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Why Minneapolis? If you had asked me eight years ago where I felt the culture wars were going to be centered I would have said Portland. Being in the PNW it was the epicenter of wokeness and it seemed like you had antifa and Proud Boys gearing up for street battles there. If not Portland I would’ve picked somewhere else stereotypically woke, Seattle, San Francisco, even NYC while not unusually woke is at least especially prominent.
Minneapolis really had no reputation in my mind, I wouldn’t have imagined it was any woker than any other semi-large American city, and probably comparable to Oklahoma City or St. Louis or something. But from George Floyd to Somali Daycares and Renee Good it has clearly become the main battleground. Does anyone have any theories as to why this is?
I think people below are reading too much into this. It's just a coincidence. If the same thing happened in any other city there would be similar explanations.
I tend to agree with you, however I do think that in hindsight, this type of incident was more likely to take place in Minneapolis than in, say, Austin, Texas. The two women, especially Good's partner, seemed to be (1) very aggressive and provocative with law enforcement; and (2) very naive about the nature of violent confrontations; the wisdom of baiting cops; and so on.
One commentator recently observed that it takes a lot of white female privilege to drive a car at a cop and think nothing will happen to you. And I think there's some truth to this. In a place like Minnesota there are a lot of Leftists who are leading extremely sheltered, privileged lives.
Obviously there are a lot more Leftists in places like Brooklyn and San Francisco, but I think such persons would be a bit more likely to appreciate the risks involved in driving a car at a police officer.
So yeah, this could easily have happened anywhere but the fact that it happened in Minneapolis doesn't seem like a huge surprise.
This kind of theorizing is based on nothing more than conjecture, though. First, you're describing a single incident of the three. Second, if it had happened in Austin we would have talked about how the woman exhibited a typical Texan brashness in a city that's known for being a liberal enclave in a stereotypically conservative state.
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And yet despite being 70% of the population, white people run over very few cops.
It occurs to me that yours is the first "white privilege" complaint I've heard about this incident. If this had happened in 2015, there would almost instantly be thinkpieces about how we're focusing on a white woman being killed by police when thousands of unarmed black people are gunned down every year. To me this is more evidence that peak wokeness has long since passed. Occupy Wallstreet was the last liberal or populist movement that wasn't subverted by identity politics. Maybe this will be the first of the new post-wokeness era.
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The middle-class white liberal protesters seem to have two contradictory ideas firmly entrenched:
(1) Cops, ICE, all such federal agencies broadly, are fascist racist [fill out the reset of the bingo card yourself] MAGA murder squads and will disappear innocent refugees/asylum seekers to torture in jails abroad and are killing brown and black people in the streets with impunity, because the fascist dictator Cheeto Hitler has no regard for law and is grabbing power for himself and using the Constitution as toilet paper, abetted by his far-right packed Supreme Court who have declared everything he does legal
(2) I am a nice, middle-class, white liberal who is protesting the Fourth Reich in the USA, so the murder squads have to obey the law of the land and give me all my rights and when I get my day in court the judge will inevitably see the rightness of my actions
The idea that if (1) is true, then they themselves are gonna get murdered with impunity in the streets by the jackbooted thugs doesn't seem to compute for them. The only way I can imagine they make sense of this is that they believe "Ah, but I have White Privilege and since society is Systemically Racist and set up to support White Privilege, nothing bad can happen to me, white person, so I can use my superpower for good!"
Main Character Syndrome. Obviously, bad things only happen to other people. I have plot armor!
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Something I've realized in finding my way around contemporary fiction is that a big issue with writing about politics is that parody is now impossible. No matter how ridiculous the character, they will turn out to be real, and probably have an outsize representation in your feed. Anyone remember the "Wall of Moms"? It's an accepted part of current year protest tactics for older white women to use themselves as human shields to protect the poor PoCs, because their privilege will protect them from ICEstapo. I'm not saying this is at all the case with the woman in question, just that the most absurd hypocritical straw character you could imagine not only exists, but has already been made into a tool of the egregore. What did we think hyperstitionist accelerationism meant? Vibes? Papers? Essays?
Every time I read some reference to a thing I think "That cannot possibly be true, this person misunderstood or is exaggerating or the likes" and I go to search out the original - well, it's not always true, but the majority of the time yes it is, and sometimes it's even more nuts than the reference.
I swear, I thought the Racist Truck was simply a first season so-bad-it's-good episode of Supernatural and then we got a 2017 attack ad featuring nice POC kids having nightmares about racist trucks, and then going through the Transgender Murdered List for the recent Day of Remembrance, I found reasoning about "we include car accidents because in a transphobic society even getting knocked down by accident counts as murder" (I can't remember the exact wording, my brain refuses to retain the idiocy).
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Noblesse oblige.
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You do raise an interesting point -- if these protestors seriously believe that ICE agents are terrible people why would they taunt and provoke them so aggressively, even to the point of body-shaming, which is usually thought to be a no-no among liberals.
But I think it's pretty common for people to hold contradictory beliefs in the same way that a dishonest businessman keeps two sets of books -- one to show to the tax authorities and one to keep track of his actual business revenues and expenses. Your typical Leftist believes that ICE agents are jackbooted thugs for purposes of demonstrating their virtue to their comrades, but that's just a matter of performance.
I think because they are filming the interaction and a) they get away with bravely poking the bear as the opponent doesn’t want to filmed while doing something bad or b) the opponent will be triggered does something film-worthy.
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To quote Ian Flemming, "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence..." we shall see if there is a third incident.
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