Oh right.
(Another basic truth about our world that I hadn’t thought about much, but that makes total sense in a way that leaves me a bit embarrassed that I’d never thought about it in exactly that way before.)
Star Wars (1977)
(In the first week or so after its release. Third grade me had no idea what the movie was about and had his mind TOTALLY blown away)
So "culty", but soon to be Very Much NOT Culty.
(Also why I've seen pretty much every Star Wars movie / series ever since.)
In the summer between 3rd and 4th grade while on vacation in Philly, my mom, who had been dragging us all over the place while my dad was at a convention, told my dad to take us to a movie so she could get a break. He found "some science fiction film" that had opened that week. It was 1977.
We haven’t seen this kind of confident religiosity on the left in a long time. This is a guy so fluent in the substance, themes, upshots of his tradition that he can’t help put draw on it to frame the message of the campaign itself. It’s something close to a perfect alchemy of faith and politics.
Well, except no, they really can’t.
Real housing requires infrastructure that warehouses don’t have. To put a whole lot of people into a city block and keep them healthy, you need lots of plumbing, lots of HVAC, lots of windows, etc. They’re just not worried about the “keeping them healthy” part.
I spent the morning at the DOJ looking at the unredacted Epstein files. Here are my initial thoughts and what I’ve found, so far.
We still don't know the names of the ICE agents who killed Gonzàlez behind the wheel of his car outside Chicago in September.
They were unmasked in this BWC footage from Franklin Park police.
If you have any information at all about these men—please text us on Signal at unraveled.66
Garcia is holding up a chart that shows how the Trump administration made "ICE the highest funded law enforcement agency in the history of the United States" and says this funding has been used "to terrorize, disfigure, and in some cases kill" US citizens.
Headline "Trump Drops Demand for Cash from Harvard After Stiff Resistance."
Veritas.
Waiting for the "aNtiFA rAddYcalLz R uSinG kiDz aS hYoomaN sHeeldZ" comment coming in a Homeland Security press release in 3... 2... 1...
I think the comma is provided by the dark blue of the brim of his cap.
Chicago represents!
Jesus, this is a brutal minute.
Readers should take this knowledge, combined with the knowledge that of course Bovino's brand of fascism is not something foreign to us, but woven into the fabric of American history, and act accordingly.
🧵/end
Bovino in the center of a group of ICE officers, wearing a dark green long overcoat that No, Doesn't look Nazi at All. :/
=============
Fable number two, or What Will Happen to Gregory Bovino?
This particular fable hasn't been written yet. Any resemblance to fable number one is purely coincidental, except in cases where it is not coincidental in the slightest.
🧵/9
The SA still existed, but many of its functions were transferred to the much more "respectable" and "reformed" Schutzstaffel ("protection squadron", abbreviated as the SS) and the Geheime Staatspolezei ("secret state police", or Gestapo, for short)
🧵/8
The plotting cumulated in a massive leadership purge on June 30, 1934, known as the Night of the Long Knives, when Rôhm and more than a hundred other enemies of the state were arrested and assassinated.
🧵/7
However, behind the scenes it was another story. Because of complicated rivalries and power struggles, people like Himmler and Göring convinced Hitler that Röhm was a threat to his regime.
🧵/6
In less than a year, they had grown to be an embarrassment to the regime. Orders were given, the random arrests stopped, and many, esp. in international academic and diplomatic circles, were reassured that Hitler had reigned in his fanatics and was on his way to becoming a "normal" world leader. 🧵/5
Local SA units would hold rallies, beat up people they thought were not respecting their authority, and even jail many, including some visiting American citizens who failed to use the Hitler salute when a parade passed by, without charge.
🧵/4
The SA had evolved from a loose group of ex soldiers and more militant supporters that provided security (and got into street fights with the Communists) at Nazi rallies in the 1920s. By the time Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, they were a fully functioning paramilitary police force.
🧵/3
In 1933, the main enforcer of Hitler's newly elected government was a paramilitary police force known as the SA. (Sturmabteilung, literally "Storm Department" but also known in English as the Storm Troopers or the Brownshirts)
🧵/2
A black and white photograph of SA chief Ernst Röhm, a slightly pudgy man in his.. thirties? wearing a moderately ill fitting German army uniform of the time. (Note the leather bandolier belt going diagonally across his chest)
Photo of CBP chief Gregory Bovino outside the Dirksen Federal Building in Chicago last fall, giving what's pretty clearly a Nazi-inspired salute for the cameras after appearing in court to answer for excessive brutality in ICE operations.
Two fables to share with you this morning:
Fable number one, or why doesn't anyone know who Ernst Röhm was anymore?
(a 🧵)
Duuuude, that's me on the drums!
Well, one of the drums, anyway. A silver lining in [everything everywhere] is that you can come with an instrument, bump into a random group of people, and get woven in to a moment of utter joy in the midst of it all.
Most people still don't suck. Good reminder.
At the end of the day, the Black Lives Matter era was about whether people should be killed in the street, and lots of people decided yeah and put those little blue flags on their cars. It spread to everyone because it stopped for no one.
Only if we let it.
I’m going to respectfully disagree. Unless your personal health is at risk because of past trauma, we ALL need to watch, and be traumatized, by it.
This is what America is becoming, and unless we’re happy about it, we need to internalize exactly what happened so that we can’t pretend otherwise.
Apparently, this happened around 9:15 central. Setting a timer for how long it takes before someone from the regime steps behind a microphone to tell us we did not see what we just just saw.
Screenshot from a video showing 4 to 6 ice goons piling on top of someone before one of them clearly shoots him in the head. In the shot, the dead victim’s feet and legs are visible on the street behind a parked car as two ice thugs stand watching. One of them still has his gun trained on the body.
WTAF America.
