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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.
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."
Something like that? https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1943443522058883549
Yes! I wish he had more influence on his party.
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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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