deployed in the civilian world.” He ordered gun chambers to remain empty except in self-defense, banned all automatic weapons and required bayonets to remain on soldiers’ belts.
But Covault added that he set those rules at his own discretion. Even then Covault said he faced some recalcitrance, especially from U.S. Marine battalions under his command that sought to keep M16 machine guns on their armored personnel carriers. In one reported case a Marine unit, asked by L.A. police for “cover,” misunderstood the police term for “standing by” and fired some 200 rounds at a house occupied by a family. Fortunately, no one was injured.
“If we get fast and loose with rules of engagement or if we get into operations without a stated mission and intent, we’re going to be headline news, and it’s not going to be good,” Covault said in the interview.
Trump has repeatedly said he might use the military to suppress a domestic protest, or to raid a sanctuary city to purge it of undocumented immigrants, or possibly defend the Southern border. Some in the military community say they are especially disturbed by the prospect that troops might be used to serve Trump’s political ends. In 1992, Covault said, he had no direct orders from Bush other than to deploy to restore peace. On his own volition, he said, he announced upon landing in LA at a news conference: “This is not martial law. The reason we’re here is to create a safe and secure environment so you can go back to normal.” Covault said he believes the statement had a calming effect.
But 28 years later, when the police killing of another Black American, George Floyd, sparked sporadically violent protests nationwide, then-President Trump openly considered using firepower on the demonstrators, according to his former defense secretary, Mark Esper. Trump asked, “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?” Esper wrote in his 2022 memoir, A Sacred Trust. At another point Trump urged his Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Mark Milley, to “beat the fuck out” out of the protesters and “crack skulls,” and he tweeted that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Esper wrote that he had “to walk Trump back” from such ideas and the president didn’t pursue them.
Some involved in the current debate say they are worried Trump would not be as restrained this time. He is filling his Pentagon and national security team with fierce loyalists. The concern is not just in how much force might be used, but also whether troops would be regularly deployed to advance the new administration’s political interests.
This topic is extremely sensitive inside the active-duty military, and a Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment. But several of the retired military officials I interviewed said that they were gingerly talking about it with their friends and colleagues still in active service.
And Mark Zaid, a Washington lawyer who has long represented military and intelligence officers who run afoul of their chain of command, told me: “A lot of people are reaching out to me proactively to express concern about what they foresee coming, including Defense Department civilians and active-duty military.” Among them, Zaid said, are people “who are either planning on leaving the government or will be waiting to see if there is a line that is crossed by the incoming administration.”
After the D.C. National Guard was ordered to clear demonstrators from Lafayette Square across from the White House in 2020 using tear gas, rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades, a group of lawyers founded “The Orders Project” aimed at connecting up lawyers and troops looking for legal advice.
One of the founders, Eugene Fidell of Yale Law School, said that the group disbanded after the first Trump administration but is now being resurrected.
“With the return of President Trump, we’re ready to help people in need,” Fidell said.
The Lafayette Square incident remains a topic of some debate inside the military community. One DC guardsman, Major Adam DeMarco, an Iraq war veteran, later said in written testimony to Congress that he was “deeply disturbed” by the “excessive use of force.” “Having served in a combat zone, and understanding how to assess threat environments, at no time did I feel threatened by the protesters or assess them to be violent,” he wrote. “I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. Anthony Pfaff, a retired colonel who is now a military ethics scholar at the U.S. Army War College, said this confusion reveals a serious training deficiency: Domestic crowd control and policing “is not something for which we have any doctrine or other standard operating procedures. Without those, thresholds for force could be determined by individual commanders, leading to even more confusion.”
For active military, most of the current debate is happening behind closed doors. As a result, some retired military as well as scholars and lawyers are trying to bring the issue into public view.
“It’s legally and ethically dicey to have open conversations about this,” says Graham Parsons, a philosophy professor at West Point who urged military officers and troops to consider resisting “politicized” orders in a New York Times op-ed in September. One concern is whether the military could tarnish itself with an incident like Kent State, when four college students were shot to death by jittery and poorly trained Ohio National Guardsmen in 1970.
