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Notes -
I am not, give me that angles!
First we have this home surveillance with narration by CNNs Anderson Cooper. It lacks pixels though nd there is a tree in the way:
https://x.com/TheMaineWonk/status/2009506563732676847
Most frustrating is this new film by a neighbour: It has the clearest view and cuts at the exact important moment! Right wingers are retweeting it as it shows Ms Good being obnoxiously honking, but I wonder if it was leaked to them and why it was cut. If it would show the Ice officer only lightly (harmlessly? calculated by him?) being touched by the corner of the car the optics would be bad.
https://x.com/GrageDustin/status/2010037103665787019
Is that...Bigfoot?
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Some questions I am puzzling over currently:
Has anyone done the napkin math on how safe it is to be apprehended by ICE? I think it’s 30k ICE agents and only 1-2 people shot with questions of justification this year. It’s likely that on a per-hourly basis you are safer being around an ICE agent than you are around the most criminally-prone young male demographic, or walking around certain cities at night. I wonder what a top-tier AI would calculate on this. If ICE agents in the line of work are safer than the average person, then I’m not sure why anyone would be worked up about this event for a rational reason, but if there’s a non-rational reason then…
… Do humans have some instinct to argue about death? This would explain the perennial popularity of these stories + TrueCrime. I suppose it’s possible. Or is there an instinct to really, really hate when a low status male kills a female in the “tribe”? “White police officer” is coded extremely low status in Progressive America, and I can’t imagine anything near the same response if the officer was a Somali woman (!!!). Would these White progressives really shout “shame” at a Somali woman in uniform, which would connote high status and deference? Re: low status femicide, this would explain why the national park couple murder event got so much traction some years back. There was a uniquely large amount of vitriol online expressed against the murderer in this event, as in, more than both the typical murder (no one really pays attention) and the typical true crime murder.
Were it the case that everything is so instinctual, is there any way that ICE can short-circuit the instincts at play here? Maybe they can paint images of empathy on their car (cute animals, maternal colors, mothers protecting their young). Or better yet, like the Ancient Greeks with their apotropaic magic imagery, they can paint a Medusa’s head on their car, except the Medusa is actually an image of a strong disabled black woman in a same sex relationship. I have a hard time believing the protesters would yell at vehicles wielding the ultimate seal of inviolability within their own cultural norms. It would be a bad look. Or maybe there is a way to change the entire “spirit” of the social encounter through music. What if you played really relaxing Enya or Jack Johnson music from loud car speakers? Or, going the other direction, just for curiosity, Richard Wagner? I wish these kinds of things were studied.
A similar thought experiment: Who would you rather babysit your kid for a week—a randomly selected ICE agent or a randomly selected Somali migrant?
While I also can't imagine there'd be anything near the same response, the Somali woman would still get some blowback for being a pick-me and Uncle Tom.
Or the ICE car version of a "pride missile."
I'd have a lot more recourse if the migrant tried any funny business.... (This reasoning was also given by some women who chose the bear.)
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There’s a longer video of the honking out there, it kind of pans annoyingly back and forth on the street for several minutes. You’re seeing a cut version because there’s nothing of interest immediately after. She’s on the street honking and dancing him her car, parked perpendicularly and waving through non ice vehicles. At some point (off camera) she pulls back (to let non ice vehicles pass through).
The only think of interest there is that based on how far out the car was on various pans, it’s clear that she was pulling back and forth in the car, to variously obstruct and allow passage. She was not stationary until the attempted peel out. This (minorly) adds context to the agent not knowing exactly what she is doing / her actions being more unpredictable and the alertness / sense of danger being heightened.
I think that alone is a stretch but my point is that every single additional video that dribbles out throws addition drops (at least) into the full picture always looking worse for her.
We’ve moved far beyond “confused and panicked mom just dropping off her kid approached by masked strangers”, yet that remains the “moral” starting point from which every counter narrative tries to gap.
Instead we see that she was actively using her car as a deliberate object of obstruction, moving it strategically to thwart the ice activity, and was using noise to rile up the situation and interfere with ICE apprehensions. She was creating a dangerous scenario intentionally for several minutes, and that context is very relevant to what happened in the heat of the moment 3 minutes later.
At the very minimum she was hoping to help attempted detainees to flee arrest and prevent ICE from safely pursuing and apprehending them. So she was creating deadly conditions from the get.
Suppose she was blocking a SWAT team from a drug raid while also shouting into a loudspeaker to alert the suspects. There would be no question. That she was creating a physically dangerous environment and that would factor into the police’s actions and assumptions and benefit of doubt in those moments. It would be very different than reading the same outcome with the assumption that she had just been walking a dog by the raid and gotten confused.
Yet that initial frame was intentionally set to poison public opinion and create artificial priors in the public to emotionally distort the interpretation
If that is so, it should knock on the head the narrative that "she was only an innocent passer-by, driving home with her wife after dropping her kid off at school, a stranger to the city who wandered into the middle of this by mistake".
This entire situation was a mess, but this does sound like "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". She's moving around with the car, blocking and unblocking, and clearly putting herself into an adversarial position. Doesn't mean she should be shot dead, but she's making herself seem like a genuine risk.
I think the larger point here is this is happening numerous times a day, day in and day out.
You play this out a thousand times something will go sideways in an encounter. This was that encounter.
The leftist harassing ICE is stochastic hoping for a viral moment.
Isn't a lot of how ICE is being presented also hoping for a viral moment though? The administration wants ICE to create conflict in blue states, so that they have more people to villify.
