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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.)
Your terms are acceptable. This can be accomplished by arresting and punishing those on the left that are attempting to dox the ICE agents and use intimidation, violence and other tactics (even stochastically) against the agents and their families to demoralise them from their work. Once the doxxers are significantly deterred to the point the criminal behaviour is drastically reduced, and the doxing threat against ICE agents for doing their jobs is removed, then ICE agents can go maskless again.
If this is not code for 'become ineffectual' and actually means that you wish them to hold the above demeanor as they effectively do their jobs then this is also acceptable. Effectively doing their jobs however includes an appropriate use of force against those they are arresting and also those attempting to disrupt law enforcement activities.
This is not going to happen, and you know it. The doxxing can happen outside of the US. Trump is not going to do drone strikes on European cities to kill doxxers.
Also, anonymity is not a privilege we grant most state officials. There are no anonymous judges, or AGs.
For law enforcement, there is a practical side as well. To verify that you are dealing with law enforcement, you need to check the identity of the officers. Also, if you feel mistreated, this will give you someone to sue.
If Chauvin had been masked (and without an ID number) while he murdered Floyd, chances are that he would have gotten away with it due to reasonable doubt about who was who.
You're correct, perhaps we should. I want anonymous courts stamping classified orders going after self identified antifa groups and other domestic-terrorism-lite groups. Hell the anonymous courts should rubber stamp drone strikes against coyotes and drug cartels. Can't retaliate when you don't know who gives out the orders.
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Chauvin was completely railroaded by political vibes and is probably out within a year or two
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This wouldn't have been possible. Even if all the officers involved refused to answer questions about who did what, the body camera footage would allow you to identify them because the police know who is wearing which camera. Chauvin's fell off while Floyd was resisting arrest around the squad car but the footage from the others would make it clear who was involved and how.
I generally agree that making it easy to identify law enforcement officers is a good thing but positive identifications can still be made after the fact if there's an incident.
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So there's a heckler's veto on good police procedure?
My philosophical problem with ICE agents masking, dressing plainly, and not providing identification is that I'm watching these videos of raids at stoplights and I'm thinking to myself: How do I go about making the decision to shoot or not to shoot a group of masked men attacking my car at a stoplight? Because the whole visual reads to me carjacking/kidnapping/robbery, and I'd be reaching for a weapon, and I'd feel that the entire history of American self-defense jurisprudence backs me up on this one.
Now am I vanishingly unlikely to be the target of an ICE raid? Sure. But procedurally the existence of a situation where the authorities are trying to arrest me, and the situation is such that I would be legally justified in shooting them, is anathema to law and order, even if the combination of events is rare.
If they're unmasked and you run into them attacking you at a stoplight, exactly how is seeing their faces going to help? Are you going to search their faces online, confirm that they're in some police database, and decide not to shoot them, all while they're attacking you?
Seeing their faces is useless until later, at which point you've already had to decide whether or not to shoot them.
Kidnappers are much more likely to wear masks, as they don't want to be seen and identified, so not wearing masks provides evidence that they're legit. Wearing uniforms and/or providing badges and names is more evidence against being miscreants. Obviously none of that is perfect, but the current videos provide zero evidence against the carjacking hypothesis, I just have to decide not to shoot.
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As long as they're not working off of bad intel or a warrant or other paperwork with typos.
Or if I'm giving one of my Venezuelan teammates a ride after jiu jitsu, or one of my wife's law school classmates is at my house, or the guys who come with my drywall contractor who don't speak English and I don't ask questions about...
It's unlikely but it's bound to happen to somebody.
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A hecklers veto has your heckler causing problems with X in order to prevent X. I don't think people opposed to ICE are trying to prevent ICE agents from exposing their faces.
In this case, a heckler's veto is being exercised on good police procedure. You're saying I can't advocate for the basic libertarian principle that agents of the state have to identify themselves until every single person in the united states agrees to treat them well.
Same issue. This is not a heckler's veto because the hecklers don't want to prevent them from identifying themselves.
A hecklers veto encourages hecklers by responding to their disruption by doing things that they want to happen. Responding to hecklers by doing things that they don't want to happen doesn't have similar problems, and is not a heckler's veto.
By your reasoning, having the police arrest a criminal is a heckler's veto on not arresting.
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That's an unpleasant problem, but it's also a fully generalized one.
I'm against no knock raids for the same reason. There should never be a situation where the boundaries of acceptable self defense and the boundaries of acceptable law enforcement activity intersect. That venn diagram should be two circles.
