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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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After a day of reading and watching videos of the woman killed in Minneapolis yesterday, here are some thoughts:

  1. This iceman was hit by a different car previously.

  2. The woman was cosplaying resistance fighter, not really realizing how dangerous what she was doing actually was.

  3. It is unambiguous given the videos that she did try to hit the officer with her car, but just barely, and seems to have backed off immediately when her tires slipped on the ice.

  4. it seems reasonable to me that the iceman was looking for retribution for the previous car strike, and she gave it to him.

  5. Shooting her would have had no effect on his safety, even if she had gotten traction. They were at “point blank” range.

All in all I think everybody here is a victim of the current evil in our society. A woman in a gay relationship with a recently deceased husband, in a new city, is being fed a constant stream of propaganda. I can imagine the state of mind if this person, and it isn’t pleasant.

She decided to try and help, which is good, but was essentially a pawn, or unknowing martyr for political power struggles I doubt she understood. A comparison could be a child soldier/suicide bomber.

The iceman: I expect better than this. Unlike the woman, acting on pure propaganda fueled adrenaline, he is supposed to train for this. He also interacts with these people daily. He should be thinking rationally here, and the rational move is to just get out of the way, not walk in front of the car of a neurotic woman screaming at you. He is legally, technically in the clear, but this was immoral. Hes basically exploiting a series of laws and norms to allow him to “innocently” kill a woman as a form of retribution. This is akin in my mind to entrapment of some form. The iceman sets up a series of traps, and just waits for an untrained, trigger, fight or flight woman to fall into one of them. He shouldn’t be setting traps, he should by building golden off-ramps to de-escalate.

Unfortunately the same which gripped both the woman and the shooter is gripping everybody forming an opinion online around this. nyTimes put out am [absurd] “forensic analysis” and determined she was trying to escape, which will never be questioned by the blue tribe ever. We will forever live in the reality where an iceman killed a woman in cold blood on Jan 7th 2026 in Minneapolis.

I don’t think this will metastasize into Floyd 2.0, mostly because the woman was white, but also because of the weather. We’ll see how this weekend plays out though.

A final question: will the shooter be charged with a state crime in Minnesota and will he be able to avoid that charge? Could we run into a Chauvin type situation here?

It is unambiguous that the officer was in the way of the car, it is not unambiguous that it was done with the intent to hit him. In a stressful panic filled moment where her attention was on the guys directly to the left of her, it is quite plausible she just didn't notice him get into that position to begin with.

This slowmo is probably the best thing for it yet. Where do you think her attention was focused? Probably on the masked man trying to reach into her car, and not the guy who was walking in front.

Likewise, he probably wasn't thinking of "revenge". He is just walking there on his phone, sees the car start to pull towards him and he panics too and pulls out his gun and shoots. Because if he wasn't panicking and was thinking through every movement, then he's an idiot for thinking shooting the driver would slow down/stop a car instead of using those precious seconds moving his body out of the way.

Edit: Actually, turns out there is video evidence from the front of it now too https://youtube.com/watch?v=Jbq98aqF794?si=JPc0rc7f7RQbuIf1 the guy literally just walks in front of the car as she's already pulling away and her wheels are turned towards the right away from him.

Yeah, I don't think was this intentional from her. She was distracted and in panic by the men grabbing at her and he seems like an idiot too busy focusing on his phone to think "is it stupid to walk in front of a car?"

someone else has already raised this but should the same charity be extended to James Fields in the Charlottesville attack (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlottesville_car_attack).

I remember analyzing that at the time. I know those streets in cville. GPS would never take you that way. He chose to drive down that street.

I think if she had hit and killed the officer instead of getting shot and killed shed be getting a murder charge like James Fields.

And if someone had shot James Fields on that street as he was accelerating down it towards a crowd they would have been in the right.

some of the roads were blocked off so GPS would instruct drivers to use a path which was impossible to use which meant people there trying to leave were just turning down roads trying to find ones which weren't blocked off so they could leave; the entire area was a complete mess

fields chose to turn down that road because of the armed group of counter protestors who pointed a gun at him

as he was accelerating down it towards a crowd they would have been in the right

when? when he was going 25mph down the road, when he slowed before the crowd at which point his vehicle was hit by flag or bat, and then he accelerated into the crowd?

it is just not believable that fields wanted to ram anyone let alone ram his way through a crowd until he was already surrounded, had already had a gun pointed at him by a different group of people, went down another street, was surrounded by another group of people, had his car attacked, and then hit the accelerator

sometimes from different people's perspectives, they can each be reasonably "in the right" if they used deadly violence against each other