Today in deeply not at all fun Trump facts; did you know the Swine Emperor has currently deployed more troops to LA than the US military officially maintains in Syria and Iraq, combined? No, seriously:

truthout.org/articles/trump-ha…

Trump Has Deployed More Troops in LA Than Syria and Iraq, Per US Counts

"President Donald Trump’s latest deployment of thousands of National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles means that there are now more troops carrying out Trump’s anti-protest crackdown in southern California than in both Iraq and Syria, regions where the U.S. has executed some of its most intense and inhumane military campaigns in recent decades, according to official counts.

Trump has dispatched roughly 4,000 National Guard members and 700 Marines to respond to L.A.’s protests of his immigration raids, for a total of roughly 4,700 troops. Meanwhile, according to publicly reported Pentagon figures, the U.S. has roughly 2,000 troops deployed in Syria and 2,500 troops in Iraq, for a total of 4,500."

As the article goes on to note, a Pentagon still operating under War on Terror logic while occupying Iraq and purportedly fighting terrorism in Syria, may well be undercounting the troop levels in those two countries; they've certainly done so in the past.

Regardless, if we consider the *official* deployment of military personnel to be a de facto statement of the regime's policing priorities, that still means the Trumpenreich is arguing that unarmed domestic protesters inside very small pockets of the Los Angeles area are a greater threat than militarized terrorist militias in two countries US intervention has helped transform into semi-perpetual warzones. Please keep in mind that the LA protests are happening on livestream, and there are hundreds of eye witness accounts in the public discourse from Angelinos saying there is no widespread disorder for the troops to quell. There is not a man, woman, nor child in America who can't verify for themselves that Trump is lying about a “rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States” going on in Los Angeles, if they want to.

All of which of course leads us directly back to our ongoing discussion about what the Trumpenreich is trying to use its militarized invasion of LA to sanctify in practice, if not in US Law. Trump wants the power to permanently occupy US cities, while engaging the military in both domestic policing and assisting the Gestapo in the regime's ethnonationalist mass deportation project; including apparently providing detention facilities for caged migrants. Furthermore, as Zhang ominously notes, there are clear signs the regime is exploring how to scale up what they're doing in LA, to a much more national project.

"According to a report by ABC News, the Pentagon is considering a plan crafted by the Department of Homeland Security to deploy more than 20,000 additional National Guard troops to aid with Trump’s immigration raids.

This would cost $3.6 billion over the course of a year, and would represent roughly half of the number of troops deployed across the entirety of the Middle East. It would also be an escalation of the Trump administration’s use of the U.S.’s colossal military capacity to attack and subdue the American public."

Folks, I'm just going to be real with you; you don't martial up 20,000+ troops from all across the country in advance because ICE is going to raid a bunch of cities one by one to hunt down brown people Stephen Miller's shriveled conscience cannot abide existing in his county. We're definitely going to talk more about the ABC report the author mentions at a later point in time, but what you're looking at here is the opening steps the regime would need to take if they intended to militarily occupy the parts of the United States that didn't vote for Trump without meeting organized, violent resistance.

Like a lot of the fascist bullshit the Klepto Kaiser is doing right now, it's hard to tell if he's going to go "all the way." At some point however, the idea that Donald Trump is just accidentally stumbling in to all the steps he would need to enshrine a militarized fascist dictatorship under a perpetual state of quasi-martial law, strains credulity. If Trump gets away with transforming protests into an insurrection and soldiers into policemen in LA, you should bet on the idea that the nazis will soon be coming for a town near you in that very same way.

#Fascism #Trump #InvasionOfLA #Imperialism #WarOnTerror #USPol #LosAngeles #Protests #MENA #Syria #Iraq #PoliceState

Trump Has Deployed More Troops in LA Than Syria and Iraq, Per US Counts

The figures are a show of the administration’s willingness to use extreme military force on its own population.

