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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 3, 2025

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ICE is deporting lots of people. Other people are recording it, opposing it, even offering bounties on ICE officers.

I have noticed a pattern where there is a horrible story that comes out. Blue tribe passes around the horrible story. There was the "black babies zip tied" story. The "deported US citizen with cancer" story. So on and so forth.

The Red Tribe waits for the Department of Homeland Security X account to post a rebuttal, and then that becomes the Red Tribe story. See for example:

https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1986198635466358989

https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1986438229373944199

https://x.com/DHSgov/status/1986086507271106982

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?" In the past I had seen the reverse. Official government accounts were scrutinized, eye witness accounts and video evidence were taken in higher regard.

For example, the Rittenhouse affair had Red Tribe internet sleuths piecing together video evidence of Rittenhouse's activities and movements for the hours leading up to the shootings. Within 48 hours they knew more than the prosecution's attorneys knew over a year later.

I'm not casting doubt on the DHS Official X Intern's ability to give it to us straight. I'm just trying to understand the epistemology that makes this all work. Is it Red Tribe to actually trust the government now? Just certain parts of the government?

For example, the Rittenhouse affair had Red Tribe internet sleuths piecing together video evidence of Rittenhouse's activities and movements for the hours leading up to the shootings. Within 48 hours they knew more than the prosecution's attorneys knew over a year later.

Why do you believe the internet sleuths knew more than the prosecution's attorneys, as opposed to the prosecution's attorneys feigning ignorance in order to conduct a politically motivated prosecution despite the available and mutually-known facts?

Re #1: Is it that hard to just stand still and get arrested? "Chasing" implies "fleeing", and fleeing to a daycare is even worse than normal.

Re #2 (link, since it isn't included): "federal agents have been the catalyst for chaos and clashes." Odd way to not blame them, but I'll take it. “To safely clear the area after multiple warnings and the crowd continuing to advance on them, Border Patrol had to deploy crowd control measures.” “Our officers are facing a 1000% increase in assaults against them" " inadvertently been exposed" Odd to include those lines with no pushback if they're inaccurate. Also note that this is a couple weeks after the temporary restraining order that restricts tear gas when not under imminent threat, and the article didn't even hint that they could be defying that order. The media very rarely lies, but NBC sure is pushing it.

Re #3: What's the alleged misconduct? Driving the child away seems like one reasonable course of action to me, and the rest is nothingburgers. The crowd's conduct wasn't great, but that's not the father's fault.

There's no need to wait for the DHS official rebuttal before dismissing those stories. I suspect the rest are similar.

You don't seem to understand what "don't trust your lying eyes" means. It means trust me over your own experiences. A random maximally emotionally exploitative WaPo article is not my own experiences. My own experience is that there are still far too many foreigners out and about so ICE needs to step it up, start denaturalizing as well.

A better example would be what the Trump admin is trying to do with affordability and food prices after their shellacking during the elections. People feel that the economy is still bad and things are still too expensive but they're on an all out blitz to deny this and claim prices are down. This backfired for Biden (vibecession) and will likely backfire for them as I don't see many conservatives buying it.

My "lying eyes" see illegals fleeing, resisting, and wreaking havoc around town, and agents rounding them up and sending them back to where they belong. It's the fake news screeching about it and crying crocodile tears for some reason, but when I look at the video I see absolutely nothing wrong.

Even if ICE specifically raided a preschool or daycare, do parents really feel that good having their kids taken care of by illegals? Go get em!

"We had agents with guns who were walking around the facility with teachers inside, with children inside," said Ald. Matt Martin, who represents the 47th Ward.

Oh the horror. Next thing you know, they'll be sending agents with guns into schools to tell kids not to use drugs.

Exactly. There's an assumption on the Left that quite a large degree of rebellion against ICE is acceptable, which makes the whole thing messy. If this were the alternate headline where red tribers were being hit with police brutality whilst trying to protest desegregation or abortion or whatever else, the fucks given would be zero. See the COVID response et al.

The leftist project to make schools, hospitals, churches, courtrooms, home depot parking lots, and anywhere else illegal aliens may go sanctuaries - in the medievalist sense of the term - is obvious nonsense. Do they want open borders or not? The Right isn't Charlie Brown, where you can falsely claim to be rule-of-law but decline to enforce immigration ones because of 'reasons'. It's blindingly obvious they're objecting to the enforcement in comparison to... what? A claw machine from the sky? Asking nicely?

