How Will the State Respond to Increasingly Forceful Protests? A Preliminary Look at the Road to Rebellion in America.

(Source)

by Thomas Neuburger

I began writing this piece by considering the modern shape of rebellion, should it come, in America. That led to words on the shapes of rebellion in general which led to many more words, a chapter in fact of some pages.

Let’s spare you that for now, and do this instead. Let’s look at two short news stories, both about rebellions and the state’s response, one a nascent rebellion by the right and another a nascent rebellion by the left.

One is Covid-related and the other is not. Both occurred recently. Considering each offers a window into how a broader revolt, or several, might progress, depending on whether the left or the right is leading it.

A Protest by the Right

First, consider this:

Michigan Closes Down Capitol in Face of Death Threats From Armed Protesters Against Gov. Whitmer

On Thursday, Michigan closed down its capitol building and canceled its legislative session after online death threats made against Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

The threats were made by protesters who planned to attend a “Judgement Day” protest at the capitol. The protesters ostensibly oppose Whitmer’s statewide shutdown orders meant to slow the spread of coronavirus.

Dozens of posts in private invitation-only Facebook groups called for Whitmer to be hanged, lynched, shot, beaten or beheaded. One suggested crowdfunding sources to hire a hitman to kill her.

“We haven’t had any bloodshed yet, but the populous [sic] is counting to three, and yesterday was day two,” wrote Dave Meisenheimer in a 385,000-member Facebook group called Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine. “Next comes the watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants,” he concluded.

Numerous other posts referred to Whitmer as a “Nazi,” “spawn of the devil,” “wicked witch,” “Soros puppet,” “baby killer tyrant” and more, according to the Detroit Metro Times. Others promised to attend upcoming protests “armed to the death” and without face masks, threatening to attack any police officers who dared confront them.

To which the response was this:

Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel have considered banning firearms from the Capitol building but are awaiting the six-member Michigan State Capitol Commission to figure out if they have the legal authority to do so.

“There are legislators who are wearing bulletproof vests to go to work,” Whitmer told ABC News last week.

No one is talking about investigating, arresting, spying on or bringing to trial those making these death threats. The protests were warned, however, that they "could be charged with brandishing if they are threatening to others." Instead of being shut down and arrested, they forced a government shutdown — a fleeing, if you will — and the protest went off as planned.

(As a mental exercise, imagine the response by police and others if the protesters had been black.)

A Strike by the Left

Now consider this, a pre-Covid 2020 wage strike at UC Santa Cruz:

California Police Used Military Surveillance Tech at Grad Student Strike

UC Santa Cruz police utilized military surveillance equipment to surveil and police the graduate student ‘wildcat’ strike earlier this year.

The California National Guard provided military surveillance equipment to the University of California at Santa Cruz’s Police Department in order to surveil and police the UC Santa Cruz graduate student wildcat strike earlier this year, documents acquired through the California Public Records Act show.

California National Guard, the state’s federally funded military force, provided so-called “friendly force trackers,” a military surveillance technology used to track U.S. troops in military combat, to monitor pickets, according to emails dated February 11 and 13. Police responding to the strike also had access to LEEP, a federal surveillance portal operated by the FBI. The emails show that law enforcement was monitoring student protest groups and social media to plan its response.

The California Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES) also assisted with law enforcement response.

I said “consider the state's response” in my introduction because clearly a large part of the mechanism of the state was involved in this response — the California National Guard provided equipment to the campus Police Department, who also had assistance from the FBI and the California Office of Emergency Services.

That’s a lot of virtual firepower trained on a small group of grad students at single university, though UC Santa Cruz's reputation for radicalism may have influenced the state's response.

What Does This Comparison Tell Us?

Both of these events are rebellious acts, one by the right in protest of the government of Michigan’s Covid-19 shutdown order, the other by graduate teaching assistants who “walked off the job and withheld grades to demand an $1,412 increase to their cost of living stipend.”

Only one threatened violence though, and that one threatened quite a bit of it. Yet the state handled the wage strike much more aggressively than it handled the side that threatened death and brought guns to their events.

Which leads to a couple of questions:

• Consider a world in the not too distant future in which right-wing protests do turn violent and people are shot, some by protesters who may even be the instigators.

What does a right-revolting world look like from the standpoint of the government’s response?

• Next consider a world in which a left-led rent strike or debt strike or Covid-fueled health-and-safety strike turns violent, not because of the protesters, who are generally less violent than Trump-fueled mobs (see above), but in a clash between protesters and counter-protesters, or protesters and police whose propensity for violence in these cases is well known.

Police using pepper spray on peaceful Occupy protestors at UC Davis

What does a left-revolting world look like from the standpoint of the government’s response?

The World of Tomorrow

Revolt in today's America today will never become a Battle of Lexington world, a pattern established in the first of our revolutions. But it could devolve to a world of protests-gone-bad — or protests-forcefully-disallowed if they’re coming from the left — all when the pressure cooker of life in a donor class–controlled state becomes not just onerous, but economically impossible and medically life-threatening.

I don’t have answers to the questions above, but I do know which questions I suggest you ask if you want to start to answer them:

• What does a right-led rebellion look like in its early stages? How does the state respond? Are those revolts tacitly encouraged?

• What does a left-led rebellion look like in its early stages? How does the state respond? Are those revolts violently suppressed?

• What if both rebellions occur in parallel? How would police-abused left  respond to coddling of violence by the right?

We’re closer than ever before to a world in which many on both sides have stopped believing that government cares to fix the shared tragedy of their lives, and both sides are closer than ever before to doing something about it.

Thomas Jefferson correctly wrote that “mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Yet when revolt does breaks out, it does so suddenly, often chaotically, and then the country becomes a place most people won’t want to live in, yet can’t escape.

We're approaching fast the next phase of revolt in America, whatever shape it takes. We're long past that day in November of 2008 when promises of "hope and change" were a cause for optimism. The dashing of that hope, in fact, is itself a cause of despair. The outcomes of the elections of 2016 simply confirmed what both sides already knew, that no one, certainly not the donor-run state, is on their side.

So count me among the group that fears what's coming. The arrogant rich, those who control both parties and the state, will never ever stand down, rolling the dice instead on the chaos that will follow. I fear the world their hubris will create.