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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.
It is an hallowed tradition in this country to call our political opponents mean names.
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