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I don't want to doxx OP so I'm not going to post it, but I found a local news report after about five seconds of looking. On the other hand, everyone knows where I live, so I'll have no trouble posting this news report from a couple months ago. It's not mentioned in the video, but the restaurant was open at the time, with customers inside, and the agents also managed to start a small fire in the kitchen after they damaged the gas line of a stove. I don't want to say these stories are exactly common, but when they appear in the relatively unbiased medium of local news every couple months in an area without a high immigrant population at all, what sort of impression are people supposed to get? Why would people think that those detained are criminals or otherwise bad people when ICE just no comments the news?
Anyway, I'm not going to argue with you about what kind of people are being deported because it's really beside the point. The important thing is that the perception exists among a lot of people, and calling them morons who live in a bubble isn't going to change that perception. This is the same logic that led to the Democrats underestimating Trump in 2016. "How could anyone possibly vote for that man? We can't lose!" Followed by a bunch of crap about how Hillary's email scandal wasn't a big deal and all the other nonsense that they assumed the electorate downplayed because they were motivated to not care about it. As I say in another comment above, this is how waves happen; you assume you have a broad mandate without doing any research to confirm how popular your policies are, ignore or downplay information that suggests people don't like this shit, talk about whatever "structural advantage" you have through gerrymandering, a Blue Wall, becoming majority minority, or whatever, and then act surprised when you get shellacked. This is exactly how the Democrats went from having a supermajority in 2009 to being in the position that they are now.
Bro, did you watch your own video? It's literally a press release from an anti-ICE activist group presented as a news clip. Every single person interviewed is from the same anti-ICE rally without a single countering take.
Meanwhile the reporters do note that the agents had a warrant and arrested so many illegals that both locations shut down temporarily. That is nothing like the "legal immigrants dragged away while begging for the chance to go get their papers" crap I was replying to.
And this perception has little to do with reality. So please stop actively making it worse. "A lot of people believe these wild exagerrations and lies I'm actively peddling, so you'd better start acting as if the lies are true". How about I keep pointing out that they're wild exagerrations and you stop making it worse?
You're simultaneously missing my point and making it for me. They aren't presenting the other side because the other side isn't saying anything. They're doing the same thing you're doing where they're hoping people just assume that everything that ICE does is 100% justified, optics be damned. And if they think otherwise then it's just because they're brainwashed by activist propaganda. Both of those things could be completely true, but it doesn't matter.
When that story broke I watched the news report in the kind of bar where people sit and watch the news, with people who aren't exactly liberal, and they were all uneasy about the whole thing. That restaurant has a location about ten minutes away and everyone has eaten there (though I'm personally not a fan), and there's a very real anxiety that they could be enjoying dinner only to have it interrupted by Federal agents barging in because a dish washer doesn't have his papers.
I flesh this out more in another comment, but wave elections happen when a party ignores obvious warning signs and either denies that there's a problem or makes excuses for why things aren't quite going the way they like. Maybe you're right and maybe this isn't really a problem, but there's a long list of other things people don't like about this administration, and if your only response is that it isn't a problem, then don't be surprised if something catastrophic happens.
On what grounds do you believe this to be true?
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The other side is constantly talking about the criminal records and unsavory behavior of the people they're deporting. That just doesn't make the news.
I'm not assuming. I've had this conversation a bunch of times, and found the anti-ICE people to be about as well-justified in their claims as when certain people go off about the Holocaust.
You do realize this is right off the back on you taking professional activist press statements at 100% face value, right?
This is the entire dispute. Optics is subjective. Optics is in the eye of the beholder. Optics is two movies seen on the same screen. Why do you take left-wing optics framing as an immutable fact of reality?
Did Albert Einstein recite the "then they came for the" poem and everyone clapped?
A "very real anxiety", wow. How many times has that happened to people you know? Are you similarly invested in very real anxieties about pretty white girls being raped and killed by illegal gang members?
My response, which you're missing and making for me, is that this is a problem entirely because of the "optics", which is a shorthand for "dedicated propaganda campaign". You are correct that the right does need to get better at that, but it would behoove you to notice the extent to which you're participating in said campaign.
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The problem is there's a million of these, where someone says ICE came in and arrested everyone even the American citizens who didn't do anything but ask the ICE agents some questions. And the stories often place front-and-center irrelevant details like the people detained not having a criminal record. But there's never any follow-up showing that all the relevant stuff is actually true. Instead this reporting is all simply repeating the claims of advocates. Which means that even someone like myself who is biased against law enforcement and believes they tend to be generally brutal starts to disbelieve the stories.
If that is indeed the case, then the administration needs to do a better job communicating that. By which I mean they need to make that information available to media either via press release or simply giving all the details when they ask. They can't just not comment or simply confirm that they executed a search warrant. Local news these days won't even hire copy editors; it may be a journalistic best practice to verify everything, but in today's media environment they aren't going to have a guy looking up criminal records, especially when these stories go out the same day. That being said, the stories I've seen around here never mention the criminal record or lack thereof, or anything about the victims for that matter. People aren't going to just assume that someone has a criminal record. If that's part of the story, you have to tell them.
Nobody who believes all those stories will listen, and any denials will just be taken as confirmation by them. There's no point in trying to satisfy those acting in bad faith.
https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/zero-criminal-record-nine-workers-detained-by-ice-boston-car-wash/UXQPWN3VUNAZHMYMBIK7K4MS6M/
Except you're doing the same thing you're accusing them of by assuming that all these people do, in fact, have criminal records and you're just being lied to about it. And the people who think otherwise are hopeless and won't believe you no matter what you tell them. This is the kind of mentality that I was talking about that causes elections to be lost. This conversation started by a comment I made where I listed the deportation policy as an example of a Trump policy that was at least somewhat unpopular and may be among the things that costs the Republicans votes. It was just one of a number of things, and we could be talking about any of them, really. I got comments from people who told me that this was exactly what they wanted him to do. Well, great, but you're not the only one voting. This particular discussion stems from a comment where someone tried to argue, in essence, that there were either no or very few normal, hardworking people who were being deported, and that they were all criminals. I don't think that that's true, but I'm ultimately not trying to litigate whether it's true or not. The important thing is that there is a perception that it's true, and it's not just a perception that's held among woke socialists who want open borders and wouldn't vote Republican if their lives depended on it; it's a perception that's also held among the kind of people who voted for Trump in 2024 but are uneasy with the conspicuous brutality with which ICE is carrying out it's business. I know some of these people. They exist. They decide elections. I beg your pardon if I'm wrong, but you're not one of those people. I doubt you're a few policy tweaks away from voting Democrat in the next election.
I fleshed this out a little in another comment, but the larger point I was trying to make was that wipeout elections tend to happen whenever the party in power ignores and makes excuses for obvious signs of trouble. Trump fans who all love Trump and all need Trump and think that everything Trump does is great and can't believe that anyone doesn't like Trump and that everyone is being unfair to Trump and the big bad media isn't given everyone the whole story, with which they'd understand how great Trump is aren't the people who are going to decide the next election. If that were the case, he would have won in 2020 and wouldn't be president now. Trump did not run away with the last election, even against a candidate as bad as Kamala Harris. When I rattle off a laundry list of things that are unpopular but that the Republican Party doesn't seem too concerned about addressing and the responses I get are that these things simply aren't problems you're making my point for me.
No, I believe they have no criminal records. It's just entirely irrelevant to whether they were proper targets of an immigration raid.
What conspicuous brutality? The Rodney King arrest, THAT was conspicuous brutality. The ICE arrests look like normal arrests.
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