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That's a very strong point I hadn't considered in quite those terms.
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I agree with most of this, yes.
As I said elsewhere in the thread, I am leery of the "other tactics (even stochastically)" bit, which I think can too easily be used as a bludgeon against free speech expressing what the bludgeon-wielding side deems to be wrongthink. If it is appropriate for non-violent pro-life activists to refer to abortion doctors as murderers - and it must be appropriate, because that is their legitimate moral belief and freedom of speech means nothing if they cannot express it - then it must remain appropriate for non-violent pro-immigration extremists to refer to ICE agents as Nazis.
But that's only one part of your post, and really a whole other conversation from the core issue here.
I see little problem with censoring content creators to not use fighting words (which due to mass media propaganda, terms like Nazi and Fascism and similar are) that basically dehumanize those you oppose. There’s a shift in context simply because of the March of technology that enables people to marinate in content like that, and creates vortexes that people fall into and come out ready to commit violence against their “enemies”. This isn’t 1980 where exposure to political content was time and space limited by technology and people had to in the famous words of William Shatner “get a life”. The content is ever present and available every time you open your phone. And if the person on that end sees “X is a [fighting word]” especially heavily upvoted, liked, and shared, with the filterbubble hiding contrary opinions, it’s seen as social proof that this person or group of people are profoundly wrong and evil, and deserve to be destroyed. That’s how you get people to be okay with killing, and a nonzero number of people actually willing to kill.
This is how propaganda works. OG Nazis wanted radios in homes so they could send audio of speeches and the sound of wild applause at the threats against political enemies or in that case Jews could be heard by every German who would see this as social proof that most Germans are on board with those ideas. The reason to have video of thousands of ordinary people cheering to show before every movie is again to create the illusion of social proof so that Germans seeing those newsreels believe that this is what Germans want. We have much tge same thing in our media especially social media, where lots of people are being given tge impression that most Americans think that they live under a fascist dictatorship with ICE as the Gestapo rounding up
Jewsimmigrants. And that’s breeding violence.Just because you don’t like something doesn’t make it “fighting words,” and it definitely doesn’t supersede the 1st Amendment.
How about it causing actual real life shootings? We’ve had 9 months of crying about Nazis, Fascists, White Christian Nationalists, and Gestapo, and we’ve now had within that same time frame dozens of incidents of Teslas being destroyed, several incident of people showing up to the homes of government officials, an assassination, two incidents where ICE officers are shot at (and detainees died), and several riots in Los Angeles. Exactly how many incidents need to be tied to the “MAGA = White Christian Nationalist = Nazi” do we need before anyone that isn’t on the right can say “yeah maybe calling everyone who doesn’t agree with us fascist and calling ICE tge Gestapo is a bridge too far?” Like are we waiting for something bigger? As I see it, if the words are causing actual violence, then it’s not all that hard to make a case for those words being “fighting words”. And this is where we are — stochastic terrorism inspired by claims that MAGA is fascism and therefore must be stopped at all costs.
I don’t see any other option. Either the Nazi and Fascist talk is banned from social media and media figures or influencers lose their jobs because they’re comparing MAGA to Fascists and Trump to Hitler, or we simply allow the current media atmosphere to remain until the next assassination. But I can’t understand how people cannot make that connection and I hope it doesn’t mean that those spreading these messages want more terrorism.
"Stochastic terrorism" is a bogeyman made up to justify suppression of right-wing speech; it is not an actual exception to the First Amendment, not even when the right flips the script. Nor is it "fighting words"; "fighting words" are an insult offered in the moment which provoke a violent reaction (and in the landmark case, was used to justify a conviction for calling a cop a "fascist"). The doctrine is fortunately mostly dead.
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Is 'punch a Nazi' fighting words?
Sorry, that was too much of a hot take.
How about 'helicopter rides?'
I find it hard to think that a person wouldn't take a threat of violence or death seriously, no matter how jaded with irony and self-referential internet culture. If Nazis are irredeemable cannon fodder that can be slaughtered without scruple of conscience, then no one should be called a Nazi unless they actually are. Same goes for pedophile, or any other group that is convenient to other.
No and no. The courts have routinely protected far more aggressive speech, as in Brandenburg.
True threats can be legally prohibited, but “mere advocacy” is not enough.