^{Sharon Zhang (Truthout)}

In previous analysis, I wrote about my belief that the Trumpenreich's invasion of LA had established a repeatable legal, logistical, and political framework for transforming the National Guard and indeed the US military into the enforcement arm of a permanent fascist police state under at least the constant threat of martial law. Well, it turns out that I could have just waited a couple of days for the regime to say the quiet part out loud, because Pete Hegseth all but admitted that's precisely how this is going down in real time, during a Congressional oversight hearing on Capitol Hill.

commondreams.org/news/hegseth-…

Hegseth Lays Out a Case for Troop Deployments in 'Any Jurisdiction in the Country'

"U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told members of Congress on Tuesday that he believes Immigration and Customs Enforcement "has the right to safely conduct operations in any state and any jurisdiction in the country."

Given that Hegseth and President Donald Trump have cast the National Guard and U.S. Marine deployments to Los Angeles as an effort to protect ICE personnel as they carry out the administration's mass deportation campaign, the Pentagon chief's testimony to lawmakers represented a justification for troop mobilizations to any part of the nation where protests against ICE are deemed a potential threat."

To completely understand what Trump's crusader Secretary of Defense is getting at here, you have to place it in the larger context of the regime's fascist mass deportation project, and the conditions which administration officials, including President Trump himself have outlined to "justify" escalation and additional military involvement. The rough process by which the regime is now actively conducting a fascist takeover of the broader American state at every level of government, looks a bit like this:

A) Send ICE Gestapo squads along with other federal agents to any city Trump regards as ideologically opposed to his fascist agenda, and begin kidnapping people and very publicly and aggressively violating civil rights.

B) Declare any protests or opposition to those nazi ICE raids and tactics, no matter how peaceful or lawful they may be, to be an insurrection and an attack on federal law enforcement. Use that attack, even if you have to make it up whole cloth, to justify commandeering a state's own National Guard to enforce Trump's rule militarily, while actively tasking them with protecting ICE Gestapo agents conducting raids; which conveniently gets around the legal restrictions that have previously prevented Trump from using the army to conduct ethno-nationalist immigration enforcement policies and mass deportations.

C) As Trump himself has proposed, respond to any "attack" (which again, we know they can just make up) on National Guard forces, by sending in the US Military and presumably invoking the Insurrection Act to place the targeted city under martial law and Trump's de facto command.

Please note that the only part of this outline that's still hypothetical is C; and while Trump hasn't actually done it yet, numerous powerful nazis in his administration have hinted that is the direction they're heading, including Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, Hegseth himself, Tom Homan, Pam Bondi, and Trump's press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who at least in theory speaks for the president. How many times do I have to share the Maya Angelou quote "when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time" in regards to Trump's fascist movement before the reality sinks in that these guys might not be capable of grasping as much power as they desire, but they abso-fucking-lutely mean to try regardless?

What we are looking at here is an arbitrarily deployable framework for a fascist police state enforced by a US military that answers only to Trump, which can be conjured up out of thin air and portably deployed around the country at will. The Swine Emperor is effectively announcing his immanent takeover of the entire country, by demonstrating on the streets of LA that he can instantly take over any given part of that country and unless local officials are prepared to fight the fucking National Guard and or US Army, there's sweet fuck all they can do about it; or at least, so the regime openly says.

Folks, I must confess that I am just as overwhelmed as you are trying to keep track of all the horrifying stories spewing out of the fascist Trumprenreich invasion of LA. But listening to the regime talk, watching Trump activate the California National guard to stop an insurrection we could all watch not happening on livestream, and seeing the LAPD gleefully join in with the nazis to argue stopping fascist ICE raids is a justification to revoke civil rights and engage in unconscionable security state violence, this doesn't sound like we're talking about a *hypothetical* fascist dictatorship anymore.

#Fascism #Trump #InvasionOfLA #LA #NationalGuard #InsurrectionAct #Dictatorship #PoliceState #ICE #LAPD

Hegseth Lays Out a Case for Troop Deployments in 'Any Jurisdiction in the Country'

"The standoff on the streets of Los Angeles," warned critics, "shows how truly eager Trump and his administration are to turn America's vast warmaking powers inward on the president's domestic foes."