“Soldiers are trained predominately to fight, kill and win wars,” says Brian VanDeMark, a Naval Academy historian and author of the 2024 book Kent State: An American Tragedy. “Local police and state police are far better trained to deal with the psychology of crowds, which can become inherently unpredictable, impulsive and irrational. If you’re not well trained to cope, your reaction might be inadequate and turn to force.” He adds that at the Naval Academy as well as West Point, “my impression is this is an issue that is being thought about and worried about a lot but it’s not openly discussed.”
Some lawyers and experts in military law say a great deal of confusion persists — even among serving officers — over how the military should behave, especially if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act and calls up troops to crush domestic protests or round up millions of undocumented immigrants. In most cases, there is little that officers and enlisted personnel can do but obey such presidential orders, even if they oppose them ethically, or face dismissal or court-martial.
But as Covault puts it bluntly: “You don’t always follow dumb orders.”
Under long-standing military codes, troops are obliged to disobey only obviously illegal orders — for example, an order to conduct a wholesale slaughter of civilians as happened in the village of My Lai during the Vietnam War. But under the more than 200-year-old Insurrection Act, Trump would have extraordinarily wide latitude to decide what’s “legal,” lawyers say.
“The basic reality is that the Insurrection Act gives the president dangerously broad discretion to use the military as a domestic police force,” says Joseph Nunn, an expert at the Brennan Center for Justice. “It’s an extraordinarily broad law that has no meaningful criteria in it for determining when it’s appropriate for the president to deploy the military domestically.” Nothing in the text of the Insurrection Act says the president must cite insurrection, rebellion, or domestic violence to justify deployment; the language is so vague that Trump could potentially claim only that he perceives a “conspiracy.”
The Insurrection Act, a blend of different statutes enacted by Congress between 1792 and 1871, is the primary exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, under which federal military forces are generally barred from participating in civilian law enforcement activities.
Most Americans may not realize how often presidents have invoked the Insurrection Act — often, in the view of historians, to the benefit of the nation. While it’s been 32 years since Bush used it to help quell the Los Angeles riots, the Insurrection Act was also invoked by President Dwight Eisenhower following the Supreme Court’s 1954 Board v. Board of Education decision, when Ike deployed the 101st Airborne Division (with fixed bayonets on their rifles) to help desegregate the South. George Washington and John Adams used the Insurrection Act in response to early rebellions against federal authority, Abraham Lincoln invoked it at the start of the Civil War, and President Ulysses Grant used it to stop the Ku Klux Klan in the 1870s.
But when it comes to the next Trump administration, the real question for most military lawyers and personnel will likely be less purely legalistic and more ethical: Even if Trump decides something is legal and the courts back him up, are troops still bound to do as he says under the Constitution?
One lawyer, John Dehn of Loyola University — a former Army career officer and West Point graduate — calls this the “Milley problem,” referring to the well-documented angst of the former Joint Chiefs chair during Trump’s first presidency. Milley stirred controversy by publicly apologizing after Trump used him in a staged photo of the Lafayette Square incident. During the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, he reportedly assured then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he would “prevent” any unwarranted use of the military, and he has acknowledged calling his Chinese counterparts to assure them that no nuclear weapons would be launched before Trump left office.
Milley, who has called Trump “fascist to the core,” later told Bob Woodward for the 2024 book War that he feared being recalled to active duty to face a court-martial “for disloyalty.” At one point Trump himself suggested Milley could have been executed for treason.
In a newly published law review essay, Dehn argues that while Milley might have breached his constitutional duties, the Constitution “is not a suicide pact,” and Milley served a higher purpose by protecting the nation. He quotes Thomas Jefferson as writing “strict observance of the written laws is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen: but it is not the highest. [T]he laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation.”
Similarly, some within the military community are urging troops to “lawyer up” and prepare to resist what they consider unethical orders, saying resistance can be justified if the soldier thinks it would jeopardize the soldier’s own conception of military “neutrality.”
