site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33838 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

https://www.newsweek.com/video-appears-to-show-new-ice-shooting-in-minneapolis-11411971

Ice shooting round 2 has kicked off. Numerous rumors already flying around but will be a bit before we have facts I imagine.

EDIT: I've been asked to add some relevant points, I'll say: this comment has links to various angles: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405295?context=8#context This comment mentions the "Sig misfire" angle that I've seen a bit: https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/405451?context=8#context

Walz has activatedthe national guard: https://x.com/MnDPS_DPS/status/2012614253090619619 The NBA postponed the Minnesota/Golden State game tonight.

Squeeze this in before the thread goes away. More as a way that I can refer to my own thoughts in the future.

I think this is a worse shooting than Renee Good. This is reflected by several people on X, with strong 2A people like James Reeves, Kostas Moros, Fenix, and Garand Thumb [1][2] is calling out stupid takes from the pro-ICE side of things.

A common critique of Kyle Rittenhouse - even among those who felt he should be acquitted - was that it was stupid for him to be there. I fully support Kyle’s right to open carry and fully support Alex Pretti to conceal carry. “Victim blaming” is a common talking point. What did you expect wearing that outfit down a dark alley? I still think the rapist should be executed, but you did a dumb thing with a known outcome. Does that make you less sympathetic? Actually, it does.

The Right feels like they’ve been losing an existential battle with the left for decades. There are many facets to this, but even wins seem like losses. Reagan gives amnesty, the Bushes are globalists, what would McCain and Romney (called right-wing extremists) have done? So here’s Trump, put that in your pipe and smoke it. And now you dare invoke Ruby Ridge and Waco, imploring the Right - people you hate, people who one of your presidential candidates talk about nuking to stand up for you? Save us!

A sentiment from Greg Price that a right-wing friend sent me. This resonates with me quite a bit, especially since I subscribe to the conspiracy theory that at the base of all this are Marxists and Communists undermining society like they have for almost a century now. And I think Marxists and Communists are evil, as evil as Nazis, but our society gives Marxists and Communists tenure at universities even after they perform terrorist acts. It’s really unfair! Life’s unfair

I think of violence being a knob for the left and a switch for the right. The right has always been pretty comfortable that if you fight police, you’re not a sympathetic homicide. If you mess with the bull, you get the horns. The sharp end of state violence is deadly sharp, and when you wrestle with an unsheathed knife, you’re going to get cut. Not that the right is amazing at it, but as was pointed out by a poster here, Kyle was un-humanly good in his situation.

Watch a professional 1st amendment auditor’s interaction. The transition from “FUCK YOU AM I BEING DETAINED!”

“Yes”

And then - relatively - calmly let themselves get arrested.

I’ve heard “Concealed carry comes with the burden to lose every argument and to walk away” as “Fudd Lore”. The reason it’s Fudd Lore is to try and prevent idiots like Alex Pretti from getting into trouble. Because while “Always lose every argument” is not taught in all concealed carry courses, there are several things that I expect are.

  1. Try really, really, really… really hard to avoid getting in a wrestling match while carrying.

  2. Conduct yourself very carefully when interacting with law enforcement while carrying.

Something that is not said is: “Don’t get in a wrestling match with law enforcement while concealed carrying.” Why is this not taught? Because only a complete idiot would get in a confrontation with police while carrying, because that’s a surefire way to end up dead. Really should be included in that “Dumb Ways To Die” add campaign.

But this is why I’ve been skeptical of Trump’s ability to pull off millions of deportations. Even if ICE was practically perfect, the media would come up with some way to tell a sad story. There’s little incentive to play nice, so again shove this in your pipe and smoke it. This is bad for ICE and the administration. Kind of a minor thing but evidence that we’ve got idiots in charge why are all these ICE guys sliding around all over the place? Go buy some Yaktrax.

I keep getting sent “leaks” from my right-wing friends showing how organized this is. Old news, NPR did a ride-along months ago. Yes, the left has people working full-time to make these interactions as tense as possible, and ICE should be doing the same. The normies got restless when a fentanyl addict died while being detained, how do you think they’ll feel when it’s a mother and a nurse?

From my personal philosophy I hate this. Put the area under wide-area persistent surveillance. Set up your own situations when the protestors commit obvious felonies against ICE and make an example of them. Send in an FBI SWAT team with all their ducks in a row, and send them in hard.

I was debating whether I should move this to the new thread for visibility, but I just saw your "More as a way that I can refer to my own thought sin the future." edit and I'll respect that.

I think of violence being a knob for the left and a switch for the right.

I tend to sympathize with the position the right takes here, though it does get tricky: the physics of violent threats are a continuum, yet we have to break that continuity somewhere because the game theory of responses to violence demands discrete Schelling points.

I'll double down on your 2010s sci-fi-writer citation with a 1980s sci-fi-writer citation:

  1. Never throw shit at an armed man. Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man.

Niven uses as an example the events that Wikipedia call the 1968 Democratic National Convention protests, though Google wants to autocomplete "1968 dnc" with "riots" ... and yet that's a surprisingly tame example, in hindsight? Hundreds of injuries, on both sides, but only one death, of someone who shot at the cops first? Impressive trigger discipline, despite widespread reports and video of the Chicago cops showing ... less discipline ... with clubs and gas and mace. If they were operating on a "switch" mentality, it seems it was a ternary rather than a binary switch, and they managed to hold it to that middle position.

And I don't see that the knob-vs-binary-switch distinction accurately describes the left-vs-right side of the conflict this time. Calling the officers in Minnesota "the right": are they really Switch people?

One of my most-upvoted comments on TheMotte (+34,-2) discusses the problems you get into when knob mentality meets switch mentality: when someone suddenly knocks you to the ground, thinking that they've just turned up that knob a bit, a Switch might reasonably decide that such a sudden and improbably-but-possibly-lethal attack means a switch has been flipped from "non-lethal" to "lethal".

