ndclavier
apostle to the clever
I advocate for mainstream economics, compassionate hereditarianism, and the restoration of noblesse-oblige. https://x.com/ndclavier thewelltemperedclavier.substack.com
User ID: 4121
I agree with most of what you wrote: the liberal complaints are indeed largely pretextual, and also uniforms still matter. Beyond what you said, I'd add that uniforms shape the behavior of the people wearing them—and I don't just mean psychologically. If you are wearing a bunch of armor, you are going to feel emboldened to start physical confrontations where you might otherwise not. If you have enormous utility pouches attached to your plate carrier, and they are are filled with several riot-size bottles of pepper spray, you might decide to use pepper spray all the time, including on the obnoxious blue-haired woman who is blocking you in with her Subura Forester, rather than rationing it for only the moments when you truly need it.
The psychological effects of uniforms on the wearer are real and important too, of course. A uniform communicates to the officer that is wearing it what kind of mission he is on, and what kind of behavior is expected. If you put him in a jumpable plate carrier and high cut ballistic helmet, you are essentially telling him he is a tier-1 door-kicker going into enemy territory for a high risk direct action raid—which is good if that is actually what you are doing, but less so if you are rounding up illegals at Home Depot.
Finally, uniforms also serve a recruiting function. And while I'll concede that handing out cool tactical gear with gigantic velcroed "FEDERAL AGENT" patches may work to boost numbers, it will also influence the type of recruit you get. The problem here is that if you advertise yourself—via your direct action urban raid uniforms—as the agency where you get to go out and smash heads, you will end up with a bunch of recruits who want to go out and smash heads.
To be clear, I don't think any of this is a major contributor to the problems we are seeing. Most CBP and ICE officers are professional and conduct themselves appropriately even in tactical gear. And as I said before, I agree that liberals would be complaining even if we dressed ICE like fancy-hotel bellhops ("You see! They don't even think the undocumented are human beings. They think they are luggage to be tossed out on the curb!"). At most, the current uniforms have a tiny negative effect. But then, when one wrongful shooting can derail the whole program, I think it is prudent to take every measure to reduce risks, and uniforms are an easy thing to change.
Enforcing any law is going to have an element of cruelty. I'm prepared to tolerate it when the objective is important and the cruelty is minimized to the greatest extent that is feasible. In this case, I don't actually think we are being particularly cruel (with a few exceptions). My main objection is that we are being stupid. We are saying we are hard and cruel (loudly and repeatedly), dressing up ICE mall-cops like they are Delta Force operators, and then putting them in situations where they end up fighting with US citizens.
Especially since the people now claiming "Oh, go after the cans of tuna" favor providing free tuna by the palletload.
This is partially fair. I don't think it's really the people like myself putting out the tuna (I genuinely don't want marginal and negative value immigrants here), but the shrieking activists, or really, the people organizing them? Yeah, they are providing material support to illegals that makes it more likely they will stay.
To which I say, fine. If they like the illegal immigrants so much, let them provide free housing for every single one of them, since they will no longer be able to pay rent. Let them provide breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day. Let them organize healthcare and childcare and recreational activities. They can take the whole of the burden of supporting millions of people. You might counter that the more extreme immigration activists would be totally prepared to do this, and they'll use our tax dollars (at the state level) to do it. Maybe so. But these extremists only exist in a few deep blue states and cities, and now they are going to get an entire nation's worth of illegals looking for handouts. My political instincts tell me this will not be popular with the masses, even in Minnesota and California (even people who like cats mostly don't want to have fifty cats). In the long term, the extremists start to look more unmistakably like the zealots we already know they are, and the regular population grows increasingly resentful until they decide to boot the extremists out of office, or else the extremists moderate for the sake of self-preservation.
