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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30588 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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The "accountable" is only part of it. The main part of it, as I said, is that the masked look (and ICE's overall vibe) is clearly meant to be threatening, and we would like the government to cool it with the scary goons immediately. If it was just a matter of protecting agents' identities there would be many ways for them to present themselves that didn't make them look like video game mooks. Unfortunately, Trump thinks having scary-looking Stormtroopers looks badass.

Being fair, it’s fairly clear that any connected with ICE who gets identified is being doxxed, and the officer as well as his family are being threatened, and now that we’re at the point of shooting at them, isolated calls for de masking ice agents may as well be stated as “please make it easier for random crazy people to identify you, find your home address and threaten or even kill you.” Theres perhaps reason for numbers, or some other unique ID to be visible, but a full face and a name in the era of the internet are enough that you may as well have them wear their name, address, phone number, and instagram account name.

If police officers manage to work without masks, why shouldn't ICE agents? Leftists have raged against police officers as much as they have raged against ICE agents.

The median cop is handing out traffic tickets, working security, running off trespassers, and taking reports of domestic violence and theft, not personally dealing with serious crime or those connected to it. He goes home to a suburb where his profession is high status among his neighbors and has strong union protections. There are far leftists on college campuses who dislike him but they’d just find some other excuse if he was an accountant or a plumber. There’s nothing personal about it.

Cops arresting gangsters and carrying out raids routinely wear masks.

If police officers manage to work without masks, why shouldn't ICE agents? Leftists have raged against police officers as much as they have raged against ICE agents.

Police officers who work in fields with a higher risk of targeted retaliation routinely wear masks.

Fair point, I did not know that.

The stakes are much higher in the average ICE raid over the average police intervention. The vast majority of interactions between police officers and citizens are not a life ruining event for the citizen. An ICE agent during a raid is going to be ruining or at least seriously affecting people's life; many of which if given the chance would do a lot to avoid that happening to them. Note that the police officers whose average interventions are also high stakes, like SWAT teams, often wear face coverings as well.

Sorry, I thought that the narrative was that they needed the masks to be safe from all the bloodthirsty antifa lefties, not from violent illegal immigrants.

I agree that arresting illegals who might prefer death to deportation is inherently risky. But I also think that this danger is largely situational. Illegals using facial recognition to figure out the home addresses of ICE agents and then taking revenge for them deporting their buddies looks rather far-fetched.

Few illegals prefer death to deportation; they expect they can just come back.

Getting deported is viewed as a serious inconvenience that sometimes happens at random, not a life-ruining one.

I guess that it depends a lot on their country of origin. If they come from Mexico, then sure. If they come from South America, it might be a significant setback. Presumably, they will not be able to just book a flight to Juárez for lack of money, id and visa.

My priors would be that they will pass through a lot of transit countries in which they are also illegal, which likely means shakedowns and abuse.

Few illegals prefer death to deportation; they expect they can just come back.

They did, but the perception might be different with this administration.

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