In the latest videos of Pretti I've seen, his last intelligible words before the incident seem to be "do not push them into traffic!", and the officers only oblige in the sense that shortly afterward we see the officers suddenly shoving a woman into the curb instead of the street. Even if we presume that she's done something criminal, is this proper arrest procedure? It seems to be literally accelerating motion rather than arresting it. Pretti should have just filmed a sloppy arrest (or even an illegal assault under the color of law, if that's what it was), not gotten literally into the middle of it while armed, but in the end he was more-than-amply punished for not thinking like a Switch while trying to defend the woman knocked to the ground. Will there also be any punishment for the offense? None of the DHS officers drew a gun until after one took (and too-ambiguously announced) Pretti's un-drawn gun, so they likewise didn't seem to believe that the violence thus far had flipped a binary switch.

Perhaps they're a bunch of Knobs too.

I feel like I'm going insane watching news coverage of this event. I've been wondering if I really am a bootlicker or if I'm in an echo chamber or what. I thought I would ask ChatGPT about this. Yesterday's shooting is not in the training data, of course so, while it's still possible to get an untainted answer I thought I would ask.

me

okay so, hypothetically, I am carrying a holstered handgun. I am at a protest. we are protesting a police arrest. the protest gets a bit rowdy. a police officer pushes someone out of the way. I step forward and try to block the police officer from the person they pushed. how much danger am I in? what would a court say if I was killed? answer in one brief paragraph.

ChatGPT

Short version: you’d be in serious, asymmetric danger, both physically and legally. The moment you step into an officer’s path during an active arrest, you’ve likely crossed from “bystander” to interfering/obstructing, and if you’re visibly armed (or they discover you’re armed during the scuffle), you now look—through an officer’s threat model—like “an armed subject interfering with police action.” That combination massively raises the probability of force, up to lethal force, because officers are trained to treat armed interference as a precursor to weapon deployment, not as peaceful protest. If you were killed, a court would mostly analyze it under objective reasonableness (Graham v. Connor): would a reasonable officer believe an armed person stepping toward them in a chaotic scene posed an imminent threat? In that context, juries often side with the officer, even if you never touched the gun; legally it’s less about your intent and more about what a cop could plausibly fear in the moment. In practice: armed + physical interposition near police = you’ve accidentally made yourself look like the most dangerous person in the scene.

Maybe this is what these tools are designed to do at this point but I feel a little less alienated right now.

I'd like to think I'm more neutral than most on this issue, I don't have strong feelings about ice in general. But I would say if you gave me that prompt I might have responded similarly, but that was definitely not the initial reaction I felt when I watched the video.

In the video I see a woman approach an ice officer with her phone recording him. I'm sure this is annoying but she does not look like a physical threat. The ice officer responds by shoving the woman to the ground. A man sees this and moves between the officer and the woman with his hands up possibly making contact with the officer but not in an obviously aggressive way. He is then immediately pepper sprayed. He falls to the ground, is dog piled, disarmed, and eventually shot.

I think there's two big reasons why the public is reluctant to blame him for what happened. First is the fact that he appears to be trying to defend the women that was shoved. You can argue that what he did was dangerous, but putting yourself in danger in order to protect someone is generally seen as honorable.

Second the situation just escalates so quickly. In the Good case people were arguing it doesn't make any sense to shoot at the driver of a car that is going to run you over since it's going to run you over regardless. The response was that it was a reasonable response in a split second situation where people won't make perfect decisions. Well, this guy made a split second decision to stop a woman from being attacked (from his pov) and almost immediately triggered the chain of events that leads to his death.

To be clear I'm not trying to say which side is responsible for what. I'm just saying I don't think the argument that the man shares the blame for his own death for intervening in police activity is going to be a compelling argument to people who watch the video, and asking chatgpt isn't going to explain why that is.

All this is true, but this doesn't excuse the shooting. An analogy would be the classic one feminists hate, woman walks down the street in a bad neighborhood alone at 2AM drunk in a skimpy outfit, gets raped. She was stupid and this was a predictable outcome of her decisions, but that doesn't mean the rapist is suddenly a good person and his actions are excused and he should get off scot-free. Here, the guy was stupid and his actions predictably resulted in his death. However, the evidence certainly seems to point to the ICE agent shooting him in the back when he was already subdued by about 5 agents, his gun was taken and the agent with the gun was already well clear of the scuffle. There is just no excuse for that. Additionally the administration is obviously lying by calling him a domestic terrorist that tried to assassinate law enforcement. This situation feels very clearcut and easy to interpret.

It's a poor analogy to use for this case but if you really wish to use it, a more accurate version would probably be this: Woman is told to not walk in a skimpy outfit in the bad neighborhood by multiple sources, woman even takes a class on skimpy outfit etiquette where she's told about the bad neighborhood where she has a high chance of getting raped if she decides to go there in a skimpy outfit. The woman has grown up in a skimpy outfit culture and there's many videos on the internet of things going bad for other women that went to the neighborhood while wearing skimpy outfits. There's a big sign that states "WOMEN IN SKIMPY OUTFITS STAY AWAY" at the entrance to the bad neighborhood. She goes there in a skimpy outfit anyway and gets raped.

This situation feels very clearcut and easy to interpret.

Is it? 24+ hours later and there's still multiple narratives being thrown around from 'pigs murdered him in cold blood because they could' to 'his gun malfunctioned and cops got spooked'

Most likely the shooter saw the deceased move in a way that appeared like he was going for a gun.

“Guy reaches for gun that was removed five seconds earlier” is almost certainly not a scenario they train for. “Guy reaches for gun” almost certainly is.

When situations turn chaotic people generally fall back to the level of their training.

I think the videos alone aren't enough to close the book on the case. But if this is the only evidence we'll ever have I agree it's not excusable.

I do think an impartial investigation must happen, perhaps even a trial, and also that it won't happen and that's bad. If this is justifiable we should hear from the officers and see their body cams.

I do think the victim contributed significantly to his own death though, and I'm surprised there's so little acknowledgement of this. I don't think it's victim blaming the way the skimpy outfit at 2am is.

Crossing a highway at night wearing dark clothes is probably a closer analogy. Cars don't have a right to hit you, it is not good that they hit you, but you probably can't assign moral blame to them if they hit you.

Police are given latitude to reasonably assess risks to themselves that private civilians are not.

You aren't a bootlicker.

During the Civil Rights era the protestors did maximally nonviolent and safe protests to exhibit injustice.