Will this be a slower, more drawn out process? No, I think it could actually go faster. To move things along, take the money we are now saving from not running the stupid cosplay immigration raids and pay a self-deportation bounty with it. Claude tells me we are about to fund DHS with 191 billion dollars. Take half of it and give it to out to the first 5 million illegal immigrants who self deport. That would be $19,000 per person. A family of four could collect $76,000 and buy a house in whatever country they came from. Or perhaps better still, run the self deportation lottery: "Deport yourself and you get a ticket that enters you to win 1 million dollars! And because the United States is so generous, there will be one winner for every 100 people who self deport! You heard that right, one winner for every hundred people!" Now your cost is down to $10,000 a person, and you have enough money to incentivize nearly 10 million people to self deport. And the best part is, either approach still leaves DHS with its full normal funding, so it will have plenty of resources to ensure nobody is coming in while this offer stands.
At the end of the day, the problem is either stupidity, or more likely, a desire not to actually succeed at scale.
Fourthly, and most importantly IMO, there are much better mechanisms to get to where ICE wants to go. We already have a surveillance state for the IRS that involves essentially all banking institutions and Paypal. Why won't Congress pass any number of measures that would criminalize, fine, and prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants? If the economic opportunity were much more limited, nobody would jump the border if they couldn't feed themselves after! This would have immediate negative consequences for mostly red states, however, it would likely gut their economies in short order.
Yes. Imagine your neighbor's yard was overrun with cats and kittens, and his first impulse was to send in a bunch of men to go and kick the kittens, and pull on the tails of the cats, and to get into fights with the shrill animal rights activists who filmed his "enforcement and removal operations".
"You know, there is an easier way to fix this," you offer. "You could just pick up all the open cans of tuna that have been placed all over your yard. Then the problem would basically take care of itself."
"I couldn't possibly," your neighbor, Donald, replies. "There are so many cans!"
"About that," you continue. "Donald, you know your roommates are the ones leaving the cans all over your yard? Maybe ask them to stop. Or take away their can openers."
"And if they keep doing it?"
"I guess you might have to kick them out."
"Right," Donald says as he nods his head. "Yeah. And then I wouldn't need to hire the men to torture the kittens and cats, cause they would all just go away. And the obnoxious PETA people wouldn't even be able to say I was doing anything wrong. And it would be way cheaper and work way better."
"Exactly," you reply.
Donald feels a growing sense of relief as he think about his new cat free future. But then his mind catches on an unforeseen complication, and he sighs with the sudden grim realization that it couldn't possibly work: "But what about content for my "interrupting cats eating" social media accounts?" If my men can't kick kittens and pull on the tails of cats, the ICE X account will be dead in weeks."
"You're kidding me," you say. "That's your problem?"
"Yeah, Kristi would be crushed—she's the one overseeing this for me. She told me she hasn't had this much fun since she had to shoot that puppy of hers, uhm... Cricket." Donald shakes his head. "Oh well. It was a good thought anyway."
Yes, I'm sorry to say this is exactly right. The fact that the Trump admin has decided to pursue the illegal immigration problem by staging Brownshirt-style street battles between ICE and radicalized Democrats is just black-pilling. If I was a Soros master-of-the-universe type, and I was intent on preserving widespread illegal immigration, and I found myself in the impossibly fortunate position of being able to mind control Trump, I think I'd basically have him continue down the path he's already elected to follow—what he is doing right now is working splendidly.
Immigration enforcement was always going to be an extremely charged and divisive undertaking. There is a sizable minority of the population that is fanatically opposed, a plurality moderate population that is fairly agnostic, and then a final MAGA faction that is all-in. The key to winning has always been disempowering the fanatics while not alienating the moderates. The employment focused approach is perfect for this: enforcement is directed against rich white people the fanatics probably don't even like; each rich white person employer probably employees a number of illegal immigrants, so you get way more bang for your buck per enforcement action; the rich white employers, unlike illegal immigrants, have a lot to lose, so they are likely to cooperate with your enforcement, or better yet, simply stop their illegal behavior once faced with a credible threat of punishment; and finally, once deprived of financial incentive for being in the country, the illegal immigrants deport at their own expense, without recourse to the legal system, and without generating any of the fraught issues that arise through forced deportation, like minor children being separated from parents, or citizen minor children being detained.
