this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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[–] peteyestee@feddit.org 105 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (4 children)

It's not even new. They did this to people during 2020 protests. They drove up in mini vans jumped out, grabbed people and pulled them into the mini van and drove off.

There used to be footage of it but I haven't been able to find it. I think it was happening in Portland and Seattle. At the time there was live stream footage. And it usually happened later in the night as people were cooling off and dispersing.

America hasn't been what it preaches for half century at least.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/evelyn-bassi-illegal-abudction-portland-protests-1357279/

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/feds-unmarked-vans-portland/

The video snopes talks about I saw. Possibly even live streaming at the time because I was hooked on watching all that. Iirc it was a bronze gold colored minivan and the sliding door opened and 1 or two guys got out masked and just grabbed the person and pulled the protestor in and drove off.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 29 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Am from Seattle.

Yep, this happened in Seattle and Portland multiple times, just basically black bagging people into unmarked vans by... presumably, plain clothes / "off duty" / half kitted out, face obscured, no visible ID cops.

They typically did this black bagging to people who had not actually broken any laws, but were so effective at keeping protester morale high, and/or were simply causing overwhelming masses of people to defend them from, in many cases, literally entirely unprovoked police assault/brutality.

Most of these were the people they wanted to removr but knew that no charges would actually stick because they had nothing, and then release them 24-72 hours later.

Sometimes they'd black bag / white van people who had actually crossed the threshold into doing something they could actually charge you for, but most of the time, nope.

I know that in Portland the cops actively decided to act as body guards for fascists, and look the other way when they attacked people.

In Seattle, ... the cops intentionally started so much shit, assaulting nonviolent people, well we uh... we literally forced them to abandon their major police office in Capitol Hill.

As in, we seiged them. Surrounded the building for days. Eventually they burned a bunch of records and made a stealthy withdrawal in the dead of night.

That police center is only a few blocks from where the 'CHAZ' would be set up.

Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

As in, we literally drove out the local police and are thus now autonomous.

... We've still never seen the all the actual communications between the police chief and mayor, other internal police records... because the police destroyed them. They destroyed them because they almost certainly outlined numerous violations of the law in terms of orders issued, tactics used, illegal arrests/detainments, bullshit 'overtime' overpayments and other financial shenanigans, crimes committed by the police and probably all the way up to the police chief and mayor engaging in a criminal conspiracy.

[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 1 week ago

I feel like this isn't talked about enough... You guys are badasses for that shit.

[–] ArmoredThirteen@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 week ago

I was in Seattle during this. Word was people got snatched here but I don't recall seeing hard evidence myself. Portland though they for sure got caught kidnapping protesters

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[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 62 points 1 week ago (3 children)

To be fair, you're not supposed to accept it. But the fascists sure would like it if you did.

[–] TranscendentalEmpire@lemmy.today 20 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Yep, a higher percentage of Americans support trump than weimar republic Germans ever supported Hitler. Fascist don't have to engage in electoralism once they securely seize the power of the pulpit.

I'm done caring about America as a whole, I'm creating my mutual defense/support networks with friends and family and preparing for the worse. Democrats are still stuck in thirdway politics as the Reichstag burns to the ground.

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (13 children)

The way Hitler took over with such a small support was by dividing the remaining citizens into smaller groups. Unity is our most powerful asset in resistance.

Trump has also failed to obtain abject loyalty of the military, which will prevent him from control by force.

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[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 53 points 1 week ago (5 children)

If you see Ice agents covering their faces, call 911 and report a masked man with a gun.

[–] Opisek@lemmy.world 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Please forgive my ignorance but isn't the police force in USA known for its violence and profiling? Wouldn't they be "in" on it, too?

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago (6 children)

ICE isn't alerting local law enforcement of what's happening. They get a call about a masked gunman and they'll show up.

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[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Lie and say they looked black so police show up faster and use their guns before asking to identify.

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[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Cops are there in minutes when seconds count.

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[–] minorkeys@lemmy.world 46 points 1 week ago (7 children)

What is anyone supposed to do? All the checks and balances that are supposed to safeguard against this are non-functional, by choice. The only option is censored from even being mentioned and it means possibly fucking dying.

[–] ftbd@feddit.org 18 points 1 week ago (14 children)

Aren't there a lot more civilian gun owners than law enforcement? I thought that was the idea behind the second amendment

[–] Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 26 points 1 week ago

I thought that was the idea behind the second amendment

No, the idea was that a good militia is all you need to keep a country safe, and that a federal army is a tool for government oppression. That's what the writers saw all over Europe at the time, so they made sure the fix that in their new country.