“By refusing to follow orders about military deployment to U.S. cities for political ends, members of the armed forces could actually be respecting, rather than undermining, the principle of civilian control,” wrote Marcus Hedahl, a philosophy professor at United States Naval Academy, and Bradley Jay Strawser, a scholar at the Naval Postgraduate School, in a blog post on Oct. 25.
Others within the military community disagree, sometimes vehemently. Such thinking is seriously misguided and could lead to widespread legal problems for military personnel, says retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Charles Dunlap, a former deputy judge advocate general now at Duke Law School. “I am concerned because I do think there’s been some mistaken information that’s out there. The fact is, if an order is legal then members of the armed forces have to obey it even if they find it morally reprehensible.”
In a Washington Post op-ed published after the election, another retired general, former Joint Chiefs Chair Martin Dempsey, agreed, saying it was “reckless” to suggest that “it is the duty of the brass to resist some initiatives and follow the ‘good’ orders but not the ‘bad’ orders that a president might issue.”
Dunlap cites the military’s standard Manual for Courts-Martial, which states clearly that “the dictates of a person’s conscience, religion, or personal philosophy cannot justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.” Dunlap and other lawyers also note that Supreme Court precedent backs that up; in 1974 the Supreme Court ruled: “An army is not a deliberative body. It is the executive arm. Its law is that of obedience.”
Inside the military this conundrum is known as “lawful but awful”: Active-duty troops have no choice, especially if the order comes from the commander-in-chief. “No one should be encouraging members of the military to disobey a lawful order even if it’s awful,” says Nunn. “And it’s crucial that is as it should be. We do not want to live in a world where the military picks and chooses what order to obey based on their own consciences. We don’t want to ask a 20-year-old lieutenant to interpret an order from the president.”
Indeed, that could set another dangerous precedent, some military lawyers say, by undermining the principle of civilian control that the Founders said was fundamental to the U.S. republic. “You don’t have to look far for examples of countries where the military is picking and choosing which orders to follow,” says Nunn.
Most legal experts agree that troops must obey all nominally legal orders. But military lawyers say it’s important for troops to remember that even if called into action they must obey peoples’ constitutional rights — including the right to assemble and to be protected from unlawful arrest and seizure or unreasonable force.
“You have to follow the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth amendments. They don’t get waived,” said Dehn. When it comes to the Fourth Amendment, for example, which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, “the requirement of reasonableness applies” to the military just as it does to police, said Dehn. So do protections for due process and other rights of the accused enshrined in the Fifth and Sixth Amendments.
“Due process still applies,” Nunn agreed. “Military personnel deployed under the [Insurrection Act] can’t do what law enforcement can’t do. They can’t shoot peaceful protesters.”
Yale’s Fidell says any successful legal challenges to Trump’s orders will likely be more “retail than wholesale.” By this he means that even if the president can broadly justify the Insurrection Act legally, “you might able to show a particular order is unlawful, for example if you’re ordered to use your helicopter to create a downdraft to disperse rioters — remember that happened at Lafayette Square — or shoot at students.”
In the end much will depend on what Trump’s senior legal advisers tell him and what courts decide, lawyers say. But for the first time in memory, “we have to consider the possibility we could have a commander-in-chief who is willing to order the military to do something that is pretty threatening to the constitutional order,” says Parsons, the West Point scholar.
“Even if we get the law straight, what’s the right thing to do?” adds Parsons. “If the president invokes the Insurrection Act we don’t really know what the ethical boundaries are. Among the military lawyers this is just uncharted territory.”
Says one lawyer who has studied many cases of military-civilian conflict and spoke on condition of anonymity because he fears retribution from the new Trump administration: “I think things are going to be bad, really bad. This is going to be worse than last time. Trump is angry. He desperately wants to turn on his TV and see guys in uniform on the streets.”
But Dunlap, for one, hopes that “cooler heads will prevail”: “I’m cautiously optimistic that people are going to realize that not all the campaign rhetoric is going to be translatable into action.”