If you insist on supplementing this approach, removing dangerous criminal aliens with ICE could be justified, but the Trump strategy has still been far from optimal. Again, the priority is to disempower the fanatics while not alienating the moderates. You don't accomplish any of this by taking the fanatics and making them into martyrs: that just alienates moderates and fuels fanaticisim. You accomplish it by demoralizing the fanatics, and by making the fanatics look like fanatics to the moderates. If a fanatic is interfering with your operations, sure, try to arrest them. But if that fails, what is wrong with letting them go and then nabbing them the next day at work once things have cooled down? Then you can pile on the charges: resisting arrest, fleeing an officer, assaulting an officer, etc. This avoids making martyrs, and definitely demoralizes—there is a certain glamor to slugging it out with the cops, but not so much to being arrested at work and then subjected to cavity searches in a federal detention center for the next three years.
I can imagine some ICE higher-up saying, "you say that, but we can't let protestors dictate the tempo of our enforcement and removal operations. It would be giving in to the worst kind of heckler's veto." To which I say, why not? Why not let the fanatics win? If you are careful in selecting your targets, letting them win these standoffs has mostly upside. Let's say that ICE had turned back after Renee Good had blocked their operation and refused to come into custody, and then did a press conference on the dangerous child molester they were planning to arrest but couldn't because Good and co had interfered. This serves the second part of our strategy perfectly: make the fanatics look like fanatics to the moderates. It turns an operational loss into a strategic victory. The ICE higher-up: "But what if that child molester goes and molests a child because we didn't deport them?" Yes, what if? To be honest, it is very unlikely, and it would be tragic, but cynically speaking, it would probably go a long way to ensuring that you never have this problem again, right? What better serves the interests of children, turning Renee Good into martyr and your whole operation into a circus, or executing the occasional strategic retreat in order to win the war?
There is a Chinese meme where Trump is called "Trump the Nation-Builder" because his geopolitical blundering so often seems to serve the interests of the PRC. In the future, will mestizo peasants be praying to Trump in thanks for his efforts to delegitimize immigration enforcement? Will they light little candles with Trump's face on them and place them on their ofrendas to honor him as the patron saint of illegals? Looking at situation as it presently stands, it wouldn't shock me.
As others have pointed out, police officers are afforded a great deal of respect in most communities. Once you adjust for the actual qualifications required, it is hard to think of jobs that offer more respect—fireman and soldier come to mind, but there are not many. And in the few places where they aren't respected, they are at least generally well-compensated. To take an admittedly extreme example, Palo Alto publishes salaries for city employees and you'll often see fairly junior officers managing to pull in 200-300k compensation with the benefit of overtime.
Even outside of HCoL areas, being a police officer can be more lucrative than you'd think. Most departments offer full pensions after 20-25 years, and it is not uncommon for a cop to retire with a full pension from one department and then start over at a second department and collect another pension. (My elite psychiatrist grandfather had a summer house in a highly desirable part of Long Island, and his neighbor was a former NYC police captain who had employed this strategy to great effect.) Additionally, in places like Texas many cops can make more money on the side by moonlighting as armed security. Claude informs me that pay can be anywhere from 25/hr in the worst case, to 150/hr in the best, with 60/hr being typical, which is not bad for what is often just sitting around and watching a concert.
Cops also have excellent insurance and protection for any eventuality. Unlike a civilian or a private security guard, an on-duty cop can know with certainty that any medical expenses incurred will be covered, that disability payments will be generous and indefinitely provided, and that in the worst case, their family will be looked after. The family of a cop killed in the line of duty receives: a one time tax free $420,000 federal pay out, typically the full pension of the dead cop (until death or remarriage of the surviving spouse), as well as department life insurance and additional support from state programs (child subsidies, tuition assistance, state payouts—Texas gives the surviving spouse another 500k!) and private charitable orgs. Basically, society has set things up so that it is fairly easy for a cop to make the heroic decision.
