For all the larpers here demanding violent response, here’s the link to Judge Karen Immergut’s final decision of November 7, 2025 kicking the National Guard out of Portland, Oregon.
https://www.opb.org/pdf/FINDINGS OF FACT AND CONCLUSIONS OF LAW_1762564569662.pdf
You don’t have to read the whole thing. In fact, you don’t have to read more than the first (long) paragraph to understand that the courts are still largely defending the Constitution, and that it was the lack of violent response to Trump’s provocations that caused her to rule against keeping the National Guard in Portland. I’ve added line breaks, but this is the first paragraph:
On September 27, 2025, the President of the United States federalized 200 members of the Oregon National Guard over the objection of Oregon’s governor and deployed them to a single federal building in Portland, Oregon. In the ensuing days, the President ordered the deployment of 400 federalized members of the Texas and California National Guards, all to the same federal building in Oregon. The mission of these deployments of military troops was ostensibly to quell violent protests outside the one-block Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) building in Portland.
But after a three-day trial that included the testimony of federal, state, and local law enforcement officials and hundreds of exhibits describing protest activity outside the Portland ICE building, the evidence demonstrates that these deployments, which were objected to by Oregon’s governor and not requested by the federal officials in charge of protection of the ICE building, exceeded the President’s authority.
While violent protests did occur in June, they quickly abated due to the efforts of civil law enforcement officers. And since that brief span of a few days in June, the protests outside the Portland ICE facility have been predominately peaceful, with only isolated and sporadic instances of relatively low-level violence, largely between protesters and counter-protesters.
When considering these conditions that persisted for months before the President’s federalization of the National Guard, this Court concludes that even giving great deference to the President’s determination, the President did not have a lawful basis to federalize the National Guard under 10 U.S.C. § 12406. (emphases and line breaks added by me)
And then, specifically BECAUSE of the non-violent response of Portland, in every successive paragraph Judge Immergut labeled the order to move the National Guard into Portland UNLAWFUL.
A violent response is NOT the answer at this point in time. I guarantee we will ALL know when it is. Save your shot.
In the meantime, my fellow countrymen, beware of larpers who don’t even live in the US, much less in Minneapolis, trying to whip up rage and get people to fight. It’s not their blood that will be shed, not their families destroyed, not the last shreds of their democracy thrown into the cesspit of an impotent orange excrescence’s lust for power and unending greed: it will be our own.
If you’re here to say you think people should fight, all you’re really telling me is that you’ve never had to fight, you don’t know how it works, you won’t be the one to pay the price in your own blood, AND you want Trump to consolidate his power even faster than he already is by giving him reason to occupy cities with the National Guard, declare martial law, and avoid having midterm elections. Think twice.
In the meantime, my fellow countrymen, beware of larpers who don’t even live in the US, much less in Minneapolis, trying to whip up rage and get people to fight.
This bears repeating. I’ve seen it in every political thread here on lemmy.world for the last year. Every, single, time, some troll crashes into the thread and promotes escalation and violence. And every time someone takes the bait and gets into an argument, swamping half the visible comment area, effectively pushing out any sane discourse about a smarter way to deal with this. It’s hard to see it happen with such regularity and not imagine this to be calculated and deliberate.
To this I say: let’s treat our political forum spaces like a protest. Stay civil. Call out provocateurs but don’t engage directly. Downvote and report to admins. Freeze these trolls out of the conversation, and let’s keep putting our heads together.
Thank you for saying this. I do not believe any of them are posting in good faith, and when challenged rely on logical fallacies and emotionally charged non-factual or barely factual statements.
They’re here solely to inflame and incite. No other conclusion left to draw.
It might depend on how we define “good faith”, but I think some of them are probably posting in good faith — though good intentions don’t negate the harm they do, of course. I get the sense that some of the people trying to incite violent action are feeling overwhelmed and powerless due to being so far away from what is happening. I say this as someone who isn’t an American, and thus can only spectate with horror as American politics continues going to hell, with ripple effects on the rest of the world.
It’s easy to rile people up when it’s not your neck on the line though. However uncomfortable it is to be spectating what’s happening in the US, you guys have it much worse. It would be nice to imagine that this is the kind of thing that could be solved through one, big push of violent resistance, but with how deep MAGA cronies have gotten their talons into US politics, resistance will necessarily require thinking of the long game. Violent resistance, when deployed unwisely, can end up serving the ends of the oppressor.
