This is the North Dacota state police, which was and is under republican control. Stop this "both sides" bullshit.
this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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It happened in MN under Walz, a Democratic governor, and Joe Biden, a Democratic president. Wikipedia: Pipeline 3 Protests
Ok but was the national guard called in by Walz like it was by Republican Governor Jack Dalrymple?
No. Don't act like it was the same
They would have called the national guard if they thought it was necessary. Instead hundreds of arrests happened, police was payed by the pipeline company and this photo was taken, which really reminds me of OPs image with those sticks and aggressive posturing:
So an oil company paying off the police to stop protests = democrats bad is what you're trying to convey?
Way to go ignoring hundreds of arrests, violent police and the possibility of democrats deploying the national guard as they have done in other situations.
And I would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for you meddling kids!
No masks.
So it would have been different under a democratic state leadership? How many pipelines were allowed / supported by democrats and how many were stopped by them?
Technically hard to say for North Dakota as it has always been extremely republican
Want some help moving those goalposts? They look heavy.
Doesn't mean you vote in Hitler over Thatcher.
"All criticism of thatcher is support for hitler!" - people who love thatcher but would be fine with hitler as long as we don't get anyone better than thatcher.
Means you vote neither.
abstaining from voting is the same as casting half a vote for Hitler
No, it's not. And it's that sort of thinking that leads to a half march towards fascism of which Trump has taken the final plunge.
If your options are move to the right or move even more to the right, neither option gets you to the left. Thus the only realistic option is to find alternative means.
"No, it's not"
yes it bloody well is, but you're also right, voting is not enough
Then fucking do something that works instead of posting memes.
And if you are fucking doing something, then stop posting pointless memes that'll draw the wrong kind of attention and get you caught.
Individuals alone cannot achieve the change needed, it’s going to take centrists understanding that voting won’t work and that they need to become radical.
Memes among other things are a way to agitate and educate, to help achieve that goal. And memes got the alt-right into power by normalising their ideas, they are effective tools of communication.
Have you ever reached out to local groups and built up community resistance? Are you prepared for anything, or do you just expect to vote every 4 years and that’s your part done.
"The alt-right" please, you shit on "centrists" then use neolib speak. The USA has always been shitty right wing and had to dragged into any sort of leftism.
Memes didn't get the right wing into power - the right wing already having power got the further right into power.
Memes won't accomplish shit at this point, and neither will shitting on the only shot y'all have left at having elections at all again - assuming the next ones are even legit.
Most casual people don't know the difference between the left and the general Democrats, or the nuance between AOC or Zohran and Pelosi.
You don't shit on the only thing that might give y'all a shot, you raise up those what will improve things.
And doing this close to the elections, you might as well be a Republican pushing people to not vote.
The elections are 2 years away…
So utterly tired of this “you can’t complain when it’s close to the election ” nonsense. There’s never a good time with you lot is there? How convenient.
Aren't there midterms or such this year? The presidential election is 2.5 years away
Yes, there is but that won’t remove or stop Trump.
When are people allowed to complain? Can’t do it at the presidential elections, can’t do it at the midterms. Guess every leftist should stop taking and simply vote blue no matter who, who cares if the Overton window has only ever shifted to Nazism from doing so.
How about WHEN THEY'RE ACTUALLY IN POWER?
The Overton window there is so far to the right it's missing 2 panels. Bring back 4 panels first.
But more importantly, it's better to build up good candidates or compare them to bad candidates rather than only be negative to the primary opposition of "worse". As others pointed out here, Republicans were the ones that sent thug stooges there, and the Biden administration at least upheld the protesters demands eventually and actually intervened in a positive way.
Trump would have probably just shot them and ignore court orders - you know, as ICE is currently doing?
Right now you're about as effective as complaining about what the centrists are doing as Hitler and the Nazis start a war.
So when they’ve already won we can talk about them not winning. Impeccable logic.
In this point and time specifically, YES!
Fucking damn, again it's like talking about making Germany Leftist while Hitler already fucking got promoted. You deal with That first. "Enemy of my enemy is my friend".
Either that, or you go the more direct route to solving the worst problems, like a certain German bunker did, not posting stupid memes.
This middle of the road option is stupid right now.
The solution for Hitler wasn’t voting, it was war and killing Hitler.
If you stop pushing voting you can start pushing for the real action needed.
"The trolley problem" isn't just some meme.
The lever is right there and pulling it doesn't preclude you from trying to derail the train. And when you fail to derail the train ignoring the lever was a choice you made: the consequences of which are on you.
I voted in every election for almost 30 years. Know what happened? Same thing that would have happened if I hadn't voted.
