Does this also come with an explanation why no one knows the names Malinowski or Finicum or Shaver? Why there was a front page post on Reddit yesterday comparing Rittenhouse?
I’m reserving judgement until we have more information in this case, with my gut leaning lightly toward bad shoot (though not necessarily criminally bad), but whether a shoot is bad or not, or committed by a state agent or not, does not control whether it is a source of outrage.
One of the underlying problems reflect a large-scale normalization of 'de-arrest' tactics, where protesters work to free arrestees or prevent police from detaining them. It started being used seriously in 2020, but in those contexts it was largely recognized as a legally risky maneuver only really available when protesters vastly outnumbered police. The recent protests have mainstreamed it thanks to political advocates claiming (afaict, wrongly) that ICE has no arrest powers involving any action by a US citizen, and local police being actively instructed to not support ICE in any way and that being interpreted (afaict, not wrongly) as permitting widespread violations of local laws so long as ICE are the targets.
So you get a lot of people doing things that look like directly impeding federal law at best, and more often look extremely dangerous, and convinced that they're totally in the free and clear.
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