I still can't get over the masking, which feels like it came out of nowhere and became immediately ubiquitous among U.S. federal cops. This is something I've always associated with gangs of third-world militia crammed into the backs of desert technicals, and not agents of a superpower storming out of suburban APCs.
Did any dystopian movies predict this? Dystopian video games were all over it decades ago, but that was mostly because that let them use the same face-model for every enemy. #uspol
On reflection I won't further call these guys "cops", federal or otherwise.
I think of cops as agents of capital-O Order. Sometimes you want that. Sometimes it goes wrong. When it goes wrong it's a wrong committed in the name of Order.
These guys are never that. They show up expressly to stir shit, sow chaos, cause trouble for its own sake. The fear they seek to impart isn't “Follow the law or else", it's "We might do anything, and you can't stop us.”
They're not cops. They're goons. #uspol
