but as we've seen, none of these people are properly organized or working together the way they were when the USAID money flowed like wine.
They also don't have a stomach for blood. It's all fun and games when the worst outcome is arrests, some bruises or broken bones, a bunch of yelling and screaming, and maybe some jail time.
Something you don't hear people talk about much (because it's kinda private to begin with, and also not something the "organizers" like to publicize) is that seeing a person you know, even if only for the afternoon having met them at a protest, be killed in front of you absolutely fucks the average person up (this is the leading cause of PTSD among soldiers who've seen active combat). It's all "abstract" and "imaginary" until you see bright-red blood pooling around somebody's head on the pavement, or see a deployed airbag (which you know should be white) stained red from all the blood dripping off it, or see some brains laying on the sidewalk.
Some people aren't affected by this (they make good soldiers) and there's no question some of them are part of these organized protests, but I guarantee you a good number of people at Karen's Vehicular ICE-capades event this week will never dare attend a protest (or even run their mouths loudly) ever again, having personally witnessed a life end in a violent fashion
and seeing the aftermath. All the screaming, yelling, crying and chaos did nothing to bring her back to life. It didn't clean the blood off the airbag. It didn't put her face back together.
Those images will never leave those protesters, and most of them are ill-equipped to deal with them properly. They'll never protest again.
This is why it never takes much actual pushback to violent protest to put a stop to it. Rittenhouse proved it, Tiananmen Square proved it, and I suspect this incident will prove it too. Seeing it makes it real. Seeing it in person makes it real and stays with you forever. The fantasy of the "underdog Rebels fighting an unjust Empire will ultimately always win" is bullshit. Many actually-oppressive regimes win, at least for a very long time. Governments that
aren't engaged in tyranny are immune to anti-tyranny violence, because everybody sane recognizes the lie and the government never loses public support.
ICE just needs to kill a few more and release gory footage, and that should quell all but the worst of the psychopaths, who'll be easy enough to identify and round up once it comes to that.
