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A gunman has opened fire on an unmarked government vehicle carrying detainees to an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas. Initial reports are two detainees killed, one injured, no casualties among the officers. The gunman committed suicide, but left behind bullets with the phrase "ANTI ICE" written on them.
The online left has been openly calling for and encouraging violence against ICE agents for some time now, as well as attempting to facilitate that violence through doxing of agents and their families. These efforts have lead to a massive increase on assaults on ICE agents and threats to their families. Democratic leadership has refused to address these calls for and encouragement to violence from their base, and instead has joined in with calls for all agents to be unmasked and identified, as well as efforts to compel such identification through law.
This pattern of the blue grassroots engaging in lawless violence while the leadership offers encouragements of varying levels of plausible deniability, has been the norm for some time now. When the Blue Tribe grassroots engaged in a sustained vandalism and arson campaign against Tesla owners and dealers, recent Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz mocked the company's declining stock price and reassured Tesla owners that "we're not blaming you, you can take dental floss and pull the Tesla thing off". His subsequent non-apology is likewise a notable example of the form. Nor did it start there; as Blues unanimously maintain, Antifa is just an idea, not anything resembling an organization.
In any case, the ICE shooting in Dallas follows Sinclair Broadcasting abruptly reversing their plans to air Charlie Kirk's memorial service, after their local affiliates received numerous violent threats, and a teacher's union lawyer actually shot up the lobby of his local channel's offices.
Jimmy Kimmel is now back on the air, having been briefly suspended for blamed the murder of one of the most prominent right-wing activists in the nation on the right, an accusation repeated enthusiastically by numerous Blue Tribe influencers, activists and leaders. Polling shows that only 10% of Democrats believe Kirk's killer was left-wing. A third of Democrats believing that the man who wrote "catch this, fascist" on his bullets was right-wing, and a further 57% believe the motive for the shooting was either unknowable or apolitical.
Investigators are still looking into motive for what is being reported as a targeted killing at a country club in New Hampshire, where a gunman shouting "Free Palestine" and "The children are safe" killed one man and wounded two others. Likewise for the attempted bombing of a FOX news affiliate's van on the 14th.
We've had a fair amount of discussion over the last week about whether the left has a violence problem. It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem, but that there is no one on the left capable of engaging with that problem in anything approaching a constructive way. Simply put, the American left has invested too much and too broadly into creating this problem to ever seriously attempt to resolve it. There is no way for them to disengage from the one-two punch of "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary"; too much of what they have built over the last decade is predicated on this syllogism for their movement to survive even attempting to walk it back. The vast majority on the left cannot even bring themselves to admit the nature of the problem. But at the same time, at least some of them do seem to recognize that this is getting out of hand in a way that may not be survivable. Destiny's recent comments seem indicative of the mentality at play:
He appeared to elaborate on this train of thought in a recent stream:
...and the core point behind his somewhat incoherent further elaboration seems to be that the left must lean on the right to "lower the temperature", because otherwise the left itself will be forced to accept considerable losses.
The problem, of course, is that he is fundamentally correct. The Right is not particularly scared at the moment. We have had a long time to acclimate to the idea of leftist violence targeting us, and wile we are very angry about our political champions being murdered by leftist scum, with their actions cheered on by the grassroots left as a whole, many of us have long accepted the idea that this was going to come down to an actual fight in the end. We do not believe we created this situation; certainly, we did not bend the entire journalism, academia, and entertainment classes to normalizing the idea that our political opponents were isomorphic to subhuman monsters sneakily concealing themselves among the general population, whose violent deaths should always be enthusiastically celebrated. I've contemplated a post on simply cataloguing the number of TV shows and movies dedicated to one or both of the "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary" paired statements. Suffice to say, we are quite aware that most of the left holds us in absolute contempt, and a large plurality wishes for our violent death. We are aware that any pushback on these sentiments will be framed as an offensive act on our part. We told the left this was a bad idea. We told them why it was a bad idea. They did it anyway. And now: consequences.
In parting, I've written and then deleted several posts about "conversations we can have in advance." This is, yet again, a conversation we can have in advance. At some point, someone on the left is going to get shot by someone on the right, and not in a legally justifiable way but as an actual ideological murder. And when that happens, all the people mocking the idea of online violent radicalization, after screaming about the dangers of online violent radicalization for the last decade, are going to flop back to being performatively worried about online violent radicalization. When this happens, they will be met with stone-faced negation from Red Tribe, and will then weep and moan about how the extremists of the right just refuse to engage with this obvious problem. This will not deliver the results they hope for, but they'll do it anyway, and we'll move another step closer to chaos.