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People really, really, really seem to misunderstand what "fighting words" are. Even if we ignore that the Supreme Court has been backing away from treating fighting words as a real thing for several decades now, even in the cases where they are treated as a real thing they require the person saying the words and the person hearing the words to be in each other's physical presence. They're called "fighting words" because they're words that will likely lead to an actual fight, then and there.
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No, because the Nazis were a real and defined party, of which there are approximately zero surviving members. Referring to them that way is way more biased and way more loaded.
It’s not polite, and it’s not good epistemics; weak men are superweapons. But public discourse is never held to that standard. People insult and insinuate by analogy all the time. Technical usage of the term “bitch” does not prevent me from using it as a shorthand.
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This seems like a needlessly pedantic hill to die on. Substitute "Nazis" for "murderous white supremacists", or however you want to phrase the combination of immorality and ideology which Leftists are clearly pointing to when they call people "Nazis". But I don't think anyone is honestly confused about this. It's only technically wrong in the same sense that "Senator McExample is a fucking asshole" would be inaccurate insofar as McExample is not literally an ambulatory anus.
Nazis have replaced the concept of Satan and demons as the "ultimate evil" in secularized Western culture. I do not think this is merely a pedantic issue when it's not merely in accurate in the way of an ambulatory anus, but as an effort to mark one's enemies as not just bad, not just evil, but THE ULTIMATE EVIL beyond any and all redemption.
New flair inspiration, thank you.
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No, this is actually an important issue. Being marked as a nazi is something that broad swathes of society agree means that it is perfectly acceptable to ruin your life and kill you - and there are at the very least people out there attacking people they consider nazis and getting away with it (see Bikelock dude). What counts as a nazi is something that is actually pretty important... and also extremely nebulous.
While the literal meaning obviously isn't being used anymore, we can't just use "murderous white supremacists" anymore because the term has clearly expanded far beyond that - to say nothing of what the Israeli/Gaza conflict has done to destroy any remaining shared meaning of the word. Given that this is an appelation which makes you fair game for political violence I think establishing exactly who is and isn't a nazi is pretty important.
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The people this label is routinely applied to pretty clearly aren't white supremacists, or often even white, and certainly aren't murderous.
Well, no, but I don't believe abortion doctors are murderers, either. Or indeed that pro-lifers are just patriarchal oppressors obsessed with Controlling Women's Bodies™. That's not in question. It's just that inaccurately ascribing evil motives to the opposition is still the bread and butter of politics, and you don't meaningfully have freedom of speech if you start banning individual instances for being especially untrue or incendiary.
Believing that abortion doctors are murderers is not a statement about their state of mind, it's a claim about how to characterize the actions that they are uncontroversially known as doing. In theory you could use "white supremacist" the same way, but that doesn't happen in practice; it pretty much always means attributing motives that you can't know or actions that they did not do.
"Controlling women's bodies" goes along with "white supremacist" and should be condemned for the same reason.
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It's not just the literal words, it's the surrounding context. If pro-lifers started talking about punching murderers, and calling people murderers, then calling people murderers would contribute to stochastic terrorism a lot more.
Also, calling them Nazis specifically is not a "legitimate moral belief" anyway. Pro-lifers think abortionists are literally murderers. Nobody thinks ICE agents are literally members of the Nazi party, and probably not even that they want to kill millions of people.
Pro-lifers absolutely should be allowed to talk in general terms about how they think murderers should be punched, and also allowed to say that they think abortion is murder, and also allowed to say "you had an abortion so in my book you're a murderer". The current standard for where speech stops being lawful is when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action. I think that's a good standard.
Hate speech is another exception to lawful speech and doesn't require incitement.technically wrong, mea culpaI think you mean "whence" ("from where"), not "whither" ("to where").
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Do you have a source on otherwise lawful (i.e. not threats or incitement) hate speech being unlawful in the US?
Hate speech is used as evidence in prosecuting hate crimes, but technically that's just an enhancement charge and I don't really want to fight about this or dig for sources. Statement redacted.
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I generally agree with this, but the zeitgeist on the ground has an awful lot of lawless action (political assassinations and attempts thereof) these days. It's obviously hard to tie specific actions there to specific speech, but the big picture is normalizing the idea of lawless action, not a single clear call for it. How much can I complain about "turbulent priests" before I'm responsible to the state when Thomas Becket gets murdered?
And I've never gotten a good answer on how "imminent" applies: can I promote a planned riot as long as it's more than, say, 12 months from now?