I get the sense that some of the people trying to incite violent action are feeling overwhelmed and powerless due to being so far away from what is happening.
I agree with this, and it shames me that my own humanity is dulled enough by constant challenges to consider it secondary. But a core part of what us anti-fascists actually tend to agree about is that words matter. I’d take it a step further and say that en masse we are individually creating change whether for better or worse, whether we acknowledge we have that power or not.
So when we incite others, we are making the problem bigger even in spite of ourselves, even as much as we claim to want the opposite (a return to sane leadership and at least superficially courteous discourse).
And that’s beyond the obvious logistics: these people arguing for violent resistance never say where or when or how they’d like others to fight, but those of us who have actually been to protests that got heated know it’s not that simple. Agents provocateurs are everywhere, because they want it to get violent, the administration wants to be able to run headlines that paint resistors as disgruntled agitators and hoodlums and troublemakers, not your neighbor or your coworker or your boss. Anything to dehumanize and label “the other”, and violent protests deliver us all up to that end. As soon as we are labeled, we cease to matter.
Compounding this problem, Americans have been firehosed with propaganda and mass manipulation from every direction for over a decade now, including mainstream media. The atmosphere here now is much what I have read of pre-WWII Germany: tight, cautious, foreboding, grim. And angry. Extremely angry. So when I see people who want to light a match to it, it’s almost impossible for me to see that as an act of good faith.
In the meantime, for all the media focus on this unconscionable murder of a citizen just trying to get home (apparently she was shot on the same street she lived) the existing cracks in the administration’s attempts to consolidate power are widening. I’d point you to Heather Cox Richardson, who mentioned in her chat today what the media is downplaying: that the Dems finally pushed through a vote on the healthcare subsidies today, and they got it through on a discharge petition because over a dozen Republicans voted for it in spite of Trump’s threats and Mike Johnson’s best efforts to keep it from a vote.
The House is also set to overturn two Trump vetoes (one of which is a Trump revenge veto against Lauren Boebert of Colorado for standing firm on the Epstein files).EDITED to add that they failed to overturn the vetoes, but did get a War Powers Act resolution up for a vote through the Senate, meaning that they will vote on whether further action in Venezuela has to be approved by Congress. This was aided by five Republicans who voted with the Dems.All of that is a big deal. This complicit Congress, without whom Trump would have nothing, are now working across the aisle on multiple issues in spite of him. Even Minnesota is standing firm and telling the feds that the ICE thug who shot Ms. Good can in fact be charged with murder by the state, and there’s really nothing the feds can do about it. The Supreme Court can only rule on what comes before it; meanwhile, lower courts are overturning his efforts right and left.
In short, he is losing power faster than he can consolidate it, and when it comes right down to it, his goons shot a woman whose only crime was trying to get home from dropping her son off at school. When American beliefs have shifted away from a prevailing wind, it has often been because of a victim like Ms. Good that we can all relate to. Again, the firehose of lies is flooding the media with their alternative narrative, but those videos are circulating faster than they can be shut down – and even the videos only exist because sane individuals were out there blowing whistles to let their neighbors know that ICE was there to begin with. That’s where real change happens, and where true power lies: with the individual.
So yeah. I can’t tell you how bad it is here right now: it is beyond anything I have ever experienced. But resistance is popping up everywhere, and outside of the roughly 20%-25% that are always going to support authoritarian rule in any society, there is no real support for him. That’s another reason why I’d tell people here to incite violence to knock it off: they could actually be part of the growing resistance if they let go of the rage and think about what’s next. Wisdom and rage rarely accomplish the same thing, and we’ve only just started to fight back. Anyone who wants to fight in the street will likely have their opportunity to do so, unfortunately. But right now it will only fuel the oppressor.
Thank you for your courteous reply; I was kind of shocked to see it, honestly. I appreciate it, more than you know.
Are you using AI? Who writes like that?
Professionals. Academics. Anyone who’s been to college can write like that. Go get an education.
Knowledge buried under the rubble of language. Then learn how to be concicse. Thanks.