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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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A woman in Minneapolis has been killed in an altercation with ICE. I don’t really trust any of the narratives being spun up. Here are two three angles:

Angle 1

Angle 2 [Twitter] [youtube]

Angle 3 (Emerged as I was writing this)

This is actually a fairly discussed type of shooting. Law enforcement confronts a person in a vehicle, the LEO positions himself in front of the vehicle, the person in the vehicle drives forward, and the cop shoots the person. Generally, courts have found that this is a legitimate shoot. The idea being that a car can be as deadly a weapon as anything.

Those who are less inclined to give deference to law enforcement argue that fleeing the police shouldn’t be a death sentence, and that usually in these situations the LEO has put himself in front of the vehicle.

I have a long history of discussing shooters in self-defense situations [1] [2] [3] and also one of being anti-LEO. However, I’m softer on the anti-LEO front in the sense that within the paradigm in which we exist, most people think the state should enforce laws, and that the state enforcing laws = violence.

The slippery slope for me: “Fleeing police shouldn’t be a death sentence”

“Resisting arrest shouldn’t be a death sentence”

“If you just resist hard enough, you should be able to get away with it”

People really try to divorce the violence from state action, but the state doesn’t exist without it.

As an aside: Noem labeling the victim a domestic terrorist is absolutely farcical and yet another example of the Trump administration's fundamentally authoritarian inclination.

edit:

The head of Minnesota’s state investigations agency said Thursday that the U.S. attorney’s office has barred it from taking part in the investigation into the fatal shooting of a Minneapolis woman by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer.

"Yep, that sure is the language of the innocent." Comparisons to the Chicago shooting leap to mind, including the likelihood of DHS sabotaging evidence after lying about events.

Technically, "insurrectionist" would be more appropriate, but as this term was suborned to mean "a person who protests while not being a Leftist", reclaiming it may be a more complex task. The point is she was intentionally breaking the law in order to achieve a political goal, which is pretty close to terrorism. While, strictly speaking, terrorism implies public intimidation, and the goal of the anti-ICE rioters is to impede and intimidate law enforcement, but not necessarily the general public (though antifa, which are part of these riots, are 100% classic domestic terrorists), I think insisting on these distinctions practically always is an attempt to muddy, rather than clarify, the issue. If we have a movement that employs violence in order to achieve their political goals, they are the bad guys, and whatever stigma is attached to the words "domestic terrorist" in the minds of the public, they deserve 100% of it, even if technically another term may describe some of them more precisely.

The head of Minnesota’s state investigations agency said Thursday that the U.S. attorney’s office has barred it from taking part in the investigation

Isn't this always what happens when FBI takes over? The FBI is not exactly knows for their laissez faire ways of letting outsiders access details of their investigations. And given as both city and state government pretty much officially proclaimed they are at war with the feds, I am not sure why they would expect the feds to react with giving them extra VIP deal with information access on this case. They'd have limited access normally, and they probably will get no access at all now that they have positioned them as openly hostile.