Not “turbulent priests.” “This turbulent priest.” It wasn’t ambiguous in the slightest.
And I think you’re overstating the amount of violence on the ground. One murder is too many, but it’s simultaneous not an awful lot. It represents less of an ongoing threat than, say, Summer 2020.
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The rally in Brandenburg v. Ohio was on June 28, 1964. The march was planned for July 4, 1964.
Note that the "imminent lawless action" test is for mere advocacy; actually planning a riot in detail (e.g. "Charlie, you take group B up on the hill with the bottles; Jim, take group A with the Molotovs) would probably not be protected.
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IANAL but my understanding is that, as long as your speech does not constitute a threat, and as long as you are not actively conspiring with others, that's protected speech. If you are planning the detailed logistics of a riot a year from now that might not be protected. But for a silly example, the whole area 51 raid thing a few years back - saying "that's based and I fully support this. everyone should go, they can't stop all of us" a month before is, under my understanding of the law, in the clear.
I think that one falls under criminal solicitation (intent that the crime occurs + request/order that some specific person commit the crime), because it was said to specific people who would be expected to take it as an order. The state would have to prove intent, but in the Thomas Beckett case that seems not too difficult.
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Didn't the Supreme Court rule that Trump's speech on j6 didn't count?
It depends on the judge you get and how many appeals you want to suffer through, but my understanding of the Supreme Court precedent on incitement is something like "My fellow activists, let's go right now to burn down the courthouse!" and then you all go right then to burn down the courthouse. If instead you all go to lunch, and some of the the people you talked to burn it down tomorrow but you didn't repeat your speech before they did, that wasn't incitement.
I don't believe any such case reached the Supreme Court. Or any court, for that matter. There were a lot of cases against Trump, but incitement to riot was not one of them.
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Nobody thinks people have to literally be members of the defunct German political party NSDAP to be called Nazis, not any more than you have to specifically commit an unlawful killing to be called a murderer.
Er... I certainly think that. It is really toxic how people apply "Nazi" to mean "someone I think is authoritarian" and I think it should be reserved for actual Nazis. I also think you shouldn't be called a murderer unless you deliberately take someone's life.
I would defend calling Hitler-admiring Jew-exclusive white supremacists in favour of violent action "neo-Nazis" or, colloquially, "Nazis", despite their lack of membership of the NSDAP.
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I would also accept members of other contemporary Nazi parties, or a member of Rockwell's American Nazi Party.
I'll trade you "only calling people cultural Marxists/communists/bioleninists if they are actual members of Socialist parties".
I'd make the trade, if this means people that had a che shirt or hammer and sickle poster in college are treated the same as if they'd had a swastika poster- that is, completely excluded from polite society.
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Why would I trade you three labels for one?
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I can't imagine every ICE agent not being doxed immediately if the Democrats win in 2028. That names list is leaking within one month.
No, see, this week the doxing is just crazy right-wing paranoia. Democrats would never endanger law enforcement personnel for partisan advantage, or in this case revenge. The violence is really rare and just fringe wackos after all. C'mon now.
Yeah, we're still only at Step 1. I thought the memo was out about this.
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That's not how this is going to play out.
At best, you're going to have the ICE data used by megacorps from Apple to Zillow to blacklist these people from ever being employed again; at worst, you're going to have Nuremburg trials for many of the more prominent ICE members (don't worry, they'll be super humane -- no deaths by hanging; that's crass and right-coded. Just prison and felony charges, to make sure you're maximally unemployable).
Porque no los dos?
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As far as democrats go they're the Gestapo and will probably be tried if the MAGA coalition fractures badly enough post Trump. Either that of Vance holds it together and starts imprisoning "Antifa" in mass. Someone is going to win and someone is going to lose in the next 8 years.
No they won't. A bunch of them will probably get fired, a few senior members will get indicted on charges that may or may not make sense. The vast bulk of ICE will not be.
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The Democrats are not going to throw the criminal law at federal agents unless they clearly exceeded their political authorization in an egregious manner. As a baseline, consider the fallout of Abu Ghraib, when random US soldiers cosplayed gitmo. Most got away with a demotion and a maybe a token prison sentence. By contrast, a civilian psychopath who tortured his neighbors that way would likely rot in prison for decades. And of course, nobody went after the CIA torturers, because they kinda had government authorization.
"Government goons are shielded from facing the consequences of crimes they commit" is a principle which helps whomever likes a powerful government, which includes both Democrats and Republicans.