Hey, I thought the point of ice bullets was that they didn’t leave evidence!
Maybe I shouldn’t joke about this. It’s tragic, and disturbing, and speaks to an increased temperature in the lunatic fringe. Nothing good can come of it. As such, I’m not going to make excuses for the fucker.
Instead, I want to ask y’all what “the left” should be doing. What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership? Cancelling any streamer stupid enough to say something edgy? The DNC taking responsibility for a terrorist act like it’s al-Qaeda? Maybe some time in the stockades, or a few televised executions? What would it take for you to feel like “the left” was making a good-faith effort?
Because this isn’t it. Whatever detente you have in mind, I cannot imagine that it involves writing bitter essays about the inhumanity of conservative scum, their unwillingness to admit that there is a problem, the inevitability of consequences when they continue to overstep. That wouldn’t be healthy. It wouldn’t feel like you were winning at all.
You are eager to treat “the left” as one organism, one will, a mouth speaking platitudes while its hand fumbles for the knife. How dare they create this situation? How could they normalize the idea that their political opponents were isomorphic to subhuman monsters?
Don’t you see the symmetry?
You recognize that “the right” is barely a coherent category, but you fail to apply that knowledge to the outgroup. How does this double standard possibly improve the situation? How can you equivocate between the normies who disagree with you and the psychopath who pulls a trigger?
If—when—the roles are reversed, “the left” is going to write pieces just like yours. They’ll try to hold you responsible for whatever fuckwit decided to bomb a clinic or shoot a Democrat. You’ll rightly protest that you never had any control over the kind of person who would snap like that. And we’ll move one step closer to chaos.
Even if I grant such symmetry (and I don't), why should I care? I mean, sure, the other tribe has a lot of the same attitudes to mine as I have toward them, and they can make arguments about my side comparable to the arguments we make about them. But there's one key difference that no amount of "symmetry" or "both sides" or "meta-level" argument can erase: one tribe is mine, and the other is my enemy.
I love my family not because they're "the best" on some abstract objective metric, but because they're my family. "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her," said G. K. Chesterton.
I want my side to win, and the other side to lose. It's just that simple.
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Exactly what they are doing. They've overextended with wokeness and demographic engineering and lockdowns, which eroded a significant part of their ability to exercise power with seeming legitimacy. Galvanizing their supporters and sympathizers by escalating the conflict allows them to solidify what power they have while increasing their apparant legitimacy. They can choose between doubling down on the narrative that currently has traction or folding entirely and admitting fault, which is a fake choice because only one of those options actually offers them prospects of future success. Especially since the Right has also been going that exact way - sticking to their guns, attempting to match or exceed the other side's escalations, defecting in the face of prior defection by the other side.
It's a conflict, it does conflict things. The left will continue conflict-ing in this, because that's the only way for it to go.
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Nothing directly in your power, but since you phrased it collectively, is it really so much to ask that the same kind of pressure that made us move offsite (and purged countless bland inoffensive communities, creators, etc) be applied to people who are actually calling for, and praising political violence?
Many on the left seem to think so.
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Those are pretty much the most basic level of standards the Blue Tribe routinely expects of its opponents.
Yes. I sorted that list in order of descending agreeability. I expect most people would find the first reasonable, which is probably why Democrats are actually doing it. Same for the second, except for the free-speech maximalists.
I probably should have made it a smoother gradient, but the question was genuine. What would “the left” have to do, in your mind, to show good faith?
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Pure premium gaslighting bullshit. We all know what it looks like when the left is actually upset about something, and what we're seeing ain't it. Get back to me when the 24/7 torrent of calls to violence on Reddit get taken half as seriously as a sticky note with "It's okay to be white" written on it.
I think this is an unreasonable standard. Cleaning house is never going to involve the same enthusiasm as fighting the outgroup, even if it's a sincere effort.
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Discover time travel and warn Google and the New York Times not to put nutters in charge of their hire/fire policies? Alternatively, they're welcome to "make bigots afraid again."
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Cancel Culture has being going on for over a decade; we know that the Left is perfectly capable and willing of coming down hard on things it actually disapproves of.
