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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.
This is a way of addressing the problem. If ICE stopped being masked goons who look like they came straight out of a bad YA dystopia movie, and became normal accountable government officials who behave kindly and civilly, I think this would reduce the violent sentiments against them tremendously. Don't turn your guys into Stormtroopers if you don't want people to start fancying themselves Jedi rebels.
(I'm not saying the Left's "thinking everyone is a Nazi" problem is unilaterally the Right's fault or anything. But in practical terms, that problem is not going to go away until the Right stops leaning into it.)
Normal government officials don't usually mask, but law enforcement has never behaved kindly and civilly towards the ordinary people they are arresting. If you're lucky it's "Turn around and put your hands on your head" followed by being slammed against a wall, a car, or the ground. If you're not it's "Don't move, freeze, BANG BANG BANG".
According to the FBI's Crime Data Explorer there were ~7 million arrests in the United States in 2024. (https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/arrest and change the filters on the left to narrow the date range to 2024). It's difficult to get exact numbers on use of force, but the website Police Violence Report (https://policeviolencereport.org/) has 1,270 killings by police in 2024. They correctly note that there are gaps in the data collection so let's be real generous and more than double that number and call it 3,000.
It's possible that there's an epidemic of non-fatal police shootings during arrests that has somehow slipped society's notice despite the general atmosphere of anti-police news over the last several years, but that's possible in the same sense that it's possible that Jeff Bezos is about to knock on your door to give you a billion dollars. I doubt you're quitting your job over that possibility. But let's again be generous and say that there are an additional 7,000 non-fatal arrest related shootings, so let's just get crazy and say that there were 10,000 arrest related shootings.
If we were being fair we'd need to subtract the justified shootings. But we won't, despite only 10 officers being charged from the 2024 killings, we'll just say a flat 10,000 out of 7,000,000 arrests.
Even with our inflated anti-police numbers it's still a ludicrous exaggeration to say that the police are jumping to "BANG BANG BANG" during arrests. This is a BLM tier, fact free sneer that does not match reality.
Eh, 3000 in 7 million is still better than the odds for winning the lottery.
Eh, I don't think it's reasonable to claim that because something's more common than winning the actual lottery that it's an accurate description of police behavior to expect during arrests (and a reminder that the 3,000 includes justified shootings completely unlike your scenario). But reasonable isn't an objective standard and based on your reply in our other discussion on policing I think your negative experience(s?) with the police have left you unable to be reasonable about the subject.
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