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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 5, 2026

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New footage of ICE shooter

Forgive another high-level post but the body cam (or cell phone?) footage of the cop who shot has been released by AlphaNews and this may significantly change perceptions of what happened (to those willing to have perceptions changed):

https://x.com/alphanews/status/2009679932289626385?s=46

To my eyes it appears that:

  • The ICE agent is clearly hit by her car and goes down

  • The ICE agent was not standing in front of her car but walking from one side to another

  • The driver’s wife is not passively observing but actively shouting at the agents (this should undermine the idea that the driver and her wife were somehow neutral people accidentally caught up in everything)

  • Perhaps most importantly, but maybe most open to interpretation, it appears to me that the driver looks directly at the ICE agent before driving forward. From this bodycam angle, her face is clearly shown looking directly ahead where the officer is seconds before she moves her car forward.

I suppose a lot of new interpretations are possible, but to me this video footage clearly debunks several going interpretations I have seen proposed. At the very least, maybe reasonable people can agree that the cop did not shoot the driver in cold blood from the side window.

I would also not be surprised to see the idea spread that this new video is AI.

Edit: per corrections from others below, this is not bodycam but cell phone footage (my mistake as it’s clearly even labeled as such) and this explains why it tumbles at the end of the video. Thanks!

Given that the other videos showed the cars wheel were fully turned, I don't think she was deliberately trying to run him down. I think she was trying to recklessly and illegally trying to escape police detainment, and between the panic and bad driving and recklessness, may have clipped the officer with her car. This is downstream of her probably being misinformed that ICE had no ability to arrest her. As I understand it, ICE cannot serve arrest warrants for citizens, but if citizens are illegally obstructing ICE operations they ICE does have the power to arrest. So she and her GF thought they could smirk and harass and insult and obstruct and then drive off with no consequences.

I think the shooting is legally justified, but I wouldn't want that officer hired to be my local beat cop. He was more careless with his positioning and more trigger happy than he had to be.

She doesn’t seem panicked at all in the video. She is smiling, unstressed, comes across as giddy, arrogant, cognizant

She certainly is earlier in the video, but we lose track of her face as her girlfriend yells at her to drive, I assume that might have been some adrenaline rush at that point that would have contributed to her bad/reckless driving. I would think there is a case for charging the girlfriend.

Felony murder?

One of my group chats speculated about this. She is clearly participating in the crime of obstructing police, but I'm not enough of a lawyer to know if the felony murder rule can be applied. Obstruction is a misdemeanor, and it is the felony murder rule after all. (I am also not enough of a lawyer to know if that's what the word "felony" in "felony murder" refers to)

What I can say is that it is an extremely safe bet that if she gets charged it won't be by the state of Minnesota.

There is in some jdxs misdemeanor murder as well. I don’t know if the law she broke (or rather laws) constitute a felony (including fleeing)

Well, striking the officer with the vehicle is an assault with a deadly weapon, which is a felony, but I am not lawyer enough to know if you can charge the wife in this situation. She does shout "drive!", which is not protected speech because it is an "incitement of imminent lawless action," but I'm not sure what actual law you would charge them under. Conspiracy? My knowledge of the law is mostly limited to what laws I might expect to involve me in some way (mostly self defense), so criminal conspiracies are a lot more of a grey area.

If they are out of a group that coordinates interfering with the enforcement of law, I wonder if you can get RICO charges against the whole group and then felony murder?

You do not lose track of her face as she accelerates she is smiling and then closes her mouth with a grin.

She wasn't panicked until the other ICE employee wearing a balaclava charged in yelling "get out of the fucking car".

  • -19

Right, except that never happened. There's a video higher up in the comment chain where you can see that didn't happen.

It also conveniently shows her not being panicked.

I question your authenticity.

I don't think it's a good idea to publicly question the authenticity of people who post opinions that appear to be quite common. It drives me absolutely insane that mods on Reddit accuse me of being inauthentic or "trolling" for posting opinions held by the median Republican. Don't fall into the same trap.

It would’ve been reasonable to post this if hyperbolic yesterday. But after the video today it seems straight trolling.

I really dislike this sort of debating where whoever is in hostile territory needs to be 100% perfect and get everything 100% correct or they get eviscerated and get called intellectually dishonest. Zero charity extended. (I get this all the time on Reddit)

Like, when @LiberalRetvrn said the ICE agent was yelling "get out of the fucking car", but actually the agent was just saying it very firmly in a confrontational way - not actually yelling. So he's technically factually wrong so now everyone gets to sneer and dunk on him. Or when he claimed the woman was panicked, but people here are certain that she wasn't panicked based on half a second of low pixel facial expressions in that video. So he's factually wrong again and is being a dishonest troll and everyone gets to dunk on him.

I think this type of response from the community is primarily driven by a certain type of leftist poster who exists here, on the rest of the internet, and even in real life... who just does not engage in reality based thinking and every time something happens they spin out a narrative, it's never true, they update only if piled on tremendously, and then they move on to the next excuse.

As an example all the woke-trolling here in the wake of the event leaning on "oh no, she's definitely here randomly and is scared of these unknown masked figures" as if it is as all reasonable to believe that given all of the interviews that were available from the moment the shooting happened (and common sense). But if you lie like that you will convince people and some people will never update (see: Rittenhouse shooting).

And if it's not lying then its believing something that is clearly not true (in the sense that it makes little sense) and was untrue last time and the time before that, and therefore becomes indistinguishable from deliberate trolling or excess blindness.

It makes me mad just writing this comment, which is why people so aggressively pile on.

It is the belief of many moderates and conservatives that the woke-left live in a world where things like reason, consistency, and common sense do not apply....and it's frustrating to see and results in piling on.

Left leaning comments on these sorts of things are almost always objectively wrong. A half dozen people have to have "shooting to maim" explained to them every time a cop shoots someone.

If you don't want these people to get dogpiled make them be correct more often about the facts.

From there we can get to the murkier business of ethics and so on.

It isn’t half a second. It’s the entire interaction. It’s clear that’s the reaction she wanted.

And I’m not asking him to be 100% correct. I am asking him to refrain from making a claim that is pretty clearly more likely than not false.

I also thought his comment yesterday about how vital states rights are to resisting the federal government interfering with the agricultural productivity of its non citizens to be a little too on the nose. (The phrase "way of life" especially.)

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I really dislike this sort of debating where whoever is in hostile territory needs to be 100% perfect and get everything 100% correct or they get eviscerated and get called intellectually dishonest. Zero charity extended. (I get this all the time on Reddit)

It's interesting you see it this way, because from my point of you it looks like LiberalRetvrn just gets to make shit up, and to even respond we have to provide timestamped videos.

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This does not mean her intent was to kill or injure the officer. I disagree with your assessment of her affect, but even if I accepted it to be true, that's not sufficient to establish intent to harm. I could just as easily suggest that her expression comes from the rebellious thrill of evading the officer or is an idiosyncratic stress response. Regardless, these questions are long distant from the question of if the shot was justified.