This is actually a great point that didn't even occur to me. We've seen what leftists can do to punish people who say things they don't like. I am personally against all cancel culture everywhere for any reason, and I would fight this tooth and nail. But I would admit that a pro-cancel culture leftist who proved that they were willing to direct the cancel culture apparatus towards leftists glorifying anti-rightist violence - or even not maximally disapproving of it - is someone who has proven a commitment to reducing political violence. It'd be a deranged sort of commitment, but a true commitment nonetheless.
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... we kinda have examples, here.
To go to the Charcoal Briquettes Rant, the aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing had a wide variety of 'compromises' lean heavily to the progressive, specific legislation to make that form of murder or its advocacy more difficult, and while the execution of the bomber (under Bush!) wasn't televised, it's one of the very few times that the Left and Right agreed on just straight up killing a dude. The aftermath of anti-abortion murderers resulted in near-total ostracization of anyone promoting violence as a means to end or reduce abortion, long serenades from both political and spiritual leaders, the 'compromise' of the FACE Act, and several executions (at least one under a different Bush). Even minimally-violent disruptive protests that are wildly tolerated in other contexts are given a long standoff from mainstream Republicans and antiabortion advocates, today. Only two out of three people in the Flores murderers got a life sentence, but it also lead to widespread delegitimization of even unrelated border groups, in some cases treating them like terrorist organizations.
I'm not going to demand anything that strong, but I made a long list of things that would have surprised me had they happened, and of them, the closest to a 'success' story also has someone saying "But I will not reflect on our shared humanity, nor will I mourn his passing."
Your argument ab adsurduem has been table stakes.
It might work for the ICE attacks, where we have a clear policy, perpetrators in custody, and alignment with other groups. I’ll say that Democrats could and probably should do that. Make it clear that what the President is doing is legal and will be enforced, even if it’s challenged in Congress and court.
Not so much for the assassins. No surviving perpetrators. No conspirators at all. No comparable groups to discredit, no social networks to ban, no pet issues to excise from the party planks. Maybe not even an appetite for restricting the means.
The shortage of obvious targets is what moves it from table stakes to absurdity. You’ve either got to double down on the most similar cases—Luigi?—or widen your criteria. And widening them enough to punish all of antifa, the Democratic Party, or “the left”…that’s going too far. I understand that it feels natural for an average Republican to make that equivalence, but I believe it’s wrong.
I think Democrats should do that. I don't think they can, and I'm pretty willing to bet that they won't.
Trivially, there's not been an outpouring of support for ICE being attacked by a literal roving mob. Bringing in the national guard to fix the problem resulted in a minor constitutional standoff rather than an embarassed looking-the-other-way. Newsom, widely suspected as the frontrunner for the next Dem presidential primary season, is in the middle of fighting ICE on several fronts, a good number of them ranging from mildly to hilariously unlawful, nearly all of them bad ideas, along with his more general accelerationist behaviors. A judge is on trial for concealing an illegal immigrant, and the state governor opposes it. The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.
There's been no willingness to budge on sanctuary cities, even in the most egregious cases that everyone with the slightest clue knows is going to blow up in pro-immigration faces. There's no triangulation, no Sister Souljah from a Dem going onto ABC and smacking someone for saying gestapo. On this very forum, we have dishonest partisans who can't go further than promoting the Lankford bill, even this week, without ever confronting the serious flaws in their claims.
Of the 'successful' ones, we have Kirk's killer sitting in a jail today. Utah's asking for the death penalty; tell me if you can find a Dem partisan who wants the murderer to fry and doesn't call the shooter a groyper.
One attempted assassin was on trial literally yesterday, tried (poorly) to kill himself with a pen after being found guilty. Another went trans and has sentencing coming up soon. Supposedly well-respected people aren't sure if the Zizian attacks 'count' as left-wing (later deciding no!). How has the coverage on the left side of that aisle looked, to you?
And, yes, if we include Luigi fandom, he just got murder one dropped down to murder two for his trial, and even if you think that's a necessary conclusion from NY's esoteric statutes, we have wide evidence of what happens in other legal cases where prosecutors or the Democratic party don't agree with a specific statutory interpretation, and this ain't it.
Several anti-immigration and anti-abortion groups were discredited for merely having similar-sounding names.. I don't think that's healthy, but we have Options, here. People in the 80s and 90s who were too happy to bring down the hammer on organizations that merely echoed the language or defended killers or violent protesters on the right, and we now have a surfeit of test cases. We'll see how it looks in a week!