I also do not think that Vance or anyone will imprison the broader ideological antifa movement. They will certainly go after people for conspiracy to commit a crime, but they will not succeed in imprisoning people just for celebrating political murders.
The Kirk assassination and ICE clashes might look like things are heading for a climax, but in the great scheme of things this still seems a tempest in the teapot, rather than Troubles-level of violence. When in doubt, default to "nothing ever happens, politically".
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You badly underestimate how long things can drag out in a muddled form.
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Your terms are acceptable. Doxing which is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action is already unlawful. We do not need new laws here, we need to enforce the ones we already have.
Yes. Emphasis on "appropriate" of course.
Sure. I support efforts to prosecute people who are actively trying to incite violence against ICE agents who plausibly could succeed at inciting said violence. I don't think I'm unusual in that opinion, even for people on the left.
I don't see much evidence that anyone is even attempting to prosecute the people breaking those laws, though. It feels like one of those "we've tried nothing and now we're all out of ideas" situations.
I don't support ICE intentionally saying "well, normal legal channels didn't work so we have to go full stormtrooper" when they haven't even tried normal legal channels. Having masked people in unmarked vehicles who refuse to identify themselves snatching people off the street should not be the first resort.
That's not how this works. The heightened threat against ICE is removed and then their legal risk mitigation strategies can be stood down.
But yes, they absolutely should be cracking down on and arresting the doxxers if the legal means allow them to do so. If they can't for whatever reason, then the protective strategies remain. Then federal laws should be passed against stochastic support of crime.
It shouldn't be 'law enforcement personnel must accept the exposure of themselves and their families to physical harm while they're alone and exposed at their homes because they decided to work for ICE'. Clearly this will lead to intimidating people into not working for ICE. Which means border enforcement ceases to exist and Antifa achieve their political ends through the threat and use of violence (eg domestic terrorism).
I think this is a case of "if your risk tolerance is literally zero you can't do anything".
We should take reasonable efforts to ensure the security of federal employees like those at ICE. Such as prosecuting people who actually break existing laws of the land in ways that endanger those employees.
There are limits, though. If the risks are higher than people are willing to deal with for the $50k / year we pay ICE agents, we should first try paying more. There are quite a few jobs that expose you to more risk than ICE agents face, and we are able to find people for those jobs. We're a rich country, we can afford to pay people. For a baseline, cops in San Francisco make $115 - $165k / year in base salary, often much more with overtime. If we're not paying at least that much for the apparently 4 digit number of people securing our borders, we shouldn't complain that we can't find people who will tolerate the risk.
What we should not do, before we have seriously attempted "prosecute people who break the law" and "pay people what they're worth", is shred the constitution. And "pass federal laws against stochastic support of crime", if I'm understanding your proposal correctly, amounts to shredding the constitution.
And if you ask the HSE people responsible for those jobs what this risk of injury should be, they will say "zero", and do absolutely everything in their power to reduce it to that level in terms of procedures that they can identify/control. I strongly doubt that OH&S sees ICE much differently than other employers in this regard.
Considering that there are literally targeted hit attempts happening on ICE agents right now, I must say that the risk of being shot for an ICE field agent seems much higher than that of them dying of COVID, given that they trend young and healthy -- and yet...
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How much risk is reasonable risk. This idea is doing a lot of heavy lifting, but there’s just no definitive answer to “when does the risk get bad enough that cops or ICE or political figures are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?” ICE is subject to serious doxxing and real-time tracking, they’re being shot at, their home addresses and thus their families’ locations are publicized thus meaning that a radicalized idiot with a gun could show up at their house, their kids’ school, or anywhere else they go. Police might get a guy they tried to arrest mad enough to try something, but it’s actually pretty rare and there are no databases or tracking apps telling people where law enforcement is at every moment. There are no public figures that refer to cops as Gestapo or quote Anne Frank every time the local beat officer arrests someone.
If ICE were treated like local cops and given the support given to cops, sure, I get the idea that you should accept risk, and that you should be able to be identified. In tge current circumstances, asking for that means that you want these agents and their families dead. Because in this particular environment, that’s tge clear and obvious result of demasking agents while they’re being shot at, doxxed with public databases, the rhetoric compares their work to Nazis rounding up Jews, and there are apps to real time track them still available for download.
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The thing is that you need lots of ICE agents to deal with all the illegal immigration. Making them so expensive that there aren’t enough of them to scale to immigration is effectively an amnesty by the back door.
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