^{jake-johnson (Common Dreams)}

If, as many local officials in California have suggested, Trump's goal was to create a powder keg that justifies even more authoritarian repression in LA, it's abundantly clear the regime and its Gestapo were working to create that power keg long before Trump illegally deployed what is now 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 US Marines to the extremely diverse sanctuary city. Take for example the assault, arrest, and smearing of Service Employees International Union President David Huerta during the Friday ICE raids in densely populated portions of LA and the surrounding area.

Whether the Gestapo pigs who assaulted Huerta on camera while the extremely popular labor leader was merely observing the unlawful Gestapo raids targeting workers in his city knew it or not, their fascist piggery was almost certainly the inciting moment for widespread nonviolent protests that broke out across the greater LA area; a day and a half later, Trump would be illegally deploying National Guard troops on the streets of downtown Los Angeles.

commondreams.org/news/david-hu…

'This Is What Fascism Looks Like': Beloved Labor Leader David Huerta Arrested

"The union included remarks from Huertas, who said, "We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice. This is injustice."

"This is about something much bigger" than his own arrest, said Huertas. "This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice."

According to a statement released by the Department of Homeland Security, approximately 44 individuals were "administratively arrested" in a series of raids at retail stores in the Los Angeles area, while one individual, identified as Huertas, was arrested "for obstruction" of federal officers.

"This is what fascism looks like," said California State Senator Scott Wiener, a Democrat. "Secret police raids. Injuring protesters. Arresting labor leaders."

As the article notes, Huertas is the president of a 750,000 member strong union in California that represents an absolutely massive number of Latinex workers in the state; if the feds were looking to avoid protests, this was the last guy they wanted to assault. Which makes the fact that they did so on camera, and then tried to lie about it later all the more revealing. This is from a Guardian update posted after Huertas was released on bond:

theguardian.com/us-news/live/2…

"In an affidavit supporting the criminal complaint against Huerta, an officer alleged that the union leader was arrested after another officer tried to push him out of the way of a law enforcement vehicle being blocked by protesters on a sidewalk. The officer who witnessed the incident claimed that he saw Huerta “push back, and in response, the officer pushed HUERTA to the ground. The officer and I then handcuffed HUERTA and arrested him.”

However, video of the arrest shared on social media by US attorney Bill Essayli seems to show that the officer shoved Huerta to the ground without being pushed by the labor leader. Huerta’s head was knocked into a concrete curb by the officers and he was hospitalized on Friday."

If you watch the video the government's own attorney shared, it is utterly impossible for the regime to credibly argue that Heurta is a violent protestor or criminal element, and even the regime's argument about "obstruction" seems to revolve around not stepping out the way for a truck full of kidnapped Angelino workers to be driven through; yet they're trying anyway. I believe that's because the facts don't matter to Trump, this arrest in particular merely provided him with the excuse he needed to declare war on LA and by extension, Governor Gavin Newsom.

If it seems like I'm laser focused on the Gestapo raids broadly targeting brown workers in LA on Friday, it's because this is unquestionably the inciting incident that lead to the Trump regime's ongoing fascist invasion of LA and contrary to Downmarket Mussolini and his minion's lies, the Trump administration was completely responsible for these inciting incidents. It was Kristi Noem who demanded vastly more migrant arrests, it was Stephen Miller who gave the order to target retail businesses and public districts, it was ICE officials who told the Gestapo to violate civil rights and start snatching people up for being brown, it was the Trump regime who targeted a sanctuary city in a sanctuary state run by the current 2028 Democrat nomination frontrunner for this spectacle, and it was Trumpenreich officials who responded to nonviolent protests by declaring a violent insurrection was occurring in LA to pave the way for Trump's deployment of US military forces to the city. They had the means, they created the opportunity, and the motives are transparently fascist; Trump snatched it up as an excuse to declare war on his perceived opposition immediately, as if it was planned that way, because it was.

#Fascism #LA #ICE #Trump #KristiNoem #StephenMiller #DHS #Invasion #USPol #Gestapo #Newsom #PoliceState #Nazis

Mayor says Los Angeles being used as ‘test case’ by federal government – as it happened

Mayor says ‘nothing warranted’ the intervention and that cannot ‘emphasize enough the level of fear and terror that is in Angelenos right now’ due to Ice raids

^{Kate Lamb (The Guardian)}