During the BLM era the protestors engage in violence, harassment, rioting, impair communication, and overall behave in such a way that low likelihood fuckups become impossible to avoid. They then blame the right/police for conditions they created.

It's the same basic tactics as Hamas and its abusive behavior, victim blaming.

But the ICE agents didn't shoot him as he was approaching them with gun in holster. They got him down on the ground, one agent took his gun, and the other agent shot him from behind as he was getting up (?).

It does mention scuffle above but let's drill down on your point. I wouldn't normally do this but since this is the game I'm playing, here's my very next prompt in the conversation. This is, I think, as fair and as neutral as I can make it.

me

lets say there's a scuffle. there's 6 or 8 officers on top of me trying to subdue me. my gun is taken by one of the officers but the rest don't necessarily know that. they eventually, in the confusion, open fire on me and kill me. what's the tactical and legal determination? again, answer in one brief paragraph.

ChatGPT

Tactically, once you’re in a pile-on with multiple officers and there’s a report or glimpse of a gun, the scene collapses into pure threat heuristics: fragmented information, adrenaline, shouted “gun!” or “he’s armed!” cues, and officers default to worst-case assumptions—so even if one officer has already secured your weapon, the others may not know that and will treat any movement as a potential draw attempt, which is exactly how blue-on-blue or overkill shootings happen in chaotic arrests. Legally, the analysis is still Graham v. Connor objective reasonableness, judged from each officer’s perspective at that instant, not with hindsight; if they can articulate that they believed you were armed and reaching or resisting during a volatile arrest, courts and juries often deem the shooting justified, even if the gun was already confiscated. In other words: tactically it’s a classic fog-of-war misidentification, and legally it often resolves to “reasonable mistake,” which makes it very hard for a wrongful-death claim to succeed.

Again, I'm not pasting this as if it's some adjudicating authority, just trying to compare to a knowledgeable impartial observer. Since the entire world is telling me I'm thinking like a Chud now .

In the court of public opinion this looks like an execution. In a court of law, maybe not.

Separately, I an reminded of the concealed carry class I took. The most basic message was: having a gun on me required me to be more responsible in public, not less. I don't know if this is universal but it is confirmed by my local monkeysphere of other concealed gun license havers.

"There's a scuffle" and "in the confusion" seem to be doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting.

By this sort of logic, an armed citizen could confuse the ICE agents for a gang of kidnappers from a distance and open fire, killing several. Would that be a "reasonable determination" too, because "there was a scuffle" and "the shooter was confused"?

"There's a scuffle" and "in the confusion" seem to be doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting.

Yes. How is that an issue when there was, in fact, a scuffle, and a lot of confusion caused by the chaos of the protest?

By this sort of logic, an armed citizen could confuse the ICE agents for a gang of kidnappers from a distance and open fire, killing several

No, they couldn't. They're in uniform with big letters spelling out "ICE". Not to mention thr only reason thr protesters are there is because they know ICE is there as well. Also, in this case they didn't open fire at a distance.

If you were going for an analogy, you came with one that is on the dissimilar end of the spectrum, to the point where I don't see how it's useful here.

This one is an even worse mess than Good. He had a gun, so why was he bringing a gun if he was only filming the protest? On the other hand, he seems not to have produced the gun, he was disarmed, there were plenty of agents holding him, so why did he get shot?

If he had produced the gun, or it was only one agent struggling with him, I'd be inclined to give the benefit of the doubt about fears for life. But this seems much more like panic, stupidity and incompetence resulting in an unnecessary death.

He had a gun, so why was he bringing a gun if he was only filming the protest?

Because it was his legal right to do so. “Why was he carrying a gun?” was a bad-faith question when leftists asked it about Rittenhouse, and it’s a bad faith question when conservatives now ask it about Pretti. It’s especially galling to see conservatives, who under normal circumstances are all about the Second Amendment, suddenly do an about face when someone they don’t like has a gun.

I don't like guns in general, and I do feel that if you're bringing a gun to whatever, you feel you are going to use it. Maybe you think you'll have to use it because The Other Side, maybe you think it's a necessary precaution, maybe you think you can use it as a threat but not have to shoot, but if you're bringing a gun, it's Chekov's Gun.

It's trying to foretell the past at this stage, but would he have been shot if he didn't have a gun and that perceived threat wasn't there? There's every possibility he could have been, but I do think having a gun ratcheted up "perception of threat and danger" by the ICE guys.

If Rittenhouse had instead e.g. attacked a cop who was shielding a BLM protestor and gotten shot in the process because he had a gun, a lot of of conservatives would've just called him dumb.

A lot of conservatives called him dumb anyway. At the time I had a lot more belief that the US still had rule of law, and characterized Kenosha Kyle as taking a risk that was justified by a vacuum of state capacity to restore order.

In hindsight I have realized that if you were in the sort of political jurisdiction where you could carry a rifle for self defense against rioters and expect that to go well for you, nobody would be rioting in that jurisdiction in the first place. If the state is letting people riot, you're living under anarcho-tyranny and you should just move somewhere that has rule of law.

It’s especially galling to see conservatives, who under normal circumstances are all about the Second Amendment, suddenly do an about face when someone they don’t like has a gun.

HereAndGone2 isn't American and definitely isn't one of the Second Amendment people. The Second Amendment conservatives are pretty consistent about not getting into it with the cops when you're carrying, and if you do, letting them know, calmly, that you have a gun and allowing them to disarm you.

In this case "allowing them to disarm you" ended with Pretti getting summarily executed

He didn't 'allow' them to disarm him. He was disarmed while struggling and the gun went off(either because of manufacturer defect or due to mishandling). This is... a dangerous combination even if he's technically innocent of everything except resisting arrest and interfering in federal police operations.

I'm not american, a conservative, or pro-guns, but that's not what happened. He interfered with the law enforcement, got into a physical altercation and got shot in the confusion.

He didn't exactly walk up to police, let them know he was armed, allow them to disarm him and then enquire about what was happening.

If you're carrying a gun while dealing with police you are on a speedrun up the escalation of force. If you don't work to slow down that continuum you're putting yourself at risk.

You can be abiding by all known laws and still be lawfully shot. It's not an execution and it's not necessarily the police's fault that you got shot.