Funny to mention that!. ARFCOM had its registrar boot them based on rhetoric that merely looked like that of violent protesters; YouTube booted gun owners for things that they merely thought might ever look illegal. We'll see how this looks in a week.
I mean, 90s Republicans didn't abandon anti-abortion or anti-immigration or pro-guns positions entirely. They just made massive and often-painful compromises until they could rebuild political capital. Do you think that's going to happen, here?
I'd love to agree with you. The trouble is that I can absolutely agree with you, and also have nothing incompatible with :
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It also helped that feds seemingly cut back on killing right wing women and children.
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I think it would need public disavowals not only of the use of violence, but all threatening and dehumanizing language towards law enforcement officers. I would like a prominent Democratic leader to say something like, "We do not agree with the enforcement policy being executed by the administration, and are working to change that policy. But ICE agents are normal, decent people, federal employees doing an important and difficult job. You are not required to assist them, but please do not interfere with their duties."
They campaigned on “saving democracy” but can’t bring themselves to defend the democratically enacted laws being enforced by Trump.
Something like “we may not like these laws, we may not like how the administration speaks about them, but that’s why we need to work to elect more Democrats and change the laws. But for now we need to respect the individuals tasked with enforcing these laws.”
That would be legitimizing something Trump does, and that’s not possible to do.
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The problem with that is that "ICE agents are doing an important job" is itself a political statement. "ICE should be abolished" is a legitimate political opinion, and it entails that ICE agents are not in fact doing an important job but actively doing harm in the world. Believing this is not incompatible with acknowledging that they are, individually, human beings with rights and dignity, or that a civil society requires letting them act as the law permits them to do; but leftists are understandably wary of endorsing the kind of statement you propose, because it's very easy for them to smuggle in a surrender on the underlying political disagreements that define Left vs Right in the first place.
A closer analogy, perhaps, would be the bitter pill that pro-lifers have to swallow viz. abortion doctors. It should by all rights be incumbent upon Democrats to be as gracious regarding ICE agents as pro-lifers are regarding abortion providers. But notably this still allows pro-lifers to call abortion doctors murderers, and that is as it should be; you really, really shouldn't outlaw calling abortion murder on the grounds that it might incite acts of violence. Yet, increasingly, it seems that the Right wants the Left to do just that for ICE agents, and that's just not going to fly. That's just asking your political opponents to stop disagreeing with you about the actual politics.
Okay, but anything short of saying “federal agents doing their job” is tacitly enabling the narrative they’re Gestapo goose stepping into Home Depot to arrest anyone who looks Mexican. At some point, leadership has to say “I don’t like it, but it’s more important to protect officers doing their job” or they bare some responsibility for acts committed against them.
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It is a legitimate political opinion, but I can't help but notice most people with that position are saying that only now despite ICE having done deportations in mass under Obama and Biden. At least in terms of the raw numbers, Trump is not deporting in rates surpassing the previous administrations.
There certainly are differences in how ICE is operating, like how the time frame for expedited removal increased to 2 years from a previous 14 days. The number of border encounters is also down significantly, so the fact that the deportation rates have remained to similar levels does support the notion that ICE is targeting a larger population than they previously had. However, the call for the complete abolition of ICE versus a reversal to the previous status and mode of operation (which had comparatively very little calls to abolish the agency) to me suggests the position is not derived from principled values but rather an anti-trump position.
I recently talked to someone that very much had a "fuck ICE it should be abolished they contribute nothing of value" attitude and when I pressed him on the issues I think his issue was more on Trump's rhetoric and framing rather than what ICE was actually doing. He even acknowledged that he wasn't necessarily against immigration restrictions or post-migration enforcement! But even when I asked about the numbers, his first response was to question if comparing the number of deportations even accomplishes anything. I don't think I changed his mind much, but I think I at least brought down the temperature from his initial anger towards ICE.
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I can understand why leftists would make that distinction, but Democrats largely disclaim that kind of far left ideology, so they should be able to say that. I suppose their unwillingness to do so could be taken as implicit support of the leftist interpretation, but it could also be cowardice or just ineptitude.