This will just escalate. When this man’s policies escalate and the economy goes into an initial inflationary recession, the reaction will be QE to right the ship. But if nobody is there to buy the QE, then you’re looking at deflation instead and a repeat of a century ago.
It’s definitely going to be bad, but probably worse than we can imagine. Wait until food stamps/SNAP benefits disappear and people, and their kids, literally start starving in the streets…they will, you know? And like the 1890s, the wealthy will step over a dying child like a lump of dog poop. THIS is who they are, who are leaders are.
I’m assuming you are talking about the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s. My granny said they were so lucky to be on a family farm that had no mortgage where they could grow enough to feed themselves. Though they often didn’t have the money for extras (like new shoes), at least they weren’t starving in the cities like so many others were.
This popped up today. Truly a weaponized government, and the technology can easily do this. The Kakistocracy
‘REVOLUTION IS COMING’: CNN Guest Delivers DIRE WARNING | The Kyle Kulinski Show
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paKKuKNgx4o
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A warning from Italy about their version of Trump:
American Kakistocracy
Beppe Severgnini / The Atlantic
https://www.rsn.org/001/american-kakistocracy.html
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sealintheSelkirks
Trump’s Executive Orders are So Dangerous Even the GOP Compared Them To War Crimes!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYJcJAnbQTU
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Thom Hartmann reads from Politico:
Trump Will Cut These 34 Lifesaving Government Services Next Week!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PdW7YcEFow
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From Hartmann’s new book:
End Voter Caging
In the lead-up to the 2018 midterms, the Economist ran an article that clearly laid out how the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling in Shelby County v. Holder gutted the preclearance provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and how states took that to mean that it was open season to purge state voter rolls.
The article quotes research from the Brennan Center for Justice that found that “nearly 16 million voters were removed from the rolls between 2014 and 2016. That is almost 4 million more than were purged between 2006 and 2008. The increased purging far exceeds population growth or the growing number of registered voters.”13
This is a system failure that automatic voter registration would not necessarily fix. Theoretically, a voter could be registered nationally but purged from the rolls for local and state elections. Since local and state elections are where most of the decisions that affect people are made, this represents a potentially serious failure of democracy.
Voter caging is just one form of voter suppression, but as the Brennan Center’s figures show, it is also very effective. Here’s how it works: State officials claim that they are simply seeking out people who may have died or moved out of state, so that they can be removed from the rolls for accuracy’s sake.
Under the pretense of rooting out those ineligible folks, election officials send out mass nonforwardable direct mailings — typically a postcard that looks like junk mail — to registered voters in areas where they suspect voter fraud (in other words, Black or student neighborhoods). If any mail is returned because a voter moved (even if he or she just moved down the street), election officials use that as a reason to formally challenge the person’s right to vote.
The For The People Act of 2019 would have outright banned the practice unless the challenger gives an oath that he or she has a “good faith factual basis to believe the person is ineligible to vote or register to vote,” but it died under a Republican filibuster in the Senate.14
Voter caging puts the burden of proof on the citizen to prove that he or she has a right to vote. This provision in H.R. 1, combined with automatic voter registration, flips the script and puts the burden of proof on state officials to prove that a citizen should lose his or her right to vote.
With just these two provisions (ending voter caging and implementing automatic voter registration), millions of Americans would gain the right to vote, and that right to vote would be protected from frivolous attempts to take it away. But it doesn’t guarantee that voters would have the time or means to make it to the polls on Election Day.
I have a friend in San Francisco, born in the US, property owner and landlord, that is about to do exactly the same thing but in a different direction. She’s in my book, Marguerite the nurse from the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic from the Hog Farm concerts who also just turned 70. Now retired. She about to make the jump as this family below is doing.
The scary thing is that my terrible Spanish is better than hers…but she looks the part.
My family Is Terrified So We Are Self Deporting
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/2/5/2301633/-My-family-Is-Terrified-So-We-Are-Self-Deporting
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Things are looking up in Australia:
Mandatory jail for Nazi salutes under new Australia laws
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8x98z0kvlo
Can we jail Musk now? Oh wait, it’s okay in the US, perfectly legal to give Nazi salutes on live TV at the president’s inauguration… You know something? Marguerite’s figured it out.