Insane take. Insane. He was wrestling the whole fucking time man. Jesus.

No, it did not. Pretti did not allow them to disarm him; he was struggling the whole time. And what @Dean said.

He was clearly struggling from being pepper sprayed in the face but he did nothing whatsoever to prevent an agent from taking his weapon or to justify another agent shooting him in the back after he was disarmed

Besides the summary part, which is a matter of time not indicated here, and execution brings implications not yet established.

Here is what the Department of Homeland Security had to say on X/Twitter. (Alternative link for those without accounts.) Copying the text here:

At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here.

The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.

Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.

The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.

About 200 rioters arrived at the scene and began to obstruct and assault law enforcement on the scene, crowd control measures were deployed for the safety of the public and law enforcement.

This situation is evolving, and more information is forthcoming.

I'm, uh, not sure I believe them. Like, I saw the videos and maybe he was technically resisting arrest, but I didn't really see "an individual [who] wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement." And I suppose it is possible 200 rioters arrived after the videos we have, but it doesn't really look like 200 people are even in the vicinity in the shots we have.

Should I believe my lying eyes here, or is this another case of Point Deer, Make Horse in action?

I'm even open to the "Sig misfire" and "reached for the gun" narratives (though on the latter point, it really doesn't look to me like he is reaching for the gun, but I'm open to the idea that the officer saw a hand twitch that was less obvious to me in the video I've seen and thought he might be reaching for a second concealed firearm), but when their initial attempt to control the narrative is so absurd, I honestly have to question why I'm bending over backwards to be reasonable and give them the benefit of the doubt?

At some point am I just saying, "Well, I don't know. The animal doesn't really look like a horse to me, but I can't definitively rule out that it's a horse I guess..." Feels like a good way to fail the loyalty test in both directions. Maybe I should just say it's a horse, and keep my head down.

News is saying he wasn't an illegal alien, he was US citizen. DHS is not helping by rushing out inaccurate information.

Did DHS claim he was an alien?

I thought in the linked article they were saying it was an illegal alien?

Your article returns nothing for "illegal" or "alien." The quote of the tweet in the comment you're replying to is referring to another person.

"At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, [another] individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here."

is how I read it.

Okay, thanks for correction.

Should I believe my lying eyes here, or is this another case of Point Deer, Make Horse in action

No, you're not supposed to believe your lying eyes. You're supposed to circle the wagons and defend no matter what. This is the based ritual, feeling sorry or bad and admitting any mistakes makes you a traitor and a loser.

In fact defending isn't even enough, that's the minimum. To be a real winner at the based ritual, you have to call for more violence. The ultimate expression of masculinity in this tournament is not the composed gentleman in a suit and tie, but the blood thirsty orc who doesn't even try to pretend they have class.

It's the same way we see things like conservative rhetoric abandoning the 2nd amendment. It's very Based to abandon your claimed values to display loyalty to the ingroup and hatred towards the outsiders. https://x.com/NRA/status/2015227627464728661 you can see all the Epic Basedness right here like this https://x.com/Thiss_Youu/status/2015456572512567587 and woah look at how based Kash Patel is https://x.com/StephenGutowski/status/2015455460724228597

I read that as, after the shooting, 200 rioters appeared within a few minutes. Basically news got out before the scene could be secured and they had to retreat due to it.

as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault

Let us stop right there.

Assault is a crime. (I would have thought that the violence is an inherent part, but I do not know the specifics of MN state law, so maybe I am wrong and 'violent assault' is a thing.)

Also, it is the type of crime typically handled on the state level.

So the DHS is claiming that a MN judge signed off an arrest warrant (or a MN PD decided they wanted him arrested in connection to some assault), and it fell to the DHS to catch him so that he could answer for his crimes in court?

Anyone believing that is also likely to believe that Trump will send them their tariff dividend check really soon now.

At least when the leadership of the left lies, they are subtle. Not breaking the truth where bending and distorting it will suffice, spinning narratives, framing events, etc.

When the Trump administration lies, it feels like something an IQ 100 conman might come up with to fool an IQ 80 mark. No need to worry about keeping your lies straight, your mark will not remember them in a day anyhow.

Less charitably, their objective is the destruction of what Arendt calls the distinction between fact and fiction. If your side is disadvantaged in the jungle, you use agent orange to destroy the jungle to create a more favorable battlefield. If your side is disadvantaged in logical debate, you destroy the concept of a coherent object reality and face them on the more advantageous battlefield of name-calling.

I mean, it could be that DHS was looking for a specific illegal who was a high priority because he had served for violent crimes before, and acted on new intel. I can't rule it out, their mandate is to get rid of all of the illegals (except for the ones Trump needs to keep the economy running), which includes both hardened criminals and six year olds. (A nice thing about the motte is that the right wingers here are pretty open about that.)

But likely ICE was just fishing for illegals by IDing random people in the street, or going after a target without a violent past, and lied about that part just like they lied about the 200 rioters and all the other stuff.

Assault is a crime. (I would have thought that the violence is an inherent part, but I do not know the specifics of MN state law, so maybe I am wrong and 'violent assault' is a thing.)

Traditionally assault (threat of imminent violence) was legally distinct from battery (the actual violence), but it seems MN combines the two. Under Minnesota Statute § 609.02:

Subd. 10. Assault. "Assault" is:

(1) an act done with intent to cause fear in another of immediate bodily harm or death; or

(2) the intentional infliction of or attempt to inflict bodily harm upon another.

EDIT: Formatting.

The suspect may have been wanted for assault and was known to be illegal which caused DHS to prioritize deporting him. Why do you assume they delegated the arrest for assault to DHS? He may have been wanted by two separate organizations for different reasons. This seems like the plain reading.

Like, I saw the videos and maybe he was technically resisting arrest

He was more than "technically" resisting arrest, but if he'd wanted to massacre law enforcement he'd have come in shooting.

And I suppose it is possible 200 rioters arrived after the videos we have, but it doesn't really look like 200 people are even in the vicinity in the shots we have.

The shots we have are fairly narrow and in a short time frame; I could believe there were 200 people around that were part of the groups blowing whistles and yelling and such, though unlikely that 200 were actually rioting.

