‘We will be notifying your family where to collect your remains, because we will kill you, graveyard dead,’ the sheriff eerily warned Thursday

A Florida sheriff issued a stark message to protesters planning to demonstrate this weekend against increasing ICE arrests nationwide.

Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey warned in a press conference Thursday that if any protesters “throw a brick, a firebomb, or point a gun,” they will be killed.

Protests against the Trump administration’s ongoing immigration crackdown have been popping up across the nation after they first erupted in Los Angeles on Friday.

They are expected to continue through the weekend, in alignment with the president’s birthday parade.

    • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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      21 hours ago

      The whole situation feels like a powder keg. The police / ICE / etc. are just pushing and pushing and eventually someone’s going to get shot, people will fight back, and it’ll turn into a shootout. I’m convinced that’s what Trump wants, so he can use it for justification.

      • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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        1 hour ago

        They’re basically setting things up such that something will happen. It’s more or less a nationwide, institutionalized police riot. And it’s entirely by design. They are wildly overreaching and doing indefensible, clearly illegal things because they want someone to get pushed too far and respond violently, and they’ll use that (frankly pretty rational, under the circumstances) pushback as carte blanche to take the gloves off and start shooting people.

        Tangentially, I hope that that’s the point where the national guard switches sides and starts shooting at ICE.

        • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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          20 hours ago

          Tangentially, I hope that that’s the point where the national guard switches sides and starts shooting at ICE.

          I feel like this is what it’s really going to come down to. If the military sides with Trump and turns on the citizenry, it’s going to be a massacre. If the military sides with the constitution and turns on the executive branch, they’ll be quickly overthrown.

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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            20 hours ago

            If the military lines up behind the fascists, they’ll be facing an insurgency the likes of which the world has never seen. You think Ukraine is being sneaky with their (granted, very impressive) covert ops in Russia? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

            • overthere@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              15 hours ago

              The hard dependence of the military on civilian supply chains coupled with the piss-poor maintenance of infrastructure and poor security around it would make the military sitting ducks if they sided against the citizenry.

              Then there’s the fact that we have more weapons in the hands of civilians, by orders of magnitude.

              Also, the creepy propaganda that we’ve been fed since childhood here has been about instilling pride and loyalty to our country and constitution, not some wannabe king (MAGA cult aside).

              • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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                11 hours ago

                So yes, but:

                The initial phase would be extremely bloody and a lot of civilians would be killed.

                But in the long run, one of the meaningful changes brought about by all that killing would be the formation of a hardcore, no-compromise mosaic of resistance organizations. And a lot of them will probably come from blue states. And a lot of those blue states have a lot of very smart people. And smart, angry people are very, very fucking effective - especially if they’re good at playing the long game.

                Or, more succinctly: I genuinely do hope the NG officers mutiny if they get orders to fire on civilians - or failing that, that the E4 mafia actually rises up and frags the compromised officers with prejudice, because that’s effectively the army rank-and-file in open rebellion.

                And, lest you be disheartened by the shitshow that recently went down at fort bragg: they had to curate those grunts. They vetted them for appearance (whiteness, and apparently also not being fat…?) and political allegiance (yes, really; yes, thats against regulations; no, it’s never happened before), so the (frankly tepid quantity of) cheering at orangeboi’s fascistic nationalism word salad shouldn’t, imo, be taken too seriously as a real barometer of the vibe in the military right now.

            • Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              19 hours ago

              This countries infrastructure is already held together by duct tape and glue, it’ll be very interesting when logistics falls apart due to constant active sabotage.

              • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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                11 hours ago

                Yeah, when you can knock out a bridge by whacking a few nearly rusted-out I-beams, you may want to rethink your strategic readiness vis a vis armed resistance movements

          • Miles O'Brien@startrek.website
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            20 hours ago

            Having been in the US military, I honestly think it would be about an even split between people who agree/don’t agree but will go along with orders vs disagree/undecided but unwilling to murder civilians.

            Of course it would never have been “all or nothing” but I think people would be surprised at where the split is and for what reasons people picked their side.

            And I’m being completely serious here: I fully believe members of the US military would carry out a nuclear strike on US soil, as long as it was one of “the woke states”, in order to make a point of “oppose us and we will kill all of you even if we die too”

            • oppy1984@lemm.ee
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              9 hours ago

              While I was medically disqualified from service (back injury) I grew up around the military and most of my friends and family either have served or are still active duty. If there was a military coup I would be cautiously optimistic. I would hope they would take power, calm things down, and then call for new elections…I would hope they would do that. In reality if they did perform a successful coup, I have a feeling that the power would be addicting and starship troopers would become a documentary.

              TL;DR, either way embrace the suck cuz we is fucked.

      • Geodad@lemmy.world
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        21 hours ago

        The best strategy would be to take out the leaders.

        This will not work for the military, however.

          • Geodad@lemmy.world
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            9 hours ago

            Yeah, but the US military is structured to avoid that problem.

            If you take out the brass, there’s still the NCOs that will direct operations.

    • DforDanger@leminal.space
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      19 hours ago

      Exactly. If we already know we outnumber them and they’ve already made it clear that their goal is to kill us, then why wouldn’t we kill them first?

      It only takes one person that has already lost so much and one Molotov to cause massive damage.