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sealintheSelkirks
This is today’s piece, Monday 24Feb:
TRUMP’S MILITARY PLOT TO TAKE OVER THE GOVERNMENT – 2.24.25 | Countdown with Keith Olbermann
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIotDer9deg
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The rest of these links I already had pasted days ago. Funny that they go right along with today’s contemplation above.
Never any good news is a problem, isn’t it? Is this what it felt like when Russia collapsed in 1991? Might want to brush up on how that went pretty quickly. This is not a snark.
The Framers of the Constitution’s worst nightmare:
The Supreme Court is Corrupt, Congress is a Rubber Stamp, & the President is Lawless—What Happens Next?
Welcome to James Madison’s nightmare: “The very definition of Tyranny”…
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-supreme-court-is-corrupt-congress-87a
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WTF?! Trump’s Enemy List EXPOSED! Glenn Kirschner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnc-Ri0Dy7w
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Mary Trump rips into her Uncle because…
Trump COWERS at Mar-a-lago as Disaster HITS Americans!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rB3thnAjwtQ
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sealintheSelkirks
If you missed this:
Cogresswoman from Texas shouts truth to power:
‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s an enemy to the United States’: Rep. Crockett lays into Trump
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_y4gV5Q3YVc
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And from Hartmann:
Thom Hartmann, a 3 minute talk on dismantling the regulatory state that created the Middle Class.
We are going back to the tiny wealthy owners and a huge number of poor peons. But a comment that Trump will be gone in 6 months replaced by?
Shocking Reality Fueling Democratic Party’s Next Move!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrhQb3EWiss
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seal
Getting worse very, very fast.
Independent Agency CEO: ‘DOGE has broken into our building.’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlLv_EIL9OE
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‘Nail in the coffin for rural America’: Tester breaks down the devastating impact of Trump cuts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iuzs_9ssQNE
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Ex-DOJ pardon attorney reacts to Trump’s desire to ‘void’ pardons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLNYHuYiXfQ
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sealintheSelkirks
This is a depressing comparison to what Hitler did to Germany in 1933/34 and what Trump has done in two months. The similarities are unnerving.
You Are Here
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/03/20/you-are-here/
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I’m next to Canada, and I’m seeing far less BC plates on this side of the border. Trump’s trade war is ramping up…and Canadians are staying home.
Should you book that trip to the U.S.? Philosophy prof breaks down ethics of retaliating against Trump tariffs
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/u-s-travel-trade-war-1.7482967?utm
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Does the current Fascist US government totalitarian behavior and the Republican party in general count as a YES when answering question #11? It should.
Make The World Scared Again: US Threatens United Nations Agencies
https://popularresistance.org/make-the-world-scared-again-us-threatens-united-nations-agencies/
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This essay speaks some hard truths about Democrats that might make some uncomfortable:
Pardon My Idiocy
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/03/21/pardon-my-idiocy/
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Mary Trump speaks:
Proud Boy TURNS ON Trump as he loses EVERYTHING!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mzvKLj9snM
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sealintheSelkirks
More thoughts on It Can’t Happen Here…but it is.
Will Trump Send U.S. Citizens to El Salvador?
https://blackagendareport.com/will-trump-send-us-citizens-el-salvador
Soon it won’t be just supposed ‘gang members’ being sent to El Salvador’s massive prison, it’ll be citizens. That’s how this works. And the dictator that rules there is perfectly happy to take $60 million US tax dollars to fill his Gulag…
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Last Line of Resistance
If Trump can destroy America’s biggest law firms, who will be left to stand against him?
https://hartmannreport.com/p/silencing-the-defenders-trumps-war-5cc
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Faster and faster we spiral around the toilet bowl and we’re only in the 4th day of the third month of Trumpenfurher. Won’t be long before Martial Law I’m guessing…
sealintheSelkirks
What Canadians are seeing:
Trump and the Politics of Pathology
The strongman catastrophist summons the worst in us. Why do so many heed his call?