If he wanted to massacre ICE agents, it is very strange that he talked to them while holding a cell phone towards them as this video shows. You'd think that he would, you know, keep his distance and just shoot them.

My conclusion is that DHS' explanation is probably nonsense, as is Stephen Miller's description of the situation as "A domestic terrorist tried to assassinate federal law enforcement".

It would be "very strange" for a group of people gassing each other up to murder ICE agents - to the point of exclaiming "the first video of an ICE agent getting shot is gonna be lit!" - might produce someone narcissistic enough to want to film it? People can't have multiple motives, some of which might be even be in conflict with each other? This is your honest assessment of the matter? If so, then no-one can argue with you, because you're not even willing to accept common human behavior, something you see literally every day, as an argument against your preferred narrative.

If you wanted to murder ICE agents and film it, you'd want to shoot them from a distance while you or someone else filmed it. You wouldn't want to get into a conversation with them while standing 1-2 feet away from them like in the video I linked. That would make it unnecessarily harder to draw your gun successfully and to escape.

If someone is intent to make a snuff video of them murdering ICE, they would spend 24h to acquire a GoPro or a barrel mounted camera for livestreaming from Amazon.

Walking up to ICE while being visibly armed and pre-occupied with a mobile phone does not seem like a very effective way to go about it when you could also climb to a rooftop with a hunting rifle.

Of course, you can add more epicycles to your theory. "He did not just want to shoot ICE and film his murders, he also wanted to make it look like he was acting in self defense."

Or even "his real goal was to trick ice into shooting him, and due to his malicious open carry he managed to deceive poor innocent ICE agents into eliminating him. Truly the perfidy of Antifa knows no bounds!"

Protesting while armed is not illegal in the US. Plenty of people have done so with zero intention of murdering anyone. So far, I have seen zero video evidence that he was drawing his gun.

If someone is intent to make a snuff video of them murdering ICE, they would spend 24h to acquire a GoPro or a barrel mounted camera for livestreaming from Amazon.

Protestors are not perfect efficient rartionalists.

I'm even open to the "Sig misfire" and "reached for the gun" narratives

I thought the latter was from Chicago, not Minneapolis

Admittedly, I could have phrased it better, but "the gun" in my sentence is meant to be "[the suspect's own, possibly concealed, second] gun [that the officer couldn't rule out that the suspect had until it was too late]", not the officer's gun. I don't think anyone is claiming the suspect reached for the officer's gun.

(I’m not entirely sure who’s woosh-ing whom here, but I was referring to this song from the musical Chicago)

Should I believe my lying eyes here, or is this another case of Point Deer, Make Horse in action?

Would you agree that the Blue Tribe statements on Good's shooting were one of such cases?

Are standards for truth-telling not substantially higher for the government versus someone vaguely associated with a Tribe? Wild misrepresentations might be made by a partisan hack (Fox News, MSNBC, bloggers) or even a politician without hitting like official Department statements.

I don't think I've ever read a statement from a police department that didn't come across as pure conflict theorist messaging. This is probably true of almost any government agency that is at all controversial. They don't typically say completely false things (unless there's no possible evidence either way), but they will absolutely lie with a minimum of true statements.

I think this is bad. But it's definitely not new.

Obviously not- was that not apparent over Covid at the latest?

We're not talking random people, we're talking the mayor of Minneapolis, and the NYT. Also, "everyone, including politicians can lie all they want, as long as they don't put it in an official statement" sounds like "newspaper can lie all they want in headlines, as long as they put a correction in tiny print, on page 57" to me.

And either way are you sure the government hasn't lied with impunity in official statements in the past? I don't have an example off the top of my head, but it would hardly be surprising.

I don't doubt that it is possible to find official statements from the Obama/Biden admin, or from the Minneapolis state/local authorities even. But 1) my point is that these, rather than random Blue Tribe media, would be the appropriate contrast versus a Cabinet department and 2) the DHS statement here seems more bald than usual to the point that we probably need a concrete example rather than just assuming it probably exists.

What is particularly bad here, imo, is the statement coming from a the top of a Cabinet branch that is not supposed to be a political operator.

I wasn't nerd sniped by the Renee Good case the way those here on the Motte were - it just didn't interest me that much, which is why I only had a few marginal comments in that thread despite reading much of it. I will say that it seemed like partisans on both sides saw what they wanted to see in the Good video, which is why I have enough intellectual humility to admit that I could literally not be seeing what I think I am seeing.

I'm even trying to come up with ways DHS might not be lying. Maybe the 200 people were a few blocks away, also protesting/observing/disrupting ICE activities, and they heard the gunshots or where contacted by observers and descended on the scene shortly afterwards? I don't know. I would very much like to hear more details about this supposed riot, especially if there is any video evidence of it to be had.

And there's a little weirdness in the phrasing of this tweet, like "The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted." (emphasis mine) It seemed to me like the suspect was successfully disarmed, moments before they shot him. But maybe there's a second weapon they haven't told us about yet, and didn't think was worth including in their tweet?

I'll be honest, if the "sig misfire" or "reaching for the gun" thing don't pan out, this shoot seems a lot less justified to me. But maybe my brain has just been poisoned by partisanship, despite my best efforts.

My read on what happened is that the officer that took the sig off of the protestor shouted “gun” to indicate that he had found a gun. Unfortunately the other officers misunderstood in the fracas and thought the protestor currently had a gun and started shooting. This is a fairly common type of fuck up in law enforcement situations. I don’t think it’s good that the guy died, but resisting arrest while armed is always a dicey proposition.

Exactly, I've been in a situation where someone removed a weapon from a patient and shouted that he had done so multiple times but we just didn't process it because of the chaos.

And that was in a much quieter more controlled situation.

I wasn't nerd sniped by the Renee Good case the way those here on the Motte were - it just didn't interest me that much, which is why I only had a few marginal comments in that thread despite reading much of it.

That's fine. What I'm saying is we've seen the Blues ran the entire gambit of excuses from "she was just a random passerby" to "she didn't know they were from ICE and was terrified of these rando thugs" to "she didn't hit him with her car" or "he walked in front of her in order to create a situation where he could shoot her". I agree there's probably some amount of yarn spinning to cover their own ass from the DHS here. Frustratingly, it's hard to tell how much, and we probably won't find out for at least a couple days more, but my point is that It's a just bit hard for me to get outraged at the "point deer make horse"-ness of this latest situation, when te Blues get to do it essentially unlimited amount of times, and no one cares.