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I think what the left should be doing is taking full-throated ownership of these murders pre-emptively, in a way that shocks the right with how quickly we're jumping to conclusions that we caused this murder, sans evidence of such. This sends a costly signal that we take the potential for violence to be caused by our violent rhetoric seriously, that we consider it more important than our reputation or pride.
And then take steps to implement policies that are supported by the attacked or rejected by the attacker. I've said similarly before; we need to send a signal to the other side that we take political violence as seriously as they do, that we consider it unacceptable to engage in it, irrespective of the political beliefs involved. So the signal must be costly for our political preferences, in favor of liberal democracy. Committing to an incentive gradient that discourages political murder, even if it means some of our political preferences don't get met seems like one of the most obvious costly signals for something like this.
EDIT: It also occurred to me later that a presentation of a certain attitude to actively seek out costly and effective signals I think would also be almost necessary. Most CW arguments involve someone nitpicking some suggested fix, finding problems here and there for why it wouldn't work, and such. And any specific fix can be nitpicked to death by someone who's motivated to appear as if they're goodwilled - this is the grain of truth in the whole "tone policing" complaints that became en vogue in SocJus spaces around 15 years ago. A full rejection of that attitude and embracing the attitude that, "If this particular costly action wouldn't properly send the signals in a way as to accomplish our goals, then we'll spend twice as much, work twice as hard and long to find some other costly action that would signal what we want in such a way as to accomplish our goals." I consider it a sort of "first derivative" commitment. We're not committing to a particular action, we're committing to a particular way of choosing our action, based on a commitment to do what it takes to figure out a way to reduce political violence, in a way that is costly to our political desires.
This is a hard sell when the right doesn't do this.
I find that rather perverse. Our commitment to lack of political violence in favor over our own pride or reputation ought not be contingent upon the behavior of people we have determined as being politically inferior to us, because that commitment is a good in itself. Otherwise, that commitment becomes merely a tool to cynically use to help one's tribe win instead of a principle of how no amount of opinions in politics ought to rise to violence.
The left, as far as the democratic establishment goes, has a good record on condemning violence. It just seems totally out of all proportion to be this critical of the exact angle of their kowtowing when most of the people complaining have not minded the log in their own eye. The big figures being critiqued for failing to condemn the violence are like random twitter accounts or streamers while the republican president and undisputed leader of the party goes on about how he hates his opponents and doesn't want the best for them and ratchets things up by claiming every republican is under threat. When the MN democratic state representatives were murdered Trump refused to lower flags to half mast or reach out to governer Walz. The framing is all wrong here.
They have a good record of condemning violence in such a non-descript manner that leaves much ambiguity. Or the final note betrays their real concerns.
"I condemn ALL violence, and especially the Proud Boys and other groups emboldened by Trump's rhetoric" and/or "what is Antifa even?" has never cleared my threshold of acceptability.
That doesn’t speak to your main point of hypocrisy regarding Republicans, which I won't argue against. But this track record you gesture at is superficially thin.
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Less believably than when Republicans condemn racism, and I've never seen the other side offer an ounce of grace on that score. Have any prominent Democrats acknowledged that Robinson looks a lot like a radicalized leftist?
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The right has successfully tamed violent fringes on multiple occasions, notably including in the pro-life movement.
Ok but from sources I believe the right vs left political violence tally is like 50/50 after you take out the obvious nonsense picks. The people to tame the pro-life bombings weren't the Trump camp and Trump would never in a million years do all the prostration people are calling for in this thread on behalf of a lunatic that did violence against his enemies. Plenty of lefty terror groups that disappeared and went inactive over the years too.
The Right tends to throw off more fringe interest groups for violence. Main catalysts for recent Leftwing stuff seems to be Israel/Palestine, Trans issues and Immigration issues. I don't think there's a ton of room in even the mainstream left to dissent on any of those issues.
This really depends on what you mean by maintream left. I'll remind you the more fringe left was rebuffed by the mainstream left party on their demands for I/P. You're really often comparing what you know to be your fringe with what you think is more mainstream on the other side. Yes, the average dem is to your left on trans stuff and immigration but the violence is coming from people who are often as far or further left of them than they are of you.
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This seems like a great opportunity for a mass collaboration.
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Could you post these sources? That is not my assessment, and it seems like the sort of thing we ought to be able to debate.
Speaking historically, they received financial, legal and moral support from the broader left, and many of them were given comfortable sinecures in high-status institutions. That history does not seem very de-escalatory to me.
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