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2025/03/18/Trump-and-Pathology-Politics/
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In the ‘ARE YOU F&&KING KIDDING ME?’ file:
Donald Trump ANNOUNCES REPARATIONS FOR DOMESTIC TERRORISTS Involved in Insurrection!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIxujmsuGww
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Don’t know where to put this warning so I’m squeezing it in here! Starts Friday:
This is for those that use Amazon Alexa devices:
?? Privacy Alert: Amazon has announced a significant privacy change to its Alexa devices, taking effect March 28, 2025.
This update means you will no longer be able to prevent your Echo from sending voice recordings to Amazon’s servers. As a result, every voice command given to Alexa will be transmitted to and processed in the cloud, regardless of your previous privacy settings.1
This change impacts users of the Echo Dot (4th Gen), Echo Show 10, and Echo Show 15 in the U.S. — even if you previously opted out of sending recordings.
What this means for you:
You will lose control over whether your voice recordings are sent to Amazon’s servers.
The devices will exclusively rely on cloud processing for voice commands, eliminating local processing.
Every interaction with these devices will be stored and potentially analyzed.
The implications for data privacy and user choice are profound. Amazon’s decision undermines your privacy options and has been made without addressing crucial concerns regarding targeted advertising, third-party data sharing, and security vulnerabilities. If you care about keeping your voice data private, now is the time to explore alternatives for smart home devices that respect your privacy.
?? Mozilla’s Recommendations:
? Take Action. Review your Alexa privacy settings now at the Amazon Privacy Hub.
? Voice your concerns. Let Amazon know that user privacy matters by sending their customer service team an email at cs-reply@amazon.com.
? Consider alternatives. If you own an Amazon Alexa-enabled device, consider throwing it into the ocean. (Just kidding, please don’t litter.)
Thank you for everything you do for the internet.
Michael Whitney
Director, Digital Engagement
Mozilla
Mozilla is a movement of people like you who believe in privacy, transparency, and user control over our own personal data.
Police State America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxf_zFMV7UM
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Tufts University Student Arrest | Marco Rubio Justifies Turkish Student Rumeysa Ozturk’s Detention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9RrHaekbpo
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a commenter:
@Noworries-PU7ye
12 hours ago
I’m so happy that I was born in Canada ?? as an anchor baby. both my parents are American I’ll probably going to get snatched up like that too because I have a felony conviction, I live off government subsidies. so I don’t know what’s going to happen to me dude this is scary s***
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Author interview- when fleeing Fascism becomes a family tradition.
‘How Fascism Works’ Author Flees The U.S. For Canada
When your fascism expert flees your country because it’s becoming too fascist, you should be really scared…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKf2EzfgtZc
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Hartmann’s latest:
We’re in the Final Act of America’s Third Oligarchic Backlash
And this one ends with either democracy renewed — or democracy erased…
https://hartmannreport.com/p/were-in-the-final-act-of-americas-931?publication
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Never any good news, eh?
sealintheSelkirks
Never any good news:
Latest from Hartmann Report:
Is This the Moment American Democracy Finally Broke?
Trump’s order to investigate truth-tellers isn’t just abuse of power—it’s a test of whether we still have a republic…
https://hartmannreport.com/p/is-this-the-moment-american-democracy-345
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sealintheSelkirks
Mission Creep is how Trump is getting destroying the country done. There is NO EMERGENCY on our border but imagine if you will that in May 1970 Nixon did what Trump is doing now and unleashed the Army on all those students in Frank Gormlie’s recent book… The cops were bad enough then, and now they have even greater immunity according to Trump. Death squads in the US is a real possibility I’m thinking…
Creeping Authoritarianism: the Case of Posse Comitatus
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/20/creeping-authoritarianism-the-case-of-posse-comitatus/
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And our illustrious and extremely ignorant ‘Homeland Security Director’ doesn’t have a clue what Posse Comitatus even means. She NEEDS fired immediately…but then Trump would put in another ignorant piece of crap just as stupid as this moron as a replacement anyway, eh?
