admiralchimpspoliticalthoughts:
\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nI have been rolling my eyes at a lot of the \u201cICE will be the spearpoint of the new Trumpian reich\u201d stuff coming out of the left recently but this\u2026 is actually something worth keeping an eye on.
\n\u201cThe Government\u201d is not a monolithic whole but a semi-integrated collection of squabbling feifdoms and \u201cThe FBI is the agency in charge of federal domestic policing/repression\u201d is a descriptive statement, not a normative one. At various points in American history the equivalent role\u2019s been filled by the US Marshals, the US Postal Inspection Service, Treasury Department agents - the Secret Service and \u201crevenuers\u201d presaging the modern BATF. For a while in the Gilded Age it was the Pinkerton National Detective Agency acting directly under leading capitalists with the government cut out of the loop entirely.
\nThe FBI\u2019s 20th century preeminence was not foreordained but a consequence of bureaucratic maneuvering in reaction to specific moments and events \u2013 the anarchist wave of the early 1900s; WWI; the First Red Scare; Prohibition; the early automobile-era motorized bandit gangs; the Kansas City Massacre (before which the FBI didn\u2019t carry guns or make arrests); WWII; the rise of TV (and J. Edgar Hoover\u2019s cooption of same); the Second Red Scare; COINTELPRO; RFK\u2019s anti-Mafia crusade and the wrap-up of white ethnic urban machine politics; Cold War cocaine \u201880s Miami; the 1993 Waco seige (starting as a backfired ATF attempt at profile-raising and positioning in the face of Clinton-era budget trimming).
\nAnd now, with the FBI and the old-line three letter agencies at loggerheads with the elected executive and his party in Congress, a young upstart agency known for its enthusiastic loyalty to said executive, in the middle of a massive staffing-up, bids to expand its capabilities and portfolio\u2026
\nthat\u2019s exactly the scenario under which things might change
\nYou know what this could be like, if we\u2019re sticking with the Third Reich metaphor? The Night of the Long Knives
\nIf Trump declared that the FBI was plotting a coup against him and sent ICE to arrest key FBI officials, and they picked up Mueller, some sanctuary city mayors, and other political opponents in the process too, and all those people just disappeared into Guantanamo or some other secret overseas prison, would anyone be able to do anything about it? If they released a bunch of salacious fake material showing FBI officials conspiring with foreign powers to remove Trump - if they did the same thing as the Steele dossier but harder, basically - and then tortured the captives into signing confessions and turning on each other to confirm every scandalous detail? You know how Trump loves torture. I think it could be done. And who would dare to get in Trump\u2019s way after that? Only a handful of high-ranking administration & ICE figures would have to really be in on that conspiracy and it\u2019d all happen in a matter of days. There\u2019d be all kinds of rumors about what really happened but no one would know anything for sure and there\u2019d be enough surface plausibility to the official story that the public would accept it. Congress and the courts would have little choice but to retroactively legalize the president\u2019s actions.
\nThe other thing he could do would be to create a massive paramilitary organization under ICE control and send them into the streets - the way I would do it would be to declare that this organization was the\u00a0\u2018well-regulated militia\u2019 in the Second Amendment and therefore anyone who was part of it would have unrestricted gun ownership rights but everyone else\u2019s gun rights would be heavily curtailed, so basically everyone with an AR-15 who didn\u2019t want to have to turn it in would have to join the goon squad and become a nominal federal law enforcement officer and spend one weekend a month and two weeks a year singing Trump loyalty songs and searching house to house for illegals, that\u2019s one of the few ways I can really see the problem of millions of undocumented immigrants already living here being dealt with without giving any of them amnesty
\nAnd sure, this would probably cause all kinds of civil disorder and riots in the streets and whatnot but that\u2019s a feature, not a bug, the administration would be able to take whatever powers they wanted at that point to bring back law and order, and millions of Trump\u2019s opponents would be imprisoned and have their voting rights taken from them
\nOf course, you\u2019d wind up with millions of undesirables in overcrowded prison camps at that point with nowhere to go, and we\u2019d probably be getting into several major wars as well about that time, so what protocol would ICE adopt to cut down on expenditures? Hmm
\nShit, I wrote this thinking\u00a0\u2018haha what would it look like if Trump really did the exact same thing as Hitler, wouldn\u2019t that be crazy\u2019 but this actually sounds like it could happen\u2026shit
\nI don\u2019t hold with the \u201cNight of the Long Knives\u201d stuff here, but the reality of our federal agencies all scrambling for power, funding, and jurisdictional territory is accurate.\u00a0 The frightening lack of accountability to the public is also accurate.
\nFor the ICE to become the leading enforcer and top funded agency they would need access to intelligence gathered by other agencies and be seen as a main intelligence gatherer.\u00a0 I can totally see them seeking to become an intelligence agency in order to get more funding and expand their power.
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yeah that\u2019s a decent paperback plot where everything gets done in a coherent series of events for 220 pages but nah
if\n you want a Reich parallel it\u2019s the way the SS outmaneuvered the SA less\n in wetwork than in grinding years of staffing, lobbying, knife-fighting for budgets, forming branches to dominate need-spaces \nas they became visible, and went on to swallow the state and federal police \nforces, and with the Waffen-SS was taking on the Heer
and part of that\n was organization, the Nazi state was continuous with the preexisting party which \nwas more or less continuous with the freikorps which were continuous \nwith the Prussian Army and civil service, which were of course the most effective \norganizations the modern world had seen and what all our schools, \nmilitaries, and governments have been modeled after ever since
of \ncourse the Heer was just as continuous, and a lot of what got gleichschaltunged, it \ncould be productive to understand post-WWI Germany as a protracted succession crisis
and\n yeah Trump doesn\u2019t have anything near that level of coordinated \nstructure, the thing about Kushner losing clearance the other week is \nthat he\u2019s depending on an immediate family structure and even then that \nstructure\u2019s losing factional fights inside his own palace,
I\u2019ve \nsaid before and I stick with, I think Trump will move things people \nthought couldn\u2019t be moved but his main effect will be power \ndissipating and decentralizing to more autonomous local actors
So \nICE might claw its way up in the next decade or two \u2013 or might not! \nRemember when Dubya\u2019s term suggested Blackwater was going to be the next\n big thing? They\u2019re still around in Chinese Africa on a plot arc that might loop back at \nsome point but they\u2019re nowhere near central to anything.
If you \nwant a short-term ooga booga, it\u2019s all the rural and college and \nweight-gym white groups, not even for risk of them going around jumping \nthe browns, but because they\u2019re the exact types \u2013 young, angry, \nmarginal lower middle classers, already a bit tested and esprited de \ncorps \u2013 that get recruited as heavies when labor or tenant movements \nstart up (which I suspect they shortly may)
the way I\u2019ve seen \nCharlottesville dynamics drag on over months even starting with a \ncollege town-level left base makes me think they could probably hold \nanything in a rural area or a third- or lower-tier city, anywhere that\u2019s\n got property developers and car dealership owners already in the habit \nof spending duffel bag cash on recruiting college sports stars