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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.)
They just want the agents to be killed by lynch mobs, it's not complicated. It's really not about "accountability," that's just a dogwhistle. The Democrats calling for revealed identities fundamentally oppose ICE's mission and often support operations that impede ICE. They do not have the best interests of its officers in mind and nothing they ask for should be taken as an idea helpful to their missionp
An argument can be made that the increase in risk of being killed for political reasons that any given ICE agent runs if ICE officers do not wear masks as opposed to wearing masks is so small that maybe an agent who isn't willing to run that small increase in risk just isn't very good law enforcement material.
Police officers are, I imagine, more likely to be targeted for their work than ICE agents are, and police officers do not wear masks.
I've heard of two recent attacks on ICE, for a group of 6500 agents. There are about 850k police officers in the US, and I suppose there might have been 260 attacks on police officers that I haven't heard of in the same period, but that seems really high.
Even aside from those numbers, I'd suspect that ICE gets all the generic "fuck the police" in addition to the ICE-specific hate.
FBI claims 79091 assaults on police officers and 60 officers killed in 2023. I expect most of those "assaults" are highly noncentral examples of "assault" but I'd expect the median ICE agent is at less personal risk than the median police officer in Baltimore (but probably much more risk than the median police officer in Boise).
Were any of those assault victims targeted for their work, or was it simply because the perpetrators didn't want to get arrested? The July 4 ambush, the recent convoy attack, and the firebombing in LA all involve the perpetrators seeking out ICE and attacking them. The traffic-stops-turned-fights later in the linked article feel like a more typical story of assault on an officer.
Protecting your identity protects you from people who want to track you down and kill you. It won't help you against people who would rather not go to jail right now. I don't think those two categories of assaults are evenly split between ICE and regular police officers.
Do you know if there are a couple hundred examples of people going out of their way to attack police officers in that 79k, or are they ~all done by people fighting whoever happens to be right in front of them?
None of these could have been prevented by masks or anonymity of the ICE officer; they weren't attacking particular people they knew to be ICE, they were attacking people known to be ICE (because they were attacking a detention facility, in the July 4 case).
But this is broadly what we would expect, in a world where ICE anonymizes themselves: when people want to attack ICE, they need to do it while they're on their official duties, because they don't know which people at home are ICE agents. Attacks that are prevented by anonymizing ICE don't happen, because ICE anonymized and thus the attacks were prevented.
We can't examine the counterfactual world where attacking ICE agents at home is easier, since we're not living in it. Conceivably some of these attacks could have been replaced by attacking agents at home, if it were easier to do so.
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Off the top of my head, thé Dallas police shootings indicate that violent attacks on police as police tend to be a major news article.
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