So I don't find the Uvalde officers sympathetic. They took respected, well compensated positions in their community that came with a small condition: a tiny chance that they might actually have to be heroes, rather than just collect the respect and the pay for it. And they failed. I understand it can often be hard to truly know how one might behave in a situation where death is a possible outcome, but I want cops to be composed of the small fraction of the population that doesn't have a hard time answering this question. And in the event a cop that is unlucky enough to be tested finds he made a good faith mistake about his tolerance for danger, I want him to act anyway, because to not do so is incredibly corrosive to the institution of policing and to society at large.
Cowards look at the Uvalde incident and now tell themselves, "hey, I can be a police officer, and in the worse case, if it gets scary, I can just hide." In so doing, they steal the resources society has apportioned to support a warrior, as well as the equipment, the training and the badge. Citizens post Uvalde will look at the police and feel less respect, reducing the effectiveness of law enforcement, the quality of recruits, and the safety of the community. Society is coarsened more generally when the people who are entrusted to "serve and protect" others behave in such a flagrantly selfish manner. Many will look at the low standard set by the Uvalde officers and feel comfortable setting an even lower standard for themselves: "If the police, with their insurance and pensions and line-of-duty death protections can sit by and watch a bunch of little kids get murdered, why should I bother to take the slightest risk to help somebody else?" This is all unacceptable; there need to be consequences.
What consequences? In another time, perhaps shame could have sufficed. But we live in a shameless, atomized society with a lot of mobility, so I don't think shame will do. Instead, I think legal consequences were required: consequences of the sort that would clear out the cowards who know themselves to be cowards and who are currently wearing a badge; consequences that would drive the coward police officers who don't know they are cowards into gunfire, should such a situation arise, because the alternative of hiding would be still more frightening; consequences that would make it clear to citizens that the moral bar for everyone is much, much higher than what happened in Uvalde. For me, it is not about exacting revenge or making the Uvalde officers suffer (I honestly feel badly for them, and I'd personally treat them with a measure of kindness); rather, it's about excising a dangerous rot before it has a chance to spread.
ndclavier
apostle to the clever
1mo ago
See my response to Resolute Raven. The most important point:
To be fair, I probably could have phrased things more clearly. Ultimately, my objection isn't that China isn't interested in Lithium deposits in Cameroon, or even that Chinese people aren't interested in running an electronics store in Yaoundé. My objection is that the Chinese don't seem to care about Cameroonians.
As to your comment on the abstract ideal of "Democracy", I think you are missing the larger point, which is that this is not about caring about systems of government, but about caring about the people that live in them. I recognize many non-Westerners (and even many Westerners) find it hard to believe that the West genuinely cares about the welfare of non-Westerners, since we have such a... mixed record... when it comes to helping them. But I think the moral concern is genuine, and I think a great deal of meaningful help (more than most critics of the West would admit) has been delivered.
In the end, even our most rapacious acts have probably largely redounded to the benefit of our victims or their descendants (there are, as always, exceptions). Take the institution of slavery in America. It was undoubtedly surpassingly cruel, but also your average African American now earns a higher income than many white Europeans. When you compare this state of affairs to what they might be experiencing if they'd been left to fend for themselves in Africa, this seems vastly better.
