Lisa Needham at Public Notice makes an important observation about the masked marauders terrorizing the streets of America — for all their cos-playing swagger, they’re the most fearful, delicate li’l fellas in the country. She writes:
The Trump administration only wants the most formidable warriors, real stone-cold-killer types, to join his war on immigrants.
They should be white, of course, and ideally ‘roided up. These guys are the sort that can take a punch and not even blink, the hardest MFers you’re ever going to see. Just look at all the sizzle reels DHS is putting out, and you can feel the toughness through the screen, right? And you just know that if those dudes want to take you down, you’re going down.
Now, it’s not at all unusual for authoritarians to treat even the smallest pushback on law enforcement officers as an attack on their authority and an excuse to be rabidly violent. But that’s not quite what the administration is doing. In public, they want everyone to know that these thugs they’ve deployed to terrorize cities are battle-hardened and impervious to pain. But on the other hand, they are also such delicate flowers that if they are, say, lightly grazed by a sandwich, they are entitled to justice because of the horrific assault they have suffered.
Call it tough guy in the streets and widdle guy in the sheets (of paper for court filings).
This piece was spurred by the testimony of the officer who claimed to have felt threatened by a Subway sandwich. The man who threw the sandwich was acquitted of charges yesterday for obvious reasons. The case was a joke. But it does highlight what Needham points out above and which I’ve gotten thought to myself as I watch the footage of a group of ICE and CPB agents decked out in full kit military gear swarm one lone day laborer or a woman driving her car to wrestle them to the ground, grind their faces into the pavement and otherwise brutalize them. The masks and the violence are obviously overkill.
But when anyone files a complaint about all this they are met with denials that any of this is happening or the excuse that the agents are in great danger and fearful for their lives requiring them to use excessive force to protect themselves. Even the masks are ostensibly needed to protect them from reprisals from the antifa terrorist commie vermin against whom they are apparently helpless.
Cops in this country have never worn masks. They haven’t felt the need to be decked out like they are invading Falluja. But these big, macho tough ICE and CPB men are so terrified of the people they are terrorizing that they must act like animals under color of law and can’t show their identities. They’re cowards.