I'll be honest, if the "sig misfire" or "reaching for the gun" thing don't pan out, this shoot seems a lot less justified to me. But maybe my brain has just been poisoned by partisanship, despite my best efforts.

I think only a second gun would actually justify the shoot. Even if there was a misfire, it would It make the decision understandable from the agent's perspective, but it would still be a clear mistake (in contrast to the Good situation where the car was actually heading for him).

It's a just bit hard for me to get outraged at the "point deer make horse"-ness of this latest situation, when te Blues get to do it essentially unlimited amount of times, and no one cares.

Indeed. There's tons of videos with commentary declaring ICE is doing something outrageous, and if you look at the video it's a perfectly professional arrest. I've seen at least two where ICE was accused of brutality and the video does indeed appear to show brutality... but it wasn't ICE. Just this morning I saw a video showing an ICE agent falling on ice and a flash going off with the caption that ICE had a negligent discharge because they didn't have the safety on. This is obvious bullshit because neither the ICEs previous duty weapon (the SIG P320) nor their current one (Glock 19) has a manual safety. Some people claimed it was the weapon's light turning on, others claimed the flash was simply added to the video, but either way it was a lie.

But it's much like the old IRA thing -- they only have to be right (by accident) once, and the government has to be right every time. Because they own the press.

Minneapolis has clearly become a clusterfuck with no real win condition for the ICE side. Shoot itself is weird since my understanding is

  • Guy got disarmed
  • Gun went off accidentally after he was disarmed
  • Guy reaches for waistband
  • ICE guys start shooting

Which is probably enough to escape legal culpability but it's also generated another ugly video and indicative there's not really a good win condition to engaging since if enough people cluster forks around the proverbial power socket there's gonna be shockings

Minneapolis has clearly become a clusterfuck with no real win condition for the ICE side.

Law enforcement in general has no real win condition. As long as there are profit, personal, or partisan reasons to commit crimes, there is no point where it is 'done.'

However, there is a fail condition for law enforcement, and that is to stop enforcing laws at heckler, and violent, veto.

Gun went off accidentally after he was disarmed
Guy reaches for waistband

I really don't think these things are true, there is basically no evidence for an accidental discharge and the first gunshot happens very shortly after the first ICE agent pulls his gun and puts it up against the guy's back. By then, the agent that had disarmed him has already turned and is heading away, so there is no active struggle over the gun. I think the evidence points towards the ICE agent shooting him much more than an accidental discharge.

I don't see any evidence the guy reached for his waistband, and it's kind of irrelevant anyway because at that point his gun had already been taken and the ICE agent was walking away with it. And assuming the first discharge wasn't accidental, at that point he had already been shot in the back once.

I don't know why everyone keeps saying "The suspect was disarmed so therefore the police had no reason to shoot him."

Removing one gun from someone violently resisting you doesn't mean they're any less likely to have a weapon on them, in fact it means they're more likely. They've already demonstrated the fact that they have access to firearms, your updated priors should be "he likely has a 2nd weapon/gun on him and continues to be dangerous until subdued."

There isn't some immutable rule of physics that people are only able to carry 1 gun at a time.

there is basically no evidence for an accidental discharge

Oh yes there is, the gun was a Sig P320

This feels a lot like cope, but at least "was this gun discharged" is something that forensics can probably answer definitively.

On the other hand, even if it were, it's still unclear to me that it's still justifiable, if at least a bit understandable: surely police aren't justified in shooting someone on the ground being arrested just because a loud noise happened nearby (actual gunshots elsewhere, fireworks, cars backfiring). I do think intentionally making such noises in these sorts of situations is just asking for trouble (I recall saying that fireworks shot at police during the 2020 protests/riots were grossly negligent), but I wouldn't condone immediate "return" fire.

But I'm also of the opinion that permanent-hearing-damage levels of intentional noisemaking (all the whistles going on, among other things) should probably be considered "assault" (otherwise I'll start working on a "194dB Free Speech Canon"), and I'd much prefer everyone take a couple of deep breaths and discuss things civilly.

We can see the agent has already disarmed him and is holding the gun in his hand and is walking away, he is several feet away by the time the gunshot goes off. In the video, you can see he looks over his left shoulder when the first shot goes off, not down at the gun in his right hand. Even if he wasn't sure where the sound came from, he would've felt the gun discharge. Furthermore, none of the other agents whip around and look at the guy running away with the gun, which would've been the source of the sound. The overwhelming evidence points to the gunshot being from the ICE agent that had pulled out his gun and pointed it at the guy's back immediately before.

I don't see any evidence the guy reached for his waistband, and it's kind of irrelevant anyway because at that point his gun had already been taken and the ICE agent was walking away with it.

How's it irrelevant? Shows intent if the individual isn't aware the gun is no longer there

Also, as we covered last week, a person with one concealed handgun can have a second concealed handgun; for those moments where reloading just isn't fast enough.

Didn't both sides kind of want this?

Trump could have gone full throttle enforcement of immigration laws within 100 miles of the Canadian and Mexican borders, and then done a bunch of small, targeted operations within the country's interior, publicizing the expelling of big criminals from the interior every time he did it, and he would have gotten most of the benefits of his current immigration policy, with fewer opportunities for leftists to get in his way.

While the current operation sending 2000 ICE agents to a Blue city 250 miles from the Canadian border is completely legitimate as a matter of law, I think it is a tactical mistake unless we assume this fanfare is exactly what Trump wanted.

And the Blue tribe are eager to make martyrs of their own. It fires up their base, and lets them cathartically live out their fantasies of being rebels and revolutionaries while changing very little.

The blue area in my state never committed to any real sanctuary policies. The state has also made some decisions for them with regards to certain mandated cooperation which made it easier for blue politicians to ignore.