Is it deranged to credit ourselves for seeing to the welfare of the descendants of people we kidnapped and enslaved? I don't actually think so. Yes, we were bad enough to enslave Africans. But we also were good enough, eventually, to free them, on our own initiative and at great cost to ourselves. And not only that, but to allow them to remain here, and to include them in our society, and to later give them equal rights, and after that to even make great sacrifices and endless efforts to try to promote their flourishing. The act of enslaving, and all the acts of kindness that came after it, both say something true about how the West is, and I think both of these things are very different than anything you could say about China. I doubt China would have ever taken African slaves at scale because I think it would have been obvious to them African slaves can't be good Chinese. And this is very good, because I also doubt, if China had a large population of the descendants of Africans it had enslaved, it would be nearly so indulgent as the West. I don't know what the Chinese solution would be to a population that committed 6-7 times as much murder as American whites on a per capita basis (I don't even want to know what the ratio would be relative to Han Chinese) but I can promise you it would not be Black Lives Matter. And as shitty as BLM was (both for us and for our black population—see the huge spike in murders with black victims) I think it is to our credit, morally, that we responded that way as opposed to in the way the CPC might have responded. Our kindness may yet be the death of us, but I can't bring myself to wish it away. My preferred solution is for us to become more practical and realistic, not less kind. In short, like the Scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz, we need a brain.
Meanwhile, I think China needs a heart: my most ardent wish is that China develops a genuine feeling of moral responsibility for its less accomplished relations in the Global South, ideally while still retaining the pragmatism and effectiveness it possesses today. Maybe this will happen naturally as it gets richer—I have to remind myself that there is still a lot of serious poverty in China, for all the incredible progress they've made on that front. The good news is I don't think the Chinese are genetically incapable of changing: this isn't like asking Somalians to start winning more Fields medals. The issue is largely cultural.
ndclavier
apostle to the clever
1mo ago
Yes, the Chinese diaspora has spread all across the world, and that is great. And evidently they are quite adaptable and enjoy a wide variety of biomes!
Indeed, there is no denying that the Chinese people have contributed a ton to any society they have decided to join. I'm glad for the Chinese people we have in the United States, and I'd personally like more of them. Many more! But this is distinct from what I am talking about, which is again a general Chinese civilizational indifference to the welfare of others. I'd love to be wrong on this for what it's worth, and I as I said I look for signs of change, but I've yet to see much of anything. China has incredible biomedical abilities. Where is its version of pepfar? China is now full of billionaires. How many have signed the giving pledge? Where is the Chinese Bill Gates? Where is the Chinese Will MacAskill?
To be fair, I probably could have phrased things more clearly. Ultimately, my objection isn't that China isn't interested in Lithium deposits in Cameroon, or even that Chinese people aren't interested in running a electronics store in Yaoundé. My objection is that the Chinese don't seem to care about Cameroonians.
Is the Chinese approach of just doing business and not actually caring about anyone but yourself better for others than the Western schizo approach of caring so much you try to invade a country like Afghanistan to set up pride parades? I don't think so. Both approaches have serious issues, and as I said, I think both approaches could benefit from incorporating elements from the other. You don't need to convince me that the West has seriously screwed up at times: that is obvious. But I don't think you can convince me that the Chinese approach is morally better. In fact, I think it is pretty clearly morally worse. I find the good samaritan who accidentally botches an attempt to help a wounded child better, morally speaking, than the person who just doesn't give a shit about the wounded child because the child doesn't own the rights to any critical mineral mines. And I worry particularly that as we approach advanced AI and robotics capabilities, the Chinese attitude of indifference beyond the point where self-interest is in effect is potentially disastrous for our stupider human relations in the Third World. If China obtained post-scarcity abundance for itself, would it selflessly share it with the billions of not very useful brown people that occupy Africa and South America? Would it go through the trouble of making sure that abundance was equitably distributed in those societies, if that turned out to be necessary? I hope so, but I can't say I've yet seen anything that has put my mind at ease.
ndclavier
apostle to the clever
1mo ago
China is, above all, fascinating. It is a state that is capable of astonishing feats of engineering and yet it will occasionally build a bridge that will collapse within months of its completion. Its government seems at times to be preternaturally competent, and at other times to be singularly dedicated to causing misery and dysfunction for its own people. It has a cultural history as expansive and complex as any on Earth, and long periods of stability during which one would expect great works of music and visual art would have been made, and yet its actual output in these domains has been, and continues to be, distinctly third-rate. In the past, there were long periods where it was unquestionable strong enough to conquer much of the world, and yet it didn't. Today, it is—or will soon be—strong enough to expand far beyond it borders, but I expect it will again choose not to.
