Krasner is a star, and this is great. But this is also how things can go next-level, right? Awkward face-offs between armed forces over ‘jurisdiction,’ which is a fancy name for territory. And, if it wasn’t clear yet, yes, PDs are armed forces. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a few other prosecutors take the same line as Krasner, but just a few. If there are any face-offs, however ‘civil’ they may turn out, it’ll nonetheless be interesting to see how PDs present themselves — say, in ‘militarized’ gear we hear so much about, or in de-escalatory, traditional police uniforms? That, in itself, might say something about the sympathies of the police. For example, in NYC I’d expect the NYPD to all but ally itself with federal troops. Note that I haven’t anything about anyone getting hurt.
The fact that we’re reaching a point where considerations like that take fairly concrete form means that things already are next-level, in some ways. And, despite the recent flurry of ‘postmature anti-fascism’ from the Serious Squad, very few have really grokked just how bad things have gotten. And they’ll get worse not better. The cities that Trump has singled out for federal intervention — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Milwaukee — are pretty chocolate cities, at least in the mind of someone who’s cognitive framework froze in about 1981. This makes it plainly clear that Trump’s strategy, electoral and otherwise, is to escalate racial conflict around country, in full knowledge that it could blow up into open civil conflict. No, it wouldn’t look like the capital-T The Civil War, but that didn’t look like earlier conflicts either, did it? Leave reenactments of the past to Colonial Williamsburg and its ilk. This is the future, and it’ll be new and different.
So, now, who’s going to splain to me about how the sparks of a civil war in the US are just the fever dreams of the radical fringe? Or about how Trump would never ‘really’ try to overstay his welcome in the WH? What, he’s going to try to use unaccountable paramilitary forces to spur civil conflicts around the country and then gracefully step down because, after all, the peaceful transition of power is what matter most? Or how Pelosi, with a small majority in half of Congress, has the authority to muster those true, patriotic professionals who’ll risk everything to drag a sitting president from the WH? How about the courts? Well, as the saying goes, how many divisions does Roberts have? One thing’s for sure: fewer than Barr does. “BUT PEOPLE WON’T STAND FOR IT!” you say? Sorry, the majority will stand for it — because it starts small, in ‘pockets,’ because it looks like other things they’ve seen for decades, because I mean really what do you expect, because it won’t directly affect them, because it’s frightening, because chaos. And a pretty big chunk of that majority will actively cheer it on.
So, like I said earlier, it’s getting time to start thinking seriously about what you won’t stand for under any circumstances. It was always a good idea, but now it might ‘really’ matter. Even for you.