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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29345 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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ICE themselves posts videos of them raiding places. They posted a video to the pokemon sound track. The pokemon one has clips of masked dudes blowing up doors. It doesn't look good man.

It does, to the target audience, which is why they do it.

There is no way ICE can have good optics for Democrats and those who watch mainstream-left media. So they don't bother, which leaves them free to pander instead to those who are receptive.

... that sure sounds like "ICE is intentionally cultivating a particular narrative about who they are" to me. I don't get why people here are so averse to the idea that ICE has PR people and those PR people are decent at their jobs.

They are cultivating a narrative, but

  1. They are quite constrained in this. In particular, they cannot cultivate a narrative that will make those who consume mainstream-left media not hate them.

  2. They are trying to be scary at least some of the time. But not hateable. Consider all this handwringing about the Pokemon soundtrack... does the Pokemon soundtrack make them seem scary and hateable? Hardly. It's whimsical; that part is aimed not at generating fear or hate, but at convincing the convincible that they are doing their job.

  1. Yeah, agreed on that. They can, however, cultivate a narrative that further increases the salience of the things that the mainstream-left media already loudly objects to. And this seems to be their strategy, at least with their decisions with the Hyundai plant (I haven't seen the "gotta catch em all" video)
  2. I think they are strategically trying to instill a sense of impotence and anger in a specific group of people (specifically the group of people who vocally backs sanctuary cities and similar things), on the working theory that if those people feel angry and impotent they will do counterproductive rage-signalling things instead of actually-obstructive process things.

Sure but when the target audience is <50% of the people (and shrinking) in a democracy, your messaging strategy is kind of stupid

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