How do we resolve these apparent inconsistencies? Well, first I'd caution that the West is full of these too. We put men on the moon with the computing power of a graphing calculator, but we can't build a single high speed rail line in California. We descend from a culture that produced the most sublime art ever created by man, but we seem largely to have forgotten how to do this, or else lost the will to even try. With AI, we figured out how to make sand talk, but I expect we would be hopelessly incapable of maintaining a Chinese level of order in our society even if our very survival depended upon it.
What do we make of this? I think the obvious conclusion to draw is that human societies are spikey. (You may have heard this term from AI. In that context, it refers to the fact that AI can be at once astonishingly competent in one domain and incompetent in another that seems no more difficult, or perhaps even easier. A classic example was the ability of earlier generations of LLMs to get 90th percentile plus scores on the SAT math section but also to fail at counting the number of r's in strawberry.) China has a weird mix of strengths and weaknesses, and so does the West.
An interesting property of spikeyness is that it is harder to see in yourself. What is easy seems easy and what is hard seems hard, so without some external example to show that certain strengths don't necessarily imply others, and that same is true of certain weaknesses, it can be hard to imagine that these things can be unlinked. Sometimes, it is only when we look at another with a different combination of strengths and weaknesses that we start to more clearly see the spikeyness that exists in ourselves. Of course, the spikeyness of an entity with very different strengths and weaknesses is obvious.
And that is what China is: a different roll of the stats dice. It looks very weird to us, but then I'm sure we look very weird to them.
Did they get a better roll than us, overall? I don't think so, but I'm not completely sure. Are they at least our peers, civilizationally speaking? Certainly.
And the final question: are they good? Well, from my perspective they are not especially good, but also not especially bad either. One Chinese deficit—which is arguably not even a deficit except from a Western, Christianity-inflected moral standpoint—is that they just don't seem to have an interest in much of the rest of the world. The downside of this (and to be honest, I'm a little disturbed by it) is how generally indifferent they seem to suffering that exists beyond their borders. I hope this might change as they become wealthier, but the social science research I've looked at does not show this happening, at least so far. Of course, this disinterest also has an upside: to me it seems obvious the Chinese don't want to conquer the world. Maybe they are HBD pilled and recognize that Chinese style governance would only work for Chinese people (for what it is worth, this seems obviously true). Or maybe they are just such cultural chauvinists that can't imagine what good could come to them from involving themselves with others (mostly also probably true). And maybe it is just that they are temperamentally conservative and risk averse, and they feel more comfortable all crowded together on the territory they have lived on for thousands of years. It is probably a combination. But whatever it is, I just don't worry much about China going all Nazi Germany on us and trying to conquer lebensraum, and I worry even less about some sort of sino-colonialist future (maybe Africa the land could become Chinese, but Africans? Never).
This is very different than us. When the pilgrims came over to Massachusetts, the seal they created for the Massachusetts Bay Colony shows an Indian standing with a text flag coming out of his mouth that said, "Come over and help us". Yes, the universalist impulse runs deep here. That can be beautiful in my eyes, as when Kipling wrote earnestly of the White Man's Burden. And truthfully, I think it has done a lot of good for the rest of the world. But also, I can't say we have a flawless track record. What happened to those Indians? How often have we bungled the helping? How often has the helping just been a pretext to exploit, to enslave, to rape? Not always, but not never either.