According to news reports, ICE stepped up operations in my state the first half of last year. That seems supported by a substantial increase of reported ICE arrests from 2024 to 2025.* According to social media ICE stepped up operations around the blue area in the last 6 weeks. I can't say by how much that is a real increase, because ICE watch styled posts aren't a reliable indicator. My state reports thousands of more deportation arrests in 2025 than the likely upper bound of 3000 that DHS claims for the surge in Minneapolis. I haven't diligently gone through that data, but I'd enjoy looking at man hours spent per arrest to compare. Mr. Vice President, do your thing.

Neither the task force styled Afghanistan metro surge or the sustained, but heightened enforcement efforts puts up the kinds of numbers that the hardliners say they really want. We're talking thousands to tens of thousands, not millions. With that taken into account the headline grabbing surge juice doesn't appear worth the squeeze. Whistle resistance isn't going to endure 3 years.

  • Bonus uninformed speculation: based on the timing and sequence of the stories that do exist, it seems like increased efforts started on one side of the state and are sweeping to the other. Could just be me though.

Trump could have gone full throttle enforcement of immigration laws within 100 miles of the Canadian and Mexican borders, and then done a bunch of small, targeted operations within the country's interior, publicizing the expelling of big criminals from the interior every time he did it, and he would have gotten most of the benefits of his current immigration policy, with fewer opportunities for leftists to get in his way.

He wouldn't have gotten immigration enforcement nationwide; he would have only gotten immigration enforcement in red areas. What you are asking is for the right to only govern their own when they are in charge, while the left gets to govern everyone.

He wouldn't have gotten immigration enforcement nationwide; he would have only gotten immigration enforcement in red areas.

I disagree.

If all Trump wanted to do was enforce immigration nationwide, having hundreds of small operations in the interior that were not announced ahead of time would be a better way to do it. Surely, the element of surprise is important, and is not something you obtain by making a big announcement that you're about to send 2000 guys into a city. That, to me, seems like a way to guarantee two results: 1) some illegal immigrants are going to flee to other places and lie low while the enforcement is in place, and 2) locals are going to try and find and confront ICE agents.

Maybe Trump just is so much of a showman that he can't help but step on his own feet when it comes to immigration enforcement, but I find it more plausible that the current outcome was expected and part of the point.

What you are asking is for the right to only govern their own when they are in charge, while the left gets to govern everyone.

I'm not asking for anything. I basically agree with the idea that Trump ran on immigration and so should have some latitude to enforce the laws, regardless of how much of an immigration hawk I am. I am saying that a Trump that wanted to actually enforce immigration laws would not be doing what he is doing now.

If all Trump wanted to do was enforce immigration nationwide, having hundreds of small operations in the interior that were not announced ahead of time would be a better way to do it.

And how, exactly, do small operations "in the interior" do anything about illegal aliens in sanctuary cities? Again, your suggestion still boils down to enforcing the law only on Red Tribe.

I am saying that a Trump that wanted to actually enforce immigration laws would not be doing what he is doing now.

This shouldn't even be up for debate. If they wanted to stop immigration they'd go after American employers who pay the illegal immigrants American money to work for them, in America. The immigrants don't come here for the weather, they come here to get paid USD.

Trump literally, with his own mouth, said they wouldn't be going after agriculture or hotels(?!) which are known industries that employe massive amounts of illegals.

Yes, I'm sorry to say this is exactly right. The fact that the Trump admin has decided to pursue the illegal immigration problem by staging Brownshirt-style street battles between ICE and radicalized Democrats is just black-pilling. If I was a Soros master-of-the-universe type, and I was intent on preserving widespread illegal immigration, and I found myself in the impossibly fortunate position of being able to mind control Trump, I think I'd basically have him continue down the path he's already elected to follow—what he is doing right now is working splendidly.

Immigration enforcement was always going to be an extremely charged and divisive undertaking. There is a sizable minority of the population that is fanatically opposed, a plurality moderate population that is fairly agnostic, and then a final MAGA faction that is all-in. The key to winning has always been disempowering the fanatics while not alienating the moderates. The employment focused approach is perfect for this: enforcement is directed against rich white people the fanatics probably don't even like; each rich white person employer probably employees a number of illegal immigrants, so you get way more bang for your buck per enforcement action; the rich white employers, unlike illegal immigrants, have a lot to lose, so they are likely to cooperate with your enforcement, or better yet, simply stop their illegal behavior once faced with a credible threat of punishment; and finally, once deprived of financial incentive for being in the country, the illegal immigrants deport at their own expense, without recourse to the legal system, and without generating any of the fraught issues that arise through forced deportation, like minor children being separated from parents, or citizen minor children being detained.

If you insist on supplementing this approach, removing dangerous criminal aliens with ICE could be justified, but the Trump strategy has still been far from optimal. Again, the priority is to disempower the fanatics while not alienating the moderates. You don't accomplish any of this by taking the fanatics and making them into martyrs: that just alienates moderates and fuels fanaticisim. You accomplish it by demoralizing the fanatics, and by making the fanatics look like fanatics to the moderates. If a fanatic is interfering with your operations, sure, try to arrest them. But if that fails, what is wrong with letting them go and then nabbing them the next day at work once things have cooled down? Then you can pile on the charges: resisting arrest, fleeing an officer, assaulting an officer, etc. This avoids making martyrs, and definitely demoralizes—there is a certain glamor to slugging it out with the cops, but not so much to being arrested at work and then subjected to cavity searches in a federal detention center for the next three years.

I can imagine some ICE higher-up saying, "you say that, but we can't let protestors dictate the tempo of our enforcement and removal operations. It would be giving in to the worst kind of heckler's veto." To which I say, why not? Why not let the fanatics win? If you are careful in selecting your targets, letting them win these standoffs has mostly upside. Let's say that ICE had turned back after Renee Good had blocked their operation and refused to come into custody, and then did a press conference on the dangerous child molester they were planning to arrest but couldn't because Good and co had interfered. This serves the second part of our strategy perfectly: make the fanatics look like fanatics to the moderates. It turns an operational loss into a strategic victory. The ICE higher-up: "But what if that child molester goes and molests a child because we didn't deport them?" Yes, what if? To be honest, it is very unlikely, and it would be tragic, but cynically speaking, it would probably go a long way to ensuring that you never have this problem again, right? What better serves the interests of children, turning Renee Good into martyr and your whole operation into a circus, or executing the occasional strategic retreat in order to win the war?

