I think black people may differ on your opinion of the US not being a "full-on police state", and may have a different opinion on police brutality. What did Donald Trump do against it? Zero. Absolutely nothing, which is what he always does. He just looks away.
I'm probably more "all cops are bastards, defund the police" than most US posters here but I still think this is a little hyperbolic.
Oxford's definition of "police state":
A totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities.
I think you can make a strong argument that the US has demonstrated a problematic slide
towards totalitarianism, but the idea that we're all the way there is way off. We've had a a disturbing number of protestors shot, arrested or beaten by cops -- unprecedented perhaps since 1968. However, vastly more protestors are... still out there protesting. In a totalitarian regime, this would all have been crushed much more quickly.
Our cops, on the whole, are racist and brutal as fuck, but they are still well short of being an actual gestapo. There's a bunch of cops in jail for murder and other serious charges because of the last few months, that doesn't happen in a police state. Some police departments in major metro areas have had their budgets slashed astoundingly as a result of protest activity.
If direct action and protest is having any impact other than "all the protestors were rounded up and shot, and their families too" -- then you're not in a full on police state. And, since we don't want to end up there, I think it's good to keep that in mind.
Good to keep in mind, because
we are still at a point where direct action matters. So people need to take more direct action while that's still true.
I am not a statistic expert, you'd need Bill Bauer for that. It seems to me, when somebody 92 years old dies, and happens to have coronavirus, it's nearly impossible to say, "He/she died from coronavirus."
If someone dies with their lungs full of glue as a result of the specific complications that COVID causes which causes lungs to fill with glue, I'd say they "died of COVID". Like, if I shoot someone in the face and they happen to be 92 years old, did they die of old age or because I shot them in the face?
This is very similar to climate change: there is vast scientific consensus, and the overall scientific consensus is that deaths are being undercounted. There is disagreement from
financial sectors which are muddying the waters with economic policy documents masquerading as "science". In some cases faking large numbers of signatures, and often backed by Koch Bros money (see: AEIR COVID 'research').
The inability of the American public to accept the basic science behind this, wear masks, and accept that
some kinds of businesses need to stay closed for longer term is why we have an administration talking about a "herd immunity" plan that can never work (because many of us will continue to wear n95s), and why we are completely torching the economy.
Basically, I think we killed the cow to get a little milk: if this had been handled differently with a comprehensive top down response, sacrificing some economic sectors in the interests of prohibiting totally unsafe behavior, then probably lots of the economy, including most schools, could be back to some kind of normal. As is, everything is just going to get completely fucked, because as of now: we're doing worse than we ever have been, we're adding 80,000 new covid cases a day, and rural hospitals are increasingly overwhelmed and have no beds. Fucked up.
I have no faith in the Trump administration to do much to help, and not too much more faith that an incoming Biden admin could or would implement actually useful changes fast enough. I think that until we have a vaccine, communities are mostly on their own -- for us, that means staying in the mountains, doing our own little halloween in the woods with one other family.
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