This Senator PROVES how incompetent she is:
Habeas Corpus: Kristi Noem Misdefines Key Legal Right in Awkward Senate Moment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DhxuWgnqqX8
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And again her ignorance is ripped to shreds:
‘Ignorant and unacceptable’: Symone Sanders Townsend on Noem’s habeas corpus snafu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caiewa1TpHA
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Everyone that Trump has put in positions of Governmental Power are the most incompetent imbeciles he could find to match his own ignorance…but they are the most loyal to his rule also.
sealintheSelkirks
Short vid by a 56 yr old rural gun-owning white guy veteran in a line of veterans going back to the Revolutionary War; who says “if you are active duty military I simply ask you to remember your oath.”
Welcome to Dystopia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bh0XvYkHfGw
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THIS IS NOT A DRILL: Mary Trump’s BRUTAL TRUTH on Trump’s Attack on America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2urDwnKbMg
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Trump lies with impunity.
Fact or Fiction | Truth behind the video of white crosses shown during Ramaphosa-Trump’s meeting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqvp1FOir4Y
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Australian woman: Not under arrest. No charges. Ex-cop. In handcuffs. Strip-search. Imprisoned with criminals. WT actual F???
Military wife detained, deported at Honolulu airport
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cYsSl-twEg
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Who will stop the Orange Traitor to the Constitution? Not his ass kissers on the unSupreme Court, that’s for sure.
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sealintheSelkirks
How Hitler did it. This should sound familiar.
Hitler Used a Bogus Crisis of ‘Public Order’ to Make Himself Dictator
Timothy W. Ryback / The Atlantic
https://www.rsn.org/001/hitler-used-a-bogus-crisis-of-public-order-to-make-himself-dictator.html
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I very much doubt that this ‘ICE/California Riot plan’ was thought up by Trump. He’s too incurious, doesn’t read at all, and as his Ivy League Wharton School of Business professor said he was the stupidest student he ever had. But there are extremely corrupt vicious people in his cabinet that DO know history…
sealintheSelkirks
Fake cop? MAGA? Trump-supporter? Proud Boy? Boogaloo Boy? Did Trump pardon this f**k a couple months ago?
I expect this killer to be shot dead. They don’t want him talking. Chalk it up to a ‘lone gunman,’ yes?
I’m guessing that a majority of cops in this country voted for the Fascist dictator last November. The Oath Keeper types are probably celebrating because this is what they proclaim to want; dead lib-tard commies.
So the killer in a police uniform and a patrol car was surprised by cops showing up at his second stop as he came out the door, and yet he got away? Now a ‘man-hunt’ is on with the help of Kash Patel’s ‘FBI’ who I’m SURE is so eager to catch one of their own Trump supporters…
Fascist workbook: instill fear in any and all opposition. All these cops/ICE/Homeland Security etc etc with their MASKS hiding their faces, no name tags or badge numbers or following the law and identifying themselves when asked? You think this isn’t already a Fascist State?
Killing a few of the enemy democrats sure fits right in, doesn’t it? As does threatening, assaulting, and arresting with bogus charges anyone who dissents. Like US Senators.
Fear all Republicans seems to be a new twist to this ongoing Fascist overthrow. Like Germany in 1933=1942, the opposition didn’t know how to stop it just as we don’t know how to stop this. Hitler let loose the demons, just like Trump has.
Trump Silent as TWO MINNESOTA DEMOCRATS ASSASSINATED by Man in Police Car and Uniform!!!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGZyZUbaWwQ
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sealintheSelkirks
The Lincoln Project brings up some very disturbing thoughts about the similarities of violent brutal masked Secret Police throughout the last 100 years…and we’ve now got them, don’t we?
Who is that Man in the Mask?!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N5KIC2Kv0c
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sealintheSelkirks
Trump LOST the election. The NSA audited it.