As for which civilization is better for the rest of the world, the Chinese or the Western, I think the optimal solution might be a middle ground. I believe there is a White Man's Burden; I also believe there is a Chinaman's Burden. Ultimately, I'd like to see China be a little more humanitarian and universalist, even if that risks them maybe being a little more expansionist. But I also think the West could learn a lot from China. Obviously technologically and governmentally, but also culturally. The West should take a more pragmatic, more Chinese, less Marvel-universe view of its own motives and (especially) capabilities, and also a more Chinese (read: racist) view of those it aims to help, which is ironically what I think will be the key to actually helping them, rather than just pretending to. Indeed, in the long run, China and the West could have a very productive and fruitful relationship that could enrich the whole world enormously. I hope we get to see it happen.
I think you are showing far too little charity, and I write as someone who finds the activities of the anti-ICE protestors to be largely detestable. Allow me to explain.
First, I'm being serious about my feelings about the protesters: in my view, they are—for the most part—smug, shrill, deluded agents of chaos. The gulf between their conceptions of their own character, motives, and impact on the world, and the truth of these things, is vast, and not in a direction that is to their credit. I'm as little inclined to violence as it is possible for a rational man to be, but I must confess that even I sometimes wish to see the most insufferable of their number, whilst engaged in some strident, self-righteous tantrum against authority, receive as a reply a salutary spritz of pepper spray straight into their stupid faces.
Second, and critically, these people are not evil, and that extends even to the violent ones for the most part. I think we can establish this pretty reliably in a couple ways. One approach is the one that @StJohnOfPatmos used: look at their backgrounds. Using this lens, we find no indicators whatsoever that Pretti was evil. In fact, he seems to have been generally law abiding and respectable. Beyond his lack of a criminal history, I'd also note that becoming an ICU nurse requires a fairly high degree of consciousness and trustworthiness, and nursing as a whole selects pretty reliably for compassion. Turning to Renee Good, she similarly lacked any criminal history or clear signs of malevolent character. And while I don't think we have the data to firmly generalize about the entire population of anti-ICE protestors, my strong intuition is that they are probably similarly decent.
It is worth taking a moment to point out that the good character of people engaged in "activism" is hardly a given. Recalling the example of Kyle Rittenhouse, he seemed unable to fire his rifle without hitting a child molester, a wife-beater, or a criminal lowlife. Now you might counter that the people Rittenhouse shot were non-representative in the sense that, of all the people present, they showed a particular eagerness to assault a 17 year old boy, and an armed one at that. Indeed, on that basis I think it would be reasonable to conclude they were probably amongst the worst of the "protesters" in Kenosha on that night. But I would respond that Good and Pretti were also selected in a similar sense: they were also amongst the most violent of all the people present at their respective protests. And that is part of where that strong intuition of my mine about the general good character of the protestors comes from. If the most confrontational of the anti-ICE protestors were as clean as Pretti and Good seem to have been, it seems likely to me that the protestors who weren't violently resisting arrest, kicking police cars, etc, are probably at least as good (at least for the most part).
Why do we see bad people acting badly in some protests, and relatively good people acting badly in others? In his comment, @StJohnOfPatmos delivered a very convincing presentation of the social and psychological dynamics at work in the case of Pretti, and I think this goes a long way to explaining the general difference between Kenosha and the current situation in Minnesota. One core insight is that current ideological landscape is particularly warped.
During the height of the BLM madness, there was a widespread belief that the police were racist and bad, but the acceptable remedy was largely to "defund them" rather than direct violence towards them. Sure, elites would equivocate about how understandable it was that people were burning down cities in response (there were a lot of "riots are the language of the unheard" type quotes) but at the same time there were also many elites who were sympathetic to BLM who said, clearly and repeatedly, that violence was unacceptable. Here is an excerpt from a fairly representative Barrack Obama statement from the time:
I'll grant that there were also statements that were less measured, but I don't think they represent the ideological center mass of the left during peak wokeness. Also—and this is crucial—no elites were telling the NPR-listening normies of the world to go out and loot their local Nike outlet. Maybe, in the view of some commentators, we could excuse a Black teen with an "unheard voice" for doing it, but that excuse certainly didn't extend to a normie with White privilege. As a consequence, ICU nurses were not typically present at the riots, and certainly they were not the ones doing the burning and looting.
