Are they limiting their raids to be within 'blue' states / districts to minimise the collateral damage their reputation may receive from those sympathetic to this cause?
Chicago was 77% Democrat in the last election.
These behaviours won't stop if there's no blowback from the MAGA base.
Blue states and heavily-Democratic urban areas are also likely to have explicit local laws preventing local police authorities from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement, since whether it is good or bad to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement is a central point of disagreement in partisan American politics right now. For the same partisan reasons involving political support for illegal immigrants, there are probably more illegal immigrants physically residing in heavily-Democratic urban areas and in blue states. So if you're federal immigration enforcement and you want to mass-arrest illegal immigrants, blue states and districts are where you're gonna be inclined to conduct raids anyway.
In any case, visibly arresting illegal immigrants is a core political demand of the MAGA base, and they eagerly want to see more raids like this one. The fact that prominent figures from Democratic-party aligned institutions like prestige news media and academia (which certainly describes Paul Krugman) strenuously object to these raids and think they are deplorable is not a critique any member of the MAGA base will take seriously. There's not gonna be blowback from the MAGA base over the government doing precisely the thing that the base wants and that their political enemies hate.
> strenuously object to these raids and think they are deplorable is not a critique any member of the MAGA base will take seriously. There's not gonna be blowback from the MAGA base over the government doing precisely the thing that the base wants and that their political enemies hate.
Every day MTG’s “national divorce” sounds like the only real solution. These people live in entirely different realities and despise each other. Insane to believe you can manage a functional country that way.
Too bad it’s a political and logistical pipe dream.
Even if there was somehow a way to do a "national divorce" without a bloody civil war (no chance), who gets to keep the kids? (nukes)
I worry that as bad as things are, at least the blue state resistance (pathetic as it is) provides SOME restraint on the red states/MAGA's worst instincts.
Even if there was a way to divide the country evenly without dealing with the urban/rural divide, I have to imagine the first thing the new separate Red America do is start invading it's neighbours, if not outright nuking parts of the world.
There is no way that a breakup of the most powerful empire in the history of the world, with military bases around the entire planet, can happen without severe consequences for the rest of us.
> Are they limiting their raids to be within 'blue' states / districts to minimise the collateral damage their reputation may receive from those sympathetic to this cause?
As of right now, it's pure agitation. They're pointing the guns into protest zones (not "blue states" really, though that's obviously where they concentrate) hoping things get out of control. At that stage, it becomes easier to paint political enemies as military ones. And you'll start seeing the use of state power against sitting legislators and judges, etc...
You can't dismantle democracy all at once. The military[1] won't follow those orders[2]. But if you create a culture where "antifa" or whoever is actually shooting stuff and blowing things up, the moral calculus becomes an easier sell. They aren't "doing a coup" by ejecting the governor of Washington State (or whatever), they're just defending America.
[1] At the end of the day, remember that authoritarianism is always executed by the military. The figurehead may come from somewhere else originally (like New York real estate development in this case), but when the regime is based on the use of force it is always run, ultimately, by the users of force.
[2] Because the military aren't MAGA, not yet. They're career officers who built careers in an existing bureaucracy and, all other things being equal, see value in that bureaucracy and don't want to tear it down.
Yes, if you look back at Trump's reaction to J6, you can tell he reveled in the violence that day. Pausing and rewinding Fox News to watch the crowds while not picking up the phone or tweeting to quell it; when he did tweet it served to instigate bloodlust for Mike Pence; and when he was confronted by Kevin McCarthy, who begged Trump to call off the mob, Trump said "Well, Kevin, I guess they are just more upset about the election theft than you are".
So yeah, it's all about creating a violent confrontation to assuage a galactic, battered ego.
Yes. Even Putin needed a pretext (in his case false flag operations) in the beginning of his reign. But any kind commotion, large enough, will do in a pinch. The dictator playbook is different in a newly minted dictatorship and a mature one. Rules become progressively less important the longer it goes on.
Chicago was 77% Democrat in the last election.
These behaviours won't stop if there's no blowback from the MAGA base.