Your spesific vote might not matter (unless you're unimaginably lucky). But this mindset duplicated across millions, or even hundreds of thousands of people actually start moving the needle. Which is why not voting is still as bad as voting for Hitler.
But in democracy it's possible.
The US has a two-party system. The way I understand it, if you want that to make sense, you have to take into account the fact that the two parties have different wings. Among others, the Republican party has both an old neocon wing, and a newer MAGA one, the Democrats have a centrist neoliberal wing, and a more new-deal-style classical progressive one.
If you want to change which wing is dominant, you need to get into the party and start showing up at meetings, and/or work indirectly through your union.
Electorialism is not the solution, party politics won't bring about change. The underlying issue of capitalism will not be dealt with via reform that get rolled back every few decades.
electoral politics are certainly not the whole solution, I'd say they're probably part of the solution. I imagine we disagree on that, but either way, they can strangle the solution, so you can't just ignore it.
I find it interesting that you seem to recognize that welfare liberalism existed, was dismantled, and that the most "solution" oriented liberals in the Democratic Party just subscribe to that reform-based social welfare policy. Except, the consequences of that movement in the US is nearly a century of continued, increasingly destructive imperialism, the erosion of the labour - organizing that necessitated those concessions to the working masses, and the domination of neoliberal and fascist politics in the US (which is by no means new, but is made new in the narrative you seem to construct here).
Exactly how do you reconcile that with party politics' ability to deliver a "solution?" I understand saying that no tool can be discarded, but that's a different argument from saying they are in any way conducive to longterm, positive change. Liberal institutions are as much of a benefit to us as any threat is, they're part of the "solution" in that a solution is predicated on a problem.
The initial consequence was a drastic reduction in inequality, with decades of economic growth happening alongside inequality lowering even further. You can try to convince me otherwise, but I'm pretty sure that this, alongside the rest of the post-war consensus, saved the western world from fascism at the time. Anarchist praxis did not.
At the end of the day, you need a state to fight this, and where there's a state there needs to be certain liberal institutions to limit the actors in it. Call it welfare liberalism or democratic socialism, but it worked.
It eventually failed as well, though, I agree with this
I think it is an incredible feat of ignorance to declare that the "west" was saved by fascism by the USA, easily the most brutal and destructive empire in human history which just so happens to be a white supremacist state. Very typical white liberal interpretation of history here, it's only fascism when it gets too mean for your taste.
Welfare liberalism isn't a term I use as an opinion, it is a term that describes the specific policymaking you referred to when you brought up the New Deal. Democratic socialists support similar policies at times, but have a different intent with their own specificities in how those policies are implemented and what they entail. It's a joke among more serious socialist thinkers to call them liberals, but its another sign of ignorance to think the difference is semantic.
I don't doubt that you recognize there's a problem, but I think you should start being more critical about how you think. I can tell that you aren't trained to talk about these things formally, which is by no means a failure on your part, but you seem to think that you know enough to speak on these topics with some kind of authority when it's clear your knowledge is mostly passive. It isn't a weakness to conclude that you need to learn more about a topic, but it is dangerous to assume that you know better than others by merit of having an opinion.
Very typical white liberal interpretation of history here, it's only fascism when it gets too mean for your taste.
No, there have been plenty of horrific regimes throughout history that were not fascist. Fascism is a vague concept, but not as vague as to just mean "bad".
Welfare liberalism isn't a term I use as an opinion, it is a term that describes the specific policymaking you referred to when you brought up the New Deal. Democratic socialists support similar policies at times, but have a different intent with their own specificities in how those policies are implemented and what they entail
Sure, and my phrasing might have been a bit unclear - I was talking about the whole post-war consensus, which involved more than welfare liberals.
For all the flaws of the policies of the post-war decades, I don't think there's any denying that the power of big capital was weakened. That's pretty important, whatever kind of socialist you are.
you seem to think that you know enough to speak on these topics with some kind of authority
Yeah, sorry about that. I'm a middle aged man who's spent too much time on the internet, but in stead of hammering on about how white and ignorant I am, I wish you'd be more specific about what exactly I'm wrong about and what's right.
it's clear your knowledge is mostly passive
how?
Just in case you've forgotten, state police and National Guard are not Federal paramilitaries, and the situation ending with the demands of the protesters conceded to - only for that decision to be reversed by the next administration in the first month of its existence - might suggest that it's not an equal fucking doom no matter who.
Abolish 
The left has a Democrat problem.
This is why you go to primaries, and help non-establishment democrats to win!
It's all the same evil.
Two side of the same coin.
Imagine making a mobius strip out of 5 yen piece or some similar coin with a hole in the middle.
What is this referencing?
Protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. This article might be referencing the situation seen on the image. (Wasnt there so I am.not 100% on this)