Tactically, this is excellent for us.

This is The Cathedral resorting to soft power alone to try and push tyranny. Which, to be clear, is an absolutely horrific mistake. I'm ecstatic our tyrants are this fucking stupid.

Tyranny works best through subjectivity and arbitrary, disproportionate violence. You use fear as a force multiplier to keep people acting ultra-cautious with their actions. For example, you want to tyrannize motorists: remove the speed limit signs, drop the speed limit to 15 mph. Patrol irregularly, but aggressively. For an entire day, there's no cops on the road. The next day, put 15 cops on the road. The next day: no one again. The next day, 15 cops only in the morning. Keep people guessing. Promote over-zealous arrests (arrest people doing 10 mph and let the courts free them). Let people with "back the blue" stickers go through, let them speed past the old speed limit. Occasionally: stop someone who has a criminal history, and beat the fucking holy hell out of him on the traffic stop. The question everyone has going down this road, at all times, is the same: "Am I next?"

People do respond to this. You're fear conditioning the population. Disproportionate violence doesn't generate the level of outrage you'd think it does. People don't rally together when they are hit with an overwhelming and chaotic force. They actually back down because it's unpredictable, and it does

Instead, they've resorted to soft power alone to solve their problems. They're not going slow enough to normalize it. They're just asserting soft power, and teaching people to become more and more resistant to their demands.

It's like changing the speed limit to 15 mph, leaving all the speed limit signs up, then not pulling people over, just ticketing them $700 and leaving it in their mailbox. Then when the people don't pay it, having the cops come to their place of work or and yell at them. You're just gonna teach people to get mad and be obstinate.