And then everyone pretended that wasn't the case

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[–] breecher@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)
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[–] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 38 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

We aren't supposed to accept that law enforcement just does as it pleases, ignoring our civil rights and protections and donning standard identification markers so that each officer can be uniquely identified. But this is not all that new.

Most of the time we don't know we're being kidnapped by g-goons or the police are ignoring our rights until they're doing it, and we can only hope we get our day in court to challenge the arrest.

Since the development of DEA, the US courts have been carving out more and more exceptions to the fourth and fifth amendments of the Constitution of the United States, and by even the 90s (with some big thanks to RICO laws / rulings) we are no longer policed by consent, but by force, because there's no one around with more firepower to stop them.

This was only noticed by minorities, especially in the 1990s with the crackdowns against street gangs and feral youths. At that point we were seeing ur-fascism feature #8 ( The enemy is both too strong and too weak ) where street gangs are described as feral youths who can't be negotiated with, while the same gang is an international organized-crime syndicate.

Then the 9/11 attacks happened, and the PATRIOT act was signed, and DHS was formed, and we noticed that some Americans, typically Muslim Arab-Americans, but sometimes Persian-Americans, sometimes Sikhs...really anyone who looked too middle-eastern, got disappeared by LGMs (dudes who look like cops but without personal or department identification, sometimes without the yellow POLICE plates), and rendered abroad to black sites to get tortured. But much of the US overlooked it because we were sore about WTC1 and WTC2.

(some of us screamed like Cassandra that this was a big move towards fascist autocracy, but I digress)

When Obama took over FBI was searching hard for terrorists in US borders but couldn't find many, and had to invent some (Remember Kellyanne Conway's Bowling Green Massacre? In the actual Bowling Green event no-one died but two refugees were gaslighted by FBI with a budget into doing some inoffensive para-terrorist work, and entrapped into terrorism charges. They're still serving time.)

By then, our massive surveillance state was in operation and all of the US' internet traffic went through NSA, and when there were Islamist militants who were thinking about a plot to suicide bomb an American asset, we'd send a predator drone to literally burn his village down: the CIA drone program killed 50 civilians -- including grandmothers and children-- for every person-of-interest neutralized. We learned that while video games don't make kids violent, making real-world warfare like a video game still meant the operator squeezing the trigger got PTSD. US drone programs had a turnover rate about as bad as German einsatzgruppen (death squads who mass executed villages for betrayal or harboring Jews).

So in 2016 when Trump won, Cassandra over here screamed about the Obama administration disabling all the mass intelligence state and surveillance state assets before Trump could get a hold of them.

We got a break, as Trump pissed off CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, so they weren't talking for a while, but then, somehow, when he had a Heritage Foundation plan and staffers who knew what structures were in place, we elected him President of the United States for a second time. Even despite his insurrection charges (which were stalled until moot).

So yeah, the previous administrations, knowing this was going to be a problem gave the Trump regime is very own SS / Brownshirt secret police (who behave a lot like the Sicherheitsdienst under Reinhard Heydrich) complete with a concentration camp system that is overflowing due to purge quotas.

During the 2020 George Floyd protests, there was a move to abolish ICE who had been hunting undocumented folk and were sent in to brutalize the demonstrations, which only pissed off more Americans, and there was a movement to Abolish ICE (what was always just a paramilitary department to serve the will and interests of the current administration, id est, a secret police).

We are now suffering the consequences of having failed to follow through.

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[–] 474D@lemmy.world 34 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The recipe has been in play for over a decade, probably more. People can't stand up if they have nothing to stand on. Everyone is struggling. What the fuck is fascism if you have to concentrate on just surviving. That's the whole play. They give us just enough to get by so we can live with no time to think. It's not denial, it's an orchestrated structure. The system isn't flawed, it's working as intended

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[–] pyre@lemmy.world 26 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (8 children)

funny how you never hear from the "cold dead hands" guys when tyranny actually happens

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[–] Gates9@sh.itjust.works 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Generally people in America don’t get organized until there’s a disaster. That’s one of the lessons of the Great Depression/New Deal. Not the most optimal way to maintain democracy. It’s not really “maintenance” if you wait for the thing to break and then fix it.

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[–] pulsewidth@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (4 children)
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[–] Enfors@ttrpg.network 21 points 6 days ago (9 children)

Is it legal in the US to shoot people who are trying to kidnap you?

