I know some of y’all are new to revolutionary politics. Some of you in the recent past may have opposed some abolitionists-led organizing efforts to deconstruct the carceral state and construct a more liberated and just future for all. You may not have understood the calls to defund and abolish unconstitutional police departments.
Some of you were tear-gassed right in front of and alongside useless CPD officers and still think they deserve the largest share of the city’s public safety budget. Some of you are still waiting for the police to come to your rescue and save you from the bad guys.
Don’t hold your breath.
The movement to defund and abolish prisons is largely law abiding in its pursuit of policy changes that aim to supervise, democratize or downsize police agencies.
Trump demands loyalty and disregards legality. It’s a “legal insurrection” when a judge or court rules against their administration, according to Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.
In May, Miller ordered senior officials at ICE to do whatever necessary to make at least 3,000 arrests of migrants — regardless of criminality — per day to carry out Trump’s promise of mass deportations. As they tell it, anyone opposed to such an exponential expansion of the carceral state is an insurrectionist. That’s intentional. It’s another dog whistle.
The administration’s framing of political and ideological dissidents and all people who are critical of the government as anti-American insurrectionists and domestic terrorists is a war strategy.
If he invokes the Insurrection Act, Trump can circumvent legal barriers and deploy the U.S. military to Chicago, Portland and whatever other American city he chooses with little room for legal objections or injunctions.
The last time the Insurrection Act was used to send federalized National Guard troops to a city without the state governor’s request or consent was in 1965 after Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama when state troopers, local police and white mobs beat John Lewis and other civil rights activists on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. They marched to Montgomery to protest police violence and Black voter disenfranchisement.
The televised terror that ensued shocked the country. President Lyndon B. Johnson sent guardsmen to deter police and mob violence when thousands of protesters led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gathered again to march across the bridge to the steps of the state’s capitol. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed shortly thereafter.
President George H.W. Bush sent the California National Guard to Los Angeles at Gov. Pete Wilson’s request in 1992 to quell riots there after the acquittal of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers who beat Rodney King nearly to death. Racist police violence is always the common denominator. It’s always the underlying issue.
The troops currently in Illinois who’ve temporarily been ordered to disengage were “employed to protect ICE and other federal personnel who are performing federal functions, including the enforcement of federal law, and to protect federal property,” according to U.S. Northern Command, operating under the Department of War to organize and execute homeland defense and civil support missions.
To that end, we should expect to see the guardsmen federalized under Title 10 authority setting up security parameters and employing more military-style crowd control strategies like deploying chemical irritants and flash grenades and shooting pepper balls and rubber bullets to discourage and disperse peaceful protestors.
