Trans Disarmament, National Guard Deployments, & More
A sustained thank you for sticking with me while I take some time away to work on other projects.
I want to bring up a couple pretty dire things today. The first, as you can read on the tin, is the Trump administration's signaling that they want to strip away the right to bear arms by trans people. If you are the last, sad, lost dem subscribed to this letter, let me be clear about something: way more cisgender white boys shoot people than trans folk do. We're a country of guns before people, and in that ecosystem you can find a sample set of virtually every sort of person who has committed a mass shooting–trans people included. The numbers, however, overwhelmingly favor racist white cis-men. Attempts for disarmament by the right have been in the mail for a while, but this does not change the fact that it is a grave, grave danger that it has made it this far. I am pro-gun. I'd love not to be. But if our opponents are armed–and they very much are–we should be as well. We will not vote our way out of this. Learn how to defend yourself and your community. It is much harder to take away your weapons than it is to prevent you from getting them in the first place–so get on it.
Next comes Trump's continued insistence that he will deploy the National Guard to various cities around the country. On the docket, after DC–which continues to see troops and federal police of various stripes pestering locals–is Chicago. While DC's mayor, Muriel Bowser, has capitulated to Trump and effectively welcomed the presence of troops on the streets, Chicago's Brandon Johnson and J.B. Pritzker have pushed back, stating with no equivocation that this move is purely to get soldiers on blue streets, harassing people of color. Crime, as you well know, has fallen over the past few years, and that includes in Trump's targeted cities. Also on the list are Baltimore–a city that has seen pretty incredible success in diverting funds from cops to alternative programs–and Portland. We can probably expect some stiff resistance in Portland.
Should troops and ICE come to your city in force, look to examples of resistance we've already seen: in Los Angeles, citizens regularly turned out in the streets to push back against the incursion; in DC, people proactively warned others of checkpoints and patrolled public spaces to ensure everyone knew their rights. If you aren't up for doing the former, maybe you can do the latter. If you can't do the latter, you can always drum up leaflets or fliers to be posted around your city so that awareness is raised. You can also try to work comms, spreading the message when locations of troops or ICE are dropped, so that others can mobilize.
I also wanted to mention a whole other front in Trump's moves toward dictatorship. The US military killed 11 people who were suspected of smuggling drugs via boat in the Caribbean. There was no attempt at apprehension, no hostility from the people onboard the boat. Just an unprovoked murder of eleven people for a suspected crime, carried out by the military. The cover here, flimsy though it may be, is that the people aboard were Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the administration recently labeled a terrorist organization. Racist bullshit, of course, as with most things the US does. This is summary execution for a supposed criminal offense conducted by the US military.
If you've been paying attention, you might immediately have brought to mind that Stephen Miller recently called the Democratic Party a domestic extremist organization. Putting those two headlines together is disconcerting--to say that groundwork is being laid to effectively outlaw an opposition party, however ineffective they already were, is I think an optimistic view of what's going on. We don't need to guess at what's happening, really, as we have history to guide us. This administration is not going to abdicate power; Trump is not going to die of old age and Vance suddenly shape up. They will continue to gather strength, peel away rights, endanger marginalized peoples, and gain more and more control over the public. That will keep happening until they meet sufficient resistance or the country itself collapses–and even then you can expect a tight grip from whatever remains of a government are left.