I mean, anyone can go around claiming to be law enforcement or ICE or whatever, but with no badge or ID, how are people supposed to know that this isn't a gang trying to trafic them?

[–] Nalivai@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago

In vast majority of states there is a stand-your-ground law in place, which means you're explicitly allowed to use deadly force if you reasonably believe that you're defending yourself from a violent crime, and in minority there is a duty to retreat while outside of your home or workplace, which means that you still are allowed to use deadly force, but you have to try to retreat first, and only use force if you are reasonably sure that you can't run away.
Kidnapping by a group of people in plain clothes in an unmarked van is explicitly stated as an example of a case where use of deadly force is permitted by law.

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[–] rumba@lemmy.zip 19 points 1 week ago (3 children)

How long will people

The Gestapo could be hauling them away in cuffs and putting them away in camps and some will just go "why is this happening to me? there must be some mistake"

Anyone who is still on the fence is either only tuned into propaganda or is incapable of reasoning.

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[–] needthosepylons@lemmy.world 19 points 1 week ago (10 children)

I mean America is a fascist regime. And you know who support fascism? Fascists. So I guess most fascists are kinda OK with what's happening.

That's not denial, that's full endorsement.

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[–] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 18 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How long? My guess is that masked unmarked people that don't even verbally identify themselves will be shot at (and killed?) by someone as they're walking down the street when law enforcement are attempting to take into custody. My guess is that this shooter will either be killed by the unmarked and masked law enforcement or that person will be arrested and charged.

This is the point when all of the "every day carry" gun folks (and there are a lot of these) will then be faced with the question when they could every use their gun to defend themselves and not be facing charges themselves through no fault of their own.

I think thats when it finally tips enough people into the category to be against trump's actions.

[–] DoubleSpace@lemm.ee 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

To avoid armed targets, they have been calling people into court hearings, then they drop charges which allows people to leave. On the way out of the courthouse feds will abduct them.

It's pretty brilliant. If people become too scared to show up to court, then they get a real judicial warrant which allows them forcibly go into homes.

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In context it looks like a goon squad kidnapping a man.

[–] Rooty@lemmy.world 16 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's called "disappearing someone" and it was something that was supposedly done by dictators and tyrants.

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[–] misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com 15 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Third term? I'd be glad if we came to terms with it by his 6th term.

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 15 points 1 week ago (6 children)

I am fully prepared for writing off this entire fucking generation.

We're going to enter dictatorship, tyranny, wars without end, mass waves of poverty, degradation of all our comforts and rights, and techno-feudalism and the average American literally- Does. Not. Care.

This is the way the pendulum swings sometimes. A massive group of people have to literally fucking rot in misery for no reason before their kids grow up and start anew with renewed energy and drive. I know this generation certainly doesn't have it. Let's not be fooled by millions of people turning out for celebratory marches on a single weekend. We all know that won't do anything and it will be a miracle if we can muster up enough group momentum to even get that again.

[–] witten@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (3 children)

You may be prepared to give up, but the rest of us aren't. I hope you find your hope before it's too late.

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 11 points 1 week ago (1 children)

going on a half-century and seeing everyone make the same stupid mistakes over and over, seeing generations not only not pass down wisdom but actively abandon the next generation over and over, it makes it hard to have hope.

I respect and support anyone trying to make change, I will continue to do what I can in my situation, but I don't have expectations anymore. At a point I'll be retreating to the woods with my loved ones to close out the world and spend more time gardening than scrolling.

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[–] jacksilver@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The guys so old, I'm not sure hell make it through this term. He's clearly not well, but that's what makes this all crazier. Dems at least knew to kick out their senile old man, how the Republicans are okay with this is wild.

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[–] Puddinghelmet@lemmy.world 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Pull ICE masks, I would let them shoot me just to protect the person they're abducting, fckn nazi's, u wanna shoot an american citizen and make me a martyr? be my guess and see what'll happen

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[–] Jhogenbaum@leminal.space 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

What pic are they referencing?

[–] ameancow@lemmy.world 32 points 1 week ago

All of them. Every picture of ICE agents and many law-enforcement personnel in the US are now hiding their faces as standard practice and we all just kinda shrugged and took it as given, because the dudes on the cover of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 83 wear face masks so it's just what badass dudes do, right??

[–] brachiosaurus@mander.xyz 12 points 1 week ago (5 children)

The same way they have been in denial until now. Why did you wait for trump to comes to terms with it?

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