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Comment by crmd | Hacker News Reader

I worry that, rather than de-escalation, one of the White House’s explicit goals here is to stage manage a Kent State-like demonstration of state force against left-wing activists that spreads to other cities. I sincerely hope I’m cynically wrong here.

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It’s been pretty obvious from their behavior and rhetoric since the beginning. It’s not cynicism.

Yup. It's in project 2025, it's been their narrative since the adminsitration started. They never wanted "law and order".

A conspiracy, huh?

A vast, open one with a nearly 1000 page document outlining their plan hosted on their website whose primary operatives are now high-level government officials.

Hard to believe? That's exactly what they're relying on: they think people are too stupid to believe there's an actual radical white-supremacist Christian Theocratic movement working to destroy the United States. It's the biggest known internal existential threat of the last 150 years and our corporate media and political environment has resulted in conditions that have enabled it to manifest nearly unchallenged.

So the Heritage Foundation (a conservative thinktank) wrote a document about their conservative vision for America (a pretty standard move for a thinktank), ergo the Trump administration is a sockpuppet for the Heritage Foundation and is carrying out its vision? Sounds like a conspiracy theory, alright.

Who are these "primary operatives" who became "high-level officials"?

> Hard to believe? That's exactly what they're relying on

Is this a QAnon quote or an original?

And the optics of Kent State worked so well for the administration.

Kind of like shooting reporters with rubber bullets.

About 35% of the country supported what the National Guard did at Kent State. Deplorable is being far too kind to these people.

Not sure it would be a good idea to shoot US citizens for the 35% approval.

(But to your point, anything >0% is pretty horrible.)

That is enough to win elections.

... no it isn't. If you have 35% support but everyone else is opposed, that's not enough to win elections.

But everyone else isn't opposed.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-pre...

>In the 2024 presidential election, 73.6% (or 174 million people) of the citizen voting-age population was registered to vote and 65.3% (or 154 million people) voted according to new voting and registration tables released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Moreover, due to the electoral college and Senate and gerrymandering of House districts, the majority is hardly needed for attain power. I bet that even in other societies, throughout time, roughly a third of the population will not react to what one of the other thirds is doing (even if they claim they don't approve in polls).

I agree. This was my point. The 35% number is the strong support. But that is not enough. If they lose all their weak support, they lose.

It demonstrably is, because of gerrymandering, electoral college, turnout manipulation etc.

You only need PA, WI, and MI

If you only have 35% of the popular vote, you aren't going to win in the electoral college.

That's what happned in 2024, right? you're not accounting for the fact that 30-40% of the country does not vote in nationals.

No, it's not what happened... The election was not won with 35% of the popular vote...

Again, if you insist on talking about "35% of people in the US" rather than "35% of voters", then fine, but I think it's a weird way to talk about it. We don't know what the people who didn't vote thought about the candidates. Voting is the way that we find that out!

>if you insist on talking about "35% of people in the US" rather than "35% of voters", then fine, but I think it's a weird way to talk about it.

When were talking about adhering to a dangerous status quo, the conversation makes sense. A status quo of boring beauracracy can be defendable. A status quo of fascism, much less so. Thars why conversations in 2025 are like this.

Even then:remember Trump still had a 40% approval rating after all this.

35% is still not enough, even given those issues.

Most numbers I can find say that about 65% of Americans are registered to vote. Let’s say 100% of them voted in 2024.

Of that, let’s call it a flat 51% voted for Trump. That means that about half of 65%, or roughly 32.5% of American citizens support Trump, and by extension, likely this policy move.

So yes, it actually is more than you need to win elections.

Oh hmm, if the 35% number is all Americans, then sure.

But typically people are talking about percentages of voters with statistics like this.

Didn't Trump say we won't have to worry about elections anymore?

What's stopping them to do enough fuckery between now and 2028 to "win" the GOP the election in 2028 (or even 2026), and to stop Trump from joining the ranks of despots that keep getting reelected like Putin and Erdogan? Or JD Vance can be his Medvedev.

To use a horrible analogy, a lot of times women don't even admit to themselves that they've been raped, because accepting that means accepting a horrific label. The USA is in the middle of getting raped, and so far the response has been to mostly freeze up and take it, not wanting to fight, because that is scary and can get you hurt even more. (Well, at least for the majority of the country there isn't a real fightback yet...).

If you're concerned about that you have a moral responsibility to campaign for secession.

I'm giving it until 2028. I'm not even fully convinced Trump makes it that far. But if that comes to fruition, then yes. I would support California joining Canada.

Trump has already joined those ranks, he just failed at it. January 6th was a legitimate attempt at overturning the election results. He was impeached over it. Mike Pence was the only thing that stopped it, and I can’t believe how close we actually came to that timeline.

