I am sure they look back at the decision to retreat from the police precinct (the precursor to it burning down, forced by exhaustion of riot munitions) as a mistake in hindsight. I doubt they will repeat this error. They will open fire with real ammunition before allowing this to happen again.

In general, the early days of the uprising in Minneapolis were marked by several incorrect assumptions by state security forces about what the general public would support. From the suspicious AutoZone fire early-on, to the burning of the police precinct itself, to the generalized looting, they thought public opinion would turn sharply against the uprising all by itself. They also thought mobilizing the National Guard would enable them to crush the uprising once and for all, which immediately backfired and lead to simultaneous uprisings in all 50 states. I think they will work much harder this time to prevent the sort of spectacular public victories over the security forces that we saw last time around (though they're already slipping, with images of dozens of destroyed police cars).

One thing that will be very different this time around is control of social media and electronic surveillance. This terrain has gotten much worse, and we can already see the results on popular platforms like Reddit and Twitter. Communication and keeping track of the news is much more difficult than it was in 2020. Lots of accounts and communities have been banned in the interim, and lots of people have been scattered to an archipelago of individual websites by censorship or transformation of Twitter into X. Disinformation will be rampant with the ease of using generative AI to create artificial images.

On the other hand, this might be mitigated somewhat by the fact that the movement is substantially Spanish-speaking. I mean, it caught many of us by surprise. I think if more of us were reading Spanish-speaking social media, we might have seen more indications this was coming. For the same reason, the state security forces were likely caught off guard initially, because not as much attention is being payed to monitoring and propagandizing Spanish-speaking media (plus, a lot of the volunteer reactionary narcs will be sidelined by the language barrier). I cannot comment at all about what the propaganda landscape looks like in this space, or how it has changed compared to the English-speaking web over the past several years. It's a total blind-spot for me.

I think activating the National Guard and the Marines in LA will motivate other cities to pick up the pace. I think this dynamic will still bear out similar to last time. The much more explicit targeting of institutions, like the arrests of judges, congressional representatives, and union leadership will also spur civil society organizations to participate - even though we won't see anything close to the SEIU or the Bar Association directly firing mortars at mounted riot cops. We are much more limited by the workweek dynamic though. 2020 was a particularly unique historical moment. With the COVID lockdowns, it was as if we had 30%+ unemployment for all intents and purposes.