The football has been pulled too many times.

The left will continue its endless parade of condescending “play nice” politics until they get their feet held to the fire of the consequences of what ask for. Until people pay a price for being wrong there’s little reason to stop treating America as a national Ken and Barbie household where we can all sit together and sing kumbaya.

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?"

There don't seem to be any "lying eyes" involved. In your first story, the Bezos blog says

Armed ICE officers arrested a teacher early Wednesday in Chicago after chasing her onto the grounds of a private preschool and grabbing her as parents and students looked on, according to a local official and witnesses.

DHS says

Law enforcement pursued the vehicle before the assailant sped into a shopping plaza where he and the female passenger fled the vehicle. They ran into a daycare and attempted to barricade themselves inside the daycare—recklessly endangering the children inside.

These are compatible stories, with different spins.

In your second story, the videos I've seen start AFTER two people had been arrested. There's no evidence available against ICEs claim that they were "SURROUNDED AND BOXED IN".

In the third, ICE claims they arrested a guy who had his kid in a stolen car. (Or maybe I'm reading it wrong; they may be claiming he had a stolen pistol in his own car). Looks like one agent did screw up and hit the kid with a ball, though the kid doesn't seem particularly bothered. The LA Times headline is "Agents drive off with child after detaining her father". Well, yeah; they arrested the father, they're not going to leave the kid at the scene. The kid was later brought back home to his mother.

Is it Red Tribe to actually trust the government now?

It hurts to see all these poseurs. It's particularly bad when they 180 because of Trump e.g. on Epstein. Regardless of party, I hate the federal government and all its bureaucrats, left or right.

I'm not casting doubt on the DHS Official X Intern's ability to give it to us straight.

Then you and the Red Tribe are in agreement?

The Red Tribe generally believes the police's account of things unless they have a pretty strong reason not to. ICE is part of the police in their reckoning. Things are different with the FBI, but does the FBI even put out official statement about their side of the story?

It's not particularly different from the pattern where Blue Tribers exclaimed how terribly badly Derek Chauvin behaved, and the Red Tribers mostly thought that, huh, maybe that's bad, the police will probably investigate, and he'll get in some kind of trouble if his actions were unusually bad, but on net it's probably worth letting the police get away with a bit more roughing up than they are now, in exchange for more public order.

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?"

They expect Blue Tribe outlets to reliably lie all the time. If the Blue Tribe is making furious, emotionally-laden claims about the police, then my bet is that the police are probably at least less in the wrong than the Blue Tribe is saying, because I expect Blue Tribe media outlets to wildly exaggerate at best.

If the NYT and MSNBC were very performatively angry that the sky was blue, I'd lean over to the nearest window to check.

What people actually do, if they do anything besides buy what the mainstream media is telling them at face value, is find an entity who's motivations and biases they align with, and then pick that guy's story. Sometimes the establishment consists of flaming hot liberals (Rittenhouse), sometimes it consists of based law enforcement (ICE Twitter). What "establishment" figure gets trusted more depends on whos listening.

That’s always been true. That’s just confirmation bias applied to people’s news diet. No one is different in that sense. I think that’s why you saw a push in advertising in some news outlets for a time for sites like Ground News and Inkl that try to categorize and aggregate news by coverage you see according to different accounts.

My question is mostly, is it normal for the Red Tribe to believe the "official story" over their "lying eyes?"

The Department of Homeland Securty is obviously biased in favor of themselves, but just like the media lying, you'd expect any factual statements they make to be correct. If they say that the guy has been previously arrested for assault, then you can bet that the guy has actually been previously arrested for assault. If that was a lie, then first of all the left would pounce on that and tell everyone that it's a lie, and second, the DHS would know this and not lie in the first place. If it's truthful, the left would be silent about it.

If the DHS had instead posted "Chicago residents say the man had been arrested for assault" you would be right to be skeptical.

This is just part and parcel of the swap that goes on whenever one side gains control of the white house. The "right" now believes the government story and the "left" doesn't - essentially the polar opposite of two years ago - and it'll swap again once the democrats win the presidency again.

My point was the opposite of this. You don't have to "believe the government" at all except to the extent of accepting that they'll say literal truths, which is a very low standard and is something that applies to the other side too.

I fully expect that with the next Democrat in the White House the government will still say things that are literally true.

Competing visions for society is all it really comes down to.