Ex-CIA Whistleblower: “The NSA Audited The 2024 Election, Kamala Harris Won”
Math doesn’t lie—people do. A buried NSA?authorized audit paved the way for this unelected illegitimate regime.
https://thiswillhold.substack.com/p/ex-cia-whistleblower-the-nsa-audited
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It feels like this is a bad dream, but I’m pretty sure I’m already awake. But I continue to feel like a canary…
But now Dementia Donnie is fighting with a frigging cartoon! Really? South Park has parodied every politician but the whiny little baby can’t take the heat.
And this is after he fired the head of the jobs report because she somehow “rigged” the entire thing and the incredibly bad economic news pissed him off? Which means the US is now looking at the same jobs stats as we had at the start of Covid in 2020 when TRUMP started locking down the country as people started dropping like fleas on a dog after a flea & tick shampoo? If people can’t even remember history from 5 yrs ago…we are in even worse trouble than I think.
He has brought us BACK to his Pandemic-level economy, but this time he’s using the US military as enforcers. Who won’t, I’m guessing, remember their OATH. The ones that invaded LA sure didn’t…
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This is a cut from an author who writes books on segments of history who is promoting his latest that is coming out next week:
“I often joke, darkly, that I write “history” books that get filed instead under “current events.” Over the last year, as I’ve worked on my new oral history of the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings, there was one section in the book that always felt particularly chilling: The memories of the mostly Jewish refugee physicists who fled Hitler’s Europe to come to the United States ahead of the advancing cloak of fascism.”
Note: The words of these scientists ARE chilling because we’ve got a flood of US scientists that are leaving the US because of the policies of DJT that will cause the ‘brain drain’ that happened to Nazi Germany…
Fleeing One Step Ahead of Fascism
Chilling warnings from 1930s Europe: “Reality is stronger than all our wishes”
https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/fleeing-one-step-ahead-of-fascism-
fbcf5ac4661dca77
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Interview with Thom. This is Klan behavior, pizza delivery and shooting the kid who opens the door. By definition a cult:
Thom Hartmann’s BOLD Prediction That SHOCKS Stephanie Miller
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LN3czmNIWUA
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As Thom says, near the end of the 10 minute segment, we faced the end of Democracy and the same ‘capitulation’ by those that were supposed to be protecting the country before in the 1850s when the Oligarchs in the Slave State south “shut down the newspapers that didn’t support them, imprisoned the editors, imprisoned their political opponents, rigged all the (elections)…by 1856 there was NO more democracy in the South…”
“And Lincoln was a Republican that stopped it at the cost of 700,000 dead. So where the hell are the Republican patriots?”
My answer: Thom, they are sucking the toes of a obese psychopath.
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This morning, 8/8/25, Thom posted this observation:
The Army Was Built to Protect the Republic — Now It’s Being Deployed to Subdue It
The battlefield is no longer overseas. It’s your city. Your rights. Your voice. And the military is no longer standing guard: it’s standing in the way…
https://hartmannreport.com/p/the-army-was-built-to-protect-the-ae4?publication_id=302288
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And that’s my Cassandra-ness for this weekend.
sealintheSelkirks
I just re-watched Don’t Look Up tonight, after I read this article:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/08/roaming-charges-118/
In my head I replaced the comet…with the words DJT’s Fascist State. It fit perfectly. Scary thought.
What, as a citizen of the United States, would you expect people to do?
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Veterans Fighting Fascism, a good explanation about what’s coming with
ICE is hiring the “worst of the worst”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSWCqnQjSzM
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Trump Signs New Order To Roundup Homeless And Throw Them In Mental Institutions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TUM56kcVV0
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And a totally ignorant dumbass, the ‘S^TUPIDEST’ student he ever had according to the prof at Wharton School of Business, is going to personally have history re-written as HE thinks it should sound like…American Exceptionalism?
White House orders review of Smithsonian museums | NBC4 Washington
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORvx2E9fpvc
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
? George Orwell, 1984
NEW HIT SONG – The Mythsonian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC9_J_5QHlk&list=RDbTqDC_fU56k&index=2
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In 8 months, and you know what? DJT is going to eat the dogs and eat the cats…and their owners.
sealintheSelkirks