Excerpt: By March, however, the state’s vision began to change. That month, state lawmakers and the governor revealed that they wanted to assign the State Guard $89 million to buy boats, planes and helicopters. They wanted a specialized unit within the guard to have police powers and the ability to carry weapons. And they wanted to boost the State Guard to 1,500 members. Instead of being activated only during emergencies within Florida, they could be sent to any state to “protect and defend the people of Florida from threats to public safety.”
Have to scratch “Haven’t rebuilt the brownshirts” from my “they aren’t like the Nazis yet” lib list. Can’t even think of a thing they haven’t done yet, but can’t wait for the “Hitler kills Hitler” arc.
Not to mention that the blackshirts and brownshirts of Europe were inspired by the KKK and similar groups in the Southern US.
The whole of Nazis was inspired by the US. Lebensraum is Manifest Destiny. The ghettos is the segregated neighbourhoods and reservations. The Holocaust and genocide is… well the genocide.
just failed state things.
Is this how the civil war starts? With alligators and meth heads galore?
The only “civil war” there’s ever gonna be in this shithole anytime soon is the security state purging anyway to the left of Mayo Pete so the uni-party can continue on agreeing on every economic issue and only disagreeing slightly on the cruelty to show towards marginalized peoples or how many bombs, exactly, to drop on or sell to [insert country].
I don’t actually think there’s gonna be a hot civil war but we’re definitely experiencing an ideological one.
On certain specific “social” or “culture war”maybe (quotes to indicate I don’t intend to downplay the importance of these issues to the communities affected).
The economic ideology has been set in stone for a very long time. Any arguments in that realm ended at the latest in the 1970s/1980s when capital finally had its opportunity after decades of chiseling away at class consciousness and solidarity to wash away the fractured infrastructure of the early 1900s unions and general socialist type movements. They had already all been compromised and destroyed in the 1960s and 70s, but when the capitalists and their government lackeys (Reaganites basically) saw Carter’s complete lack of response to a crisis during his term and his general “nothingness” campaign and time in office, they saw it was time to finally do what they had wanted to do way way back to FDR’s time and had been waiting patiently for. Fire up the culture war insanity machine, deregulate everything they could get their grubby hands on, very publicly gut and crush public sector unions and wash out any remaining workers who had any memory of a time when unions were strong and meant at least a little bit of something. Of course HW Bush was more of the generally same but then Clinton did the thing for the Democratic side and ensured the rightward plunge would continue when he basically ran as a Republican like a Reagan-lite in the 90s. And it’s just been getting more and more right wing economically since then. Cuts to any and all social safety nets, mass incarceration, exploding military budget and justifying wars worldwide (despite the USSR having just fallen providing a boost to the US and in theory should have resulted in cutting military budgets to zero and dissolving NATO- the exact opposite happened of course because the revenue from producing weapons of war can never end…).
Somewhere in that Carter->Clinton zone, including both ends of course, every liberal in the country decided economics had been settled. The free market was king, unions weren’t needed anymore, trickle down was here to stay! The only distinction left that you were allowed to fight over was “how much, exactly, do you hate black people? LGBTQ people? Muslims? Russians? The Chinese?” The discussion of capital vs labor, who produces value, who deserves the profits and all that was silenced, seemingly anyway, forever.
The US is in some sort of transition state now, but the internal strife is not between capital and labor (ie capitalism vs socialism), no it’s between “full unlimited genocide of gay people or just a little? Fully roll back women’s rights to the Roman Empire era or just strip a few rights? Jail every black person or only allow random extrajudicial killings when the media feels it was justified? Arm Ukraine with 100% of their asks or only 80%? Support Israel? (Just kidding, that’s a given not a question.)) And honestly, regardless of which sides “wins” between the socially-better libs or the caveman genocide-happy conservatives… the world is fucked. The country is fucked and it’s fucked worse for any non-white and specifically non-white males. We’re all fucked.
This is what I mean by there is no civil war. There cannot be a civil war because the two dominant ideologies which could potentially fight are ultimately in agreement on everything except the items I discussed, which it seems so far the libs are pretty happy to just capitulate on, and kind of tells us how the future will look in the next several decades… “not good” is about the best summary I can give there.
I remember when this story hit the first time when nothing had really happened yet. People all said “it’s just for helping during disasters and shit! Stop being hyperbolic!”
Well, here’s the update showing the “hyperbolic” people were unfortunately correct.
And this time the libs will ignore it, heads in the receding beach sands, secure in their minds that they were always correct, everything is ok, Trump was Hitler and FDR-Biden beat him. All is right in their world.
it’s just for helping during disasters
This amuses me too. Because in a disaster, there’s more concern on “law and order” (read: punishing people whose lives are already destroyed by a natural disaster) than on aid. I know that in general talking about government budgets as a zero-sum game isn’t very accurate, but in this case, wouldn’t you rather have money allocated to aid after a disaster than law enforcement after a disaster?
