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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.)
Why would you think something demonstratably untrue?
A lack stormtroopers hardly impeded significant parts of the broader left from accusing anyone to their right of being fascists, something that has been in the political water for nearly a century since the first fascists diverged from their socialist influences. Just in the last decade, after convincing themselves that there were multiple orders of magnitudes more police shootings of unarmed black men than were actually occuring, efforts to reduce the 'goon' surface vector by reducing police presence and proactivity saw a substantial increase in violent sentiments carried out against fellow residents and citizens.
Nor did a lack of goons or stormtroopers hinder the political left from formalizing itself as the plucky underdog rebels of the anti-fascist or Jedi variety, and years of not-actually-oppressing the opposition, rather than decrease violent sentiment, led to the Democratic Party's political-media alliance championing the fiery but mostly peaceful protests that caused insurance market warping damages.
'Accountable' law enforcement, as framed by the Democratic officials and political left opposed to ICE, has repeatedly corresponded with more, not less, violent sentiments over time when political control has enabled the removal of police who were an obstacle to executing the violent sentiments. This is not exactly the first time this has happened either, hence the multi-decade cycle of in US politics of progressive advocacy to depolice various communities and issues, and then the subsequent issues leading to waves of re-enforcing laws, the enforcement of which becomes justification for new violent opposition.
Given that the perception of oppression can be based on lies, or even distortions taken magnitudes out of any bit of truth, there is no meaningful change in hostile sentiment to be had. The inclination is demonstratably not based on on truths, and so its level does not depend on irrelevant independent variables such as truth..
What is practical about insinuating a standard global practice for police at risk of retaliation, by a law enforcement agency with a history even before the current administration of being subject to targeted attacks by international criminal groups and US domestic extremists, that is actively being targeted by doxing and harassment efforts after partisan media signal boosted social media apps for anonymously reporting and tracking ICE locations and movements to enable further actions, is 'leaning into' a Nazi accusation?
Well, that's not what I want. I would like more, but softer, policing. More local beat cops who know everyone by name, fewer Stormtroopers. I'll grant you that the mainstream Democratic messaging doesn't actively advocate for this, but for what it's worth, that's what I want; I don't think there's a binary switch between "defund the police" and "goons in balaclavas". (See also this post.)
You avoided the question regarding your own position.
Your response of the practicality, please.
Your desires are as irrelevant to the consequences of your proposed policies as they are irrelevant to the intended consequences of the partisans your are borrowing the arguments of.
Local beat cops in California are legally prohibited from conducting immigration enforcement by multiple legal obstacles, including accountability to the state of California whose politicians oppose enforcing immigration laws, and the policy engineering of that political leadership coalition to revoke that authority from even other, willing states.
Hence, your preferred policy would lead to less enforcement, and fewer actors legally authorized to enforce laws. This is, not coincidentally, the intent of the progressive anti-ICE coalition, for whom the 'stormtrooper' accusation is a useful lie to deflect blame for escalating tensions that are justified on the grounds of such lies.
That your preferred additional policy of demasking would make it even easier for malefactors to escalate targeting of those fewer authorized actors, thus creating a moral and pragmatic obligation on the part of those authorized actors to protect themselves, thus leading to further accusations of being totalitarian oppression used to advocate for even fewer people more easy to target, is a symbiotic feedbackloop coincidence.
It is worth nothing when you perpetrate the false and accusatory framings that are used to justify the political violence of those who very much do advance such binary switches through political violence.
How is it a lie? They do in fact look like faceless Stormtroopers. You can argue that this is necessary, either because that's just how policing work or because the Left has left immigration enforcers no other options - but you can't argue it's a "lie". It's visibly just true, and several other people in the thread are in fact defending that yes, they are, but that's what you gotta do.
I contend - as a matter of fact - that if ICE agents looked and acted like normal people instead of Stormtroopers, this would in fact lead to fewer attacks on them in the mid-to-long-term. There's a fringe of radicals who would still try to doxx/hurt/kill them, but they would look much worse in the eyes of the wider population than in the current status quo where the people they're fighting go around dressing and acting like supervillains. Violence against a normal-looking dude would seem shocking and generate more pushback.
I lost this kind of hope in the common left-liberal when otherwise-sane people with good careers started attacking random peoples' cars because of comments by the car manufacturer's CEO.
You're either overestimating the goodness of "normies" or underestimating the frequency of the fringe.
Vandalizing unoccupied Teslas speaks ill of the culprits' maturity, but widespread tolerance for "heck yeah, let's mess up Bad Man supporters' stupid-looking hell-cars, that'll show them" does not make me despair of human nature in the same way "heck yeah, hang that father of three from a lamppost" would. Those seem to be in very different realms, and just because the former is disappointingly common, does not make me lose hope about the rarity of the latter sentiment.
I think the route from one to the other is shorter than you do, and the allowance of calling one's enemies Nazis (or cockroaches) makes it shorter still.
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A father of two was just murdered for his political views. A none insignificant number of leftists cheered his murder. You have members of Congress saying murder bad but “long diatribe about how awful the decedent was” effectively saying “that this murder wasn’t that bad.”
So I don’t have the faith you do.
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No, Stormtroopers have a gruesome white helmet, and if you took off the helmet it wouldn't matter because they all have the same face.
While I don't like the masking, I do not believe there is any convincing evidence for this claim.
Stormtroopers were not clones and they didn't look very gruesome imo.
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You avoided the question regarding your own position, again.
Your response of the practicality, please.
Because they are not Stormtroopers. They are not stormtroopers in the military context (ICE are not dressed as the origin of the term of trench stormers), or in the fascist context (ICE is not fulfilling a fascist police state supression role), or the in the young adult novel dystopian government context (the demand of which is exceeding the supply).
It is visibly not true, since vision allows people to observe actions, and even reasons for actions. Visibility also allows the comparisons, and contrasts, with other ascetic representations of things of a category (the variety of what Stormtroopers might be, which is too broad to be encapsulated by ICE), and things that are not of a category (the global examples of face-obscuring wear of not-Stormtroopers, to which a Stormtrooper accusation would be a lie).
Aside from your contention of a fact being a non-falsifiable hypothesis rather than a fact, this claim entails a notable omission of the 'short-to-medium' term, which is when law enforcement activity would occur. It has no attempt to address the relevant possible hypothesis second-order consequences of current political violence trajectories both for enforcement over the mid-to-long term (such as trends to non-enforcement from successful terrorism), or compensation efforts (which would be accused of being authoritarian abuses).
The wider population already support immigration enforcement and standard force protection measures for police. In turn, the current enforcement wave is the pushback for years of systemic non-enforcement, which did lead to predictable and predicted consequences both in terms if migrant crimes and ideological blind eyes to migrant perpetrators of crimes against normal-looking dudes (and dudets).
You are already in the context of the pushback. You, specifically, are opposing the pushback.
Until demasking is attempted, so is the hypothesis that demasking would lead to further escalation of violence.
I am not saying that they "are" Stormtroopers, I am saying that they look like Stormtroopers - meant in its colloquial aesthetic sense of "identical, impersonal, threatening-looking armed goons". I think it is obviously true that they look like Stormtroopers, and fairly clear from Trump's own rhetoric and that of ICE supporters, that this is an aesthetic they deliberately cultivate as opposed to an innocent consequence of putting together optimally protective and effective uniforms. They want ICE to look intimidating. Are you really claiming that they don't?
You are talking about pushback from the Right; I am talking about pushback from within the Left (which Mottizens have been the first to notice has been lacking).
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