And you’re absolutely right about the denial. It manifests as the “nothing ever happens” meme.

It depends on whether you plan to have elections afterwards or not.

If not, 35% approval is perfectly fine if that includes most of the police and the military.

That was a very different time, as you must be aware. We did not have anything like the same polarization or the accelerating effect of the internet coupled with all-out information warfare across a 24-7 news cycle. I could go on for 1000 words about how different society is from 60 years ago.

The majority of non-city dwellers I know are now so propagandized against cities that I think they would be neutral to outright supportive of a kill order.

This is a dire situation and I'm not sure how this country crawls back out of this authoritarian slide, but we've got to somehow.

Nixon won 49/50 states in the next election, FWIW

The day after Kent State, a Gallup poll found 58% of polled Americans blamed the students for being shot. 31% had no opinion, and 11% blamed the National Guard.

After the National Guard shot a few kids for literally no reason (nobody had ever been given orders to fire), they told the student standing around "Disperse or we will shoot again"

This has never been a problem for the party of Roger Stone who literally has a large back tattoo of Nixon and is one of the primary reasons we had Bush Jr as president even though Al Gore won the votes when the count was allowed to finish

You're not cynical; it's his plain, revealed character. He's been openly fantasizing about soldiers shooting protestors for years. He's asked his own defense secretary if he could do it for him,

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/09/1097517470/trump-esper-book-d... ("Former Pentagon chief Esper says Trump asked about shooting protesters")

(Self-reply) There was also that infamous interview about Tiananmen Square, all the way back in 1990,

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tiananmen-... ("Resurfaced Trump interview about Tiananmen Square massacre shows what he thinks of protests")

I think the goal hear is to "both sides" the concept of insurrection to neuter the January 6th criticism of his administration. The protesters here, at least in some cases, are doing their protests explicitly to prevent the government from enforcing laws that the protestors don't like.

Instead it makes Jan 6th look worse as Congress asked for national guard and Trump did nothing. Newsom condemned the use of military and Trump did it anyway.

>explicitly to prevent the government from enforcing laws that the protestors don't like.

100+ policemen died on Jan 6th. What's the body count here?

Where are you getting 100+ deaths from?

I was too loose with my words, apologies. "casualties" was the word I was looking for.

Wikipedia says as much, since the government itself took down their page:

>Within 36 hours, five people died: one was shot by the Capitol Police, another died of a drug overdose, and three died of natural causes, including a police officer who died of a stroke a day after being assaulted by rioters and collapsing at the Capitol.[d][34][45] Many people were injured, including 174 police officers. Four officers who responded to the attack died by suicide within seven months.[35] Damage caused by attackers exceeded $2.7 million.[46]

"Within 36 hours" is doing a lot of work here. Zero cops died as a result of the protests.

Officer Sicknick (the cop who died of a stroke the next day) was pepper-sprayed by rioters, but not physically assaulted in a way which might cause a stroke. He did not collapse at the capital on Jan 6, but at 10PM the following day (your confusion on this point is understandable, given that the Wiki article deceptively implies that he collapsed on Jan 6). His autopsy found that his death was due to "natural causes".

The gaslighting around Jan 6 is really outrageous.

Oh speaking of gaslighting, what is this horseshit?

"Not physically assaulted in a way which might cause a stroke" - you're right, I can imagine no way in which hitting someone in the head multiple times with a fire extinguisher might cause a hemorrhagic stroke, a literal bleed in the brain. Versus a spontaneous stroke, which at his age would affect 0.03% of the population to even occur, let alone be actively fatal, especially when the person was already in the hospital being monitored for the injuries TO THEIR HEAD.

That's the absolute risk for a 42-year-old individual having a stroke in the US in that year, a 1 in 1.2M risk that it happened in the 24 hours following that.

Poor Officer Sicknick, had the shit beat out of him and then suffered a 1 in a million "unrelated" stroke in the same 24 hours!

> His autopsy found that his death was due to "natural causes".

I love that you leave out the next fucking sentence, that even if you are playing pedant, still says this: "that the events that transpired on January 6 played a role in his death".

Piss off with the gaslighting bullshit. Yes, the Capitol Police issued a statement... as little more than damage control.

I can appreciate where you're coming from. Lies and liars piss me off, too. But it's simply a fact that Sicknick was not struck by a fire extinguisher. That claim was published repeatedly by many mainstream outlets (who happily spread all manner of lies in the immediate aftermath of Jan 6) based on "anonymous sources", but yhere is zero evidence that it happened.

[0]https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brian-sicknick-fire-exting...

Back then we called it the Kent State Massacre

edit: and remember, it was a net positive for conservatives in the end.

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