That's not quite true - the administration is hoping to make it obvious that ICE can and will catch you if you're in the states illegally. They're hoping to set up an environment that feels unwelcoming for illegal immigrants, which means that they need to raid blue states as well.
It is probably to the administration's benefit if they capture people behaving badly, but not their purpose; you can trivially prove this by thinking about what happens if the resistance to their actions disappears.
If the blue states stop protesting ICE, ICE is still going to be arresting illegal immigrants. If ICE stops arresting illegal immigrants, then the protestors will stop protesting ICE (presumably; there is a chance that they simply swap to anti-Trump protests, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt). As a result, we can intuit that ICE is opposing illegal immigrants, while the protestors are opposing ICE.
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Yes that narrative is 100% a fabrication based on a multitude of evidence and common sense and has always been a fabricated hopium, never evinced in any way. You can debate the shooting all you want, but the whole thing stinks of inauthenticity when the left started their position on a completely made up situation.
That guy who got shot in Kenosha was initially a Local community leader who saw some sort of argument happening in his community while driving and stopped to assist in restoring harmony to his community, then cops tried to assassinate him.
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It should, but arguments are soldiers and ONLY that. The comments on the David French column about this demonstrate this pretty clearly.
e.g. from "Cece"
We know from the videos this didn't happen. Doesn't matter. Gets repeated over and over.
from "Niko"
We know from the videos the officer did not draw his weapon until she started going forwards.
From "SD"
No way? She did actually hit him. Whether that was her intent is not proven, but certainly the video does not rule it out. Of course, despite this having been shown from several angles (and heard), plenty of people still insist he wasn't hit.
From "OG MD"
Good thing this wasn't OG JD because that's all false.
From "Don't Think Twice"
No, her choice of a weapon was a Honda Pilot. Even if she didn't mean to hit the officer, she was using it to engage in her blockade tactics.
And from "Back to MN"
We've got video and audio that clearly reveals that the orders she was given were "Get out of the car" and "Get out of the fucking car". These aren't conflicting.
Evidence doesn't matter; there is only narrative.
Normally (i.e. not under Trump) the way this would play out is law enforcement and the administration would refuse to comment. The protestor story would be the only one which got around. Then some months later when the officer was acquitted, people would be shocked and there'd be another round of protests. The Trump administration is trying something different -- backing up their officer to hyperbolic lengths. I'm not sure if that's better, but the old way wasn't working.
I don't know a delicate way to put this, so I'll just bull ahead. How effin' stupid do you have to be to turn up to a protest where you are facing "This is Fascist Dictator Disappearing Torture Regime", believing in the dogma that the cops/ICE/jackbooted thugs have carte blanche to shoot anyone they like particularly the black and brown, that you are putting yourself in real danger, and yet... not expect that anything bad will happen? "We have whistles and they have guns" - then either get guns yourself or have realistic expectations of injury or death.
I thought the guys in the Rittenhouse case were fools but even they (or at least one of them) turned up with a gun. That's criminal, but it's not entirely stupid and is at least consistent with what you believe: the pigs and their lackeys have guns and intend to shoot us, we're gonna shoot back.
The answer is that they believe ICE isn't allowed to do anything to US citizens. This is wrong; they can arrest US citizens who interfere with their operations. But they don't really believe this is what they say it is.
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These Leftists have their own discussion forum / echo chamber, and anyone who raises this kind of point will be instantly banned/shadowbanned/excommunicated/etc. That's the price you pay for assabiyah - obvious inconsistencies and other flaws in your group's reasoning get swept under the rug.
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From a Certain Point of View, them turning up to #Resist despite the real danger only further illustrates how Stunning and Brave they are, that they as the plucky outgunned underdogs had the courage to go up against the Fascist Dictator Disappearing Torture Regime that has license to kill, that their presence and white privilege could at least make the Stormtroopers hesitate before gunning down black and brown bodies. Outnumbered Rebels with lightsabers against a Galactic Empire with spaceships and laser blasters.
I can respect protesters who show up even where they do realise they're in actual danger. I don't know what to think of protesters who think they can claim it's the Evil Evil Stormtrooper Show which they are protesting, and yet at the same time that they can behave with maximum irritating nonsense but nothing can or will happen to them, because - that's not fair? "I can yell abuse, slurs, make loud noises, throw things, and behave worse than a four year old having a sugar-fuelled meltdown, but they have to be nice to me and stand there and take it even though they are the low-IQ violent murder monsters who are going around murdering and assaulting people"????
I genuinely don't get it.
Perhaps they think that ICE are paper tigers - not actual Stormtroopers but wannabe-Stormtroopers who are in truth no better than schoolyard bully, and will fall apart if someone is on hand to puncture their delusions of grandeur? Perhaps they take the "white privilege" stuff a little too literally, and genuinely believe that although they have no scruples about assaulting innocent blacks and Hispanics, ICE's own white-supremacy forbid them to ever lay a finger on a white blonde?
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That should have died with the video from the officer's perspective, where they clearly taunting them.
It should have died with the witness interviews on day one....
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Bad for whom? We know the ICE agent was not seriously injured by the car. This "he didn't even hit him" followed by (when sufficient demonstration of contact is made using multiple video and audio feeds) "but it wasn't that bad a hit" is just minimal retreat, not bad optics for the side which claimed correctly that he was in fact hit.
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Yeah, it's suspicious that it helps one side but it cut off right at the critical moment. Based on what I've seen so far, I'm reasonably confident that the shooting was justified, but still.
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