Things are different now. To give you a sense of this, I've excerpted Obama's statement on the Pretti shooting:
According to Obama, the federal agents who have been "deployed" lack even a semblance of discipline and accountability; their tactics are lawless; they are assaulting our core values as a nation; and every American should support the "peaceful" protests to resist them. Notably there is no language in the statement explicitly condemning the violence of the protestors, or urging compliance with law enforcement. This is as close as you are going to get to Obama saying that you should go out and punch an ICE officer in the face. The craziest part is, while I don't have the patience to do an exhaustive survey of elite left sentiment, I expect Obama is, as usual, probably more moderate than many of his peers.
This messaging shapes participation in the "protests". This is how you get generally decent, well-adjusted people doing crazy shit en-masse. You have the authority figures they respect tell them repeatedly that they should be doing crazy shit, because freedom is on the line. In this media environment, I've seen people whom I generally respect (individuals whom I know to be highly intelligent, rational, kind and free-thinking in most contexts) basically baying for ICE blood. If they are vulnerable, what chance is there for left-orientied normies?
This also represents the second way I can tell that the anti-ICE protestors are not evil. If there are a bunch of people I know to be generally kind and well-calibrated who think ICE is a modern incarnation of the SS, it tells me the problem with the anti-ICE protestors is not their fundamental decency. People often find these kind of statements difficult because there is such strong urge to attach moral sanction to people who hold views we find repugnant, but I really mean it. I'm Jewish, but I'd say the same thing about the actual SS. The problem with the SS was not that the people in the SS were all evil. I expect they were less good, on average, than people like Hans and Sophie Scholl, but also probably better character-wise (kinder, less impulsive, more loyal) than even your run-of-the-mill wife-beater. The scary part of all this is that people who are not monsters can do things that are far more monstrous than most criminals will ever manage.
None of this is to say Pretti was without fault. I agree with @StJohnOfPatmos that he probably felt more inner rage than most, and once he had his socially sanctioned outlet for that rage, he was all too eager to use it. But the fact that he needed that the social sanctioning is key. He was decent enough that he could hold it together all his life until an authority figure came along and told him it was okay to let go. In this way, he was, ironically, probably a lot like many cops. Law enforcement has a reputation for attracting bullies who want permission to go out and hurt people, and while I think this stereotype is over-applied, it is not groundless. I've been on police ride-alongs were I've heard cops cheerfully regaling each other with stories of how they got to "beat the shit of a prisoner who was resisting".
At the start of this long comment, I said you showed too little charity, and now I will clarify. The charity you ought to show is in recognizing that a Pretti, or violence-enjoying cop for that matter, for all their flaws, are still possessed of the requisite self-control and pro-social impulses to do good and to not knowingly do bad. And this counts. There are plenty of people who have bad impulses and who can't control themselves under any circumstances, or who don't even care to try. Our prisons are full of them. Some of them need only the barest pretext to do bad: I looted the Nike store to protest white supremacy; I raped that girl because she secretly wanted it; et cetera. Many others don't need any pretext at all—their value function is to do whatever is good for them personally, and damn the consequences. In comparison, someone like Pretti was responding to extremely concerted messaging from many authority figures, and was engaged in actions that were plausibly proportionate and plausibly served the cause, all at risk to himself. Like I said, I still think Pretti is an agent of chaos, and I'd even agree his actions were far more damaging to society than most crimes (though this was not entirely for reasons he could have controlled). But there is a real moral difference between Pretti and his ilk and most criminals, and I think it is one we should be careful not to lose sight of lest we work ourselves up into a fit of righteousness where we become the ones doing the evil.
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