There is a Chinese meme where Trump is called "Trump the Nation-Builder" because his geopolitical blundering so often seems to serve the interests of the PRC. In the future, will mestizo peasants be praying to Trump in thanks for his efforts to delegitimize immigration enforcement? Will they light little candles with Trump's face on them and place them on their ofrendas to honor him as the patron saint of illegals? Looking at situation as it presently stands, it wouldn't shock me.

Amazing comment

In the future, will mestizo peasants be praying to Trump in thanks for his efforts to delegitimize immigration enforcement? Will they light little candles with Trump's face on them and place them on their ofrendas to honor him as the patron saint of illegals? Looking at situation as it presently stands, it wouldn't shock me.

This is hilarious

No, this is a made-up misdirection from the left.

Employers are not the villain here - employers are legally required to accept any "reasonably genuine" documents that appear to relate to the employee, even if they are not ultimately confirmed by e-verify. Employers cannot terminate an employee simply because they believe they are an illegal immigrant. Doing so may result in anti-discrimination lawsuits against the employer, which are far riskier and carry heavier penalties than hiring illegals.

If an employer reports a worker to ICE as potentially illegal, the employer may get into trouble with anti-retaliation law. Additionally, claiming the employer is retaliating against you can be a pathway to getting 6 more years in the US - i.e. the illegal alien is financially motivated by the government to cause further trouble for the employer.

https://legalaidatwork.org/factsheet/deferred-action-for-noncitizen-undocumented-workers-in-labor-disputes/

> name is "yestrusocialist"

> "Employers are not the villain here"

Snark aside, I'm not super interested in assigning blame here. Although I imagine many (especially farmers and hotel owners) employers do know they're hiring illegals, I imagine they try to.

My logic rests upon the core facts:

  1. illegal immigrants come here to trade their labour for money
  2. the person on the other side of that trade runs an American business
  3. there are less Americans businesses than there are illegal immigrants
  4. the vast majority of American businesses have much more documentation/paperwork on their existence, location, etc
  5. due to the smaller # of businesses, and the significantly higher ease in finding them and monitoring them, it's way easier to enforce this via american businesses

I don't know the exact policy/regulation structure that both stops employers from hiring illegal immigrants while maintaining worker dignity and privacy, but I'm very confident there's a way to accomplish this. Also, the current status quo of ICE is 1) of middling effectiveness relative to the stated goals of the admin and 2) a shitshow that is very obviously not doing good at "dignity" or "privacy" so the bar is pretty low here

I also imagine (and in a couple of cases know with certainty) that employers know they are hiring illegals. But at $10k/violation for hiring illegals and $50k-$300k for discrimination for failing to accept "reasonably genuine" documents, I don't blame them for it.

I blame the legal structure they operate under and the politicians who created it. Capitalists will be Capitalists. It's on government to align the incentives with desired actions.

I agree this can be done, but it will be slow and will not get rid of illegals in the short run.

Employers are not the villain here - employers are legally required to accept any "reasonably genuine" documents that appear to relate to the employee, even if they are not ultimately confirmed by e-verify.

Okay, and why don't we have mandatory e-verify despite a Republican Congress and white house?

All of the obstacles you mention could easily be cleared with legislation.

I agree that it would be great to dismantle antidiscrimination law. It is not true that this could be "easily cleared with legislation" - among other things one would also need to eliminate leftist judges and other instruments of left wing anti democratic power.

More comments

Does ICE see itself as the right-wing version of Antifa from 10 years ago? Like, I remember there was an effort to shut down right-wing demonstrations by means of violent masked mobs (bike lock guy etc.), and I'm sure it's not hard to come up with an argument that those "anarchists" were effectively agents of the state, just like ICE is now. But I don't remember that violence rising to the killing of right-wingers, and so the present ICE action is an escalation from that. (Or am I wrong, and Antifa did actually kill right-wingers, and I just never heard about it?)

Basically I'm wondering if there's a plausible turnabout-is-fair-play narrative that the ICE-sympathetic side is going to adopt.

Yes, Antifa killed right wingers for being right wing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_of_Aaron_Danielson_and_Michael_Reinoehl

Many people died in the riots of 2020. Wikipedia shows 19 deaths confirmed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests

Or am I wrong, and Antifa did actually kill right-wingers, and I just never heard about it?

Right-winger, singular, at least. I don't actually remember a second off the top of my head, but I wouldn't be surprised if I forgot 1 or 2 more. I would be surprised if I missed 10 or 20 more.

But for his reflexes and marksmanship Rittenhouse would’ve almost certainly been killed by Gaige Grosskreutz.

And most importantly, if there wasn’t overwhelming video evidence of it being a near picture perfect case of self defense, he would have been 100% railroaded into prison for being who he was.

'What' he was, even.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no. This is where the idea of disrupting police, "de arresting" people, rioting, etc. comes from. They don't agree that the state should have the ultimate power to enforce laws that they don't agree with. In this case they seem to disagree with immigration laws, and because of this disagreement they don't believe that ICE/DHS has a right to enforce these laws.

This is a big problem. An actual threat to democracy. Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced. A small (but growing) contingent of the left does not believe that that is legitimate, and therefore believe that they have the right to use force to oppose this.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here? These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that. Aside from some sort of science fiction style deprogramming effort: how do you bring them back to reality?

This is a question that genuinely troubles me.

It’s always been an American intuition that resisting a government which is domineering you in ways that you think are unjust is the right thing to do. Thats part of the unofficial founding ethos of the country. Giving federal agents prowling your neighborhood a hard time is one of the most American things you could do.

I have it on good authority this country was founded on White Supremacy so I think we should do away with such racist traditions

If that’s your model of the country then you would also be in favor of resisting unjust laws, which is how that structure got slowly dismantled over time. Either way the moral imperative shakes out the same.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

Setting aside the object level question of the incident here, the state having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force does not mean that all use of force by the state is legitimate.

Part of what legitimizes the state monopoly on violence is the assurance that if agents of the state step out of line, they will theoretically be punished. For example, police enforcing drug laws is a legitimate use of the state monopoly on violence, regardless of how any given individual feels about drug laws. But police planting drugs on someone to justify an arrest, is not a legitimate use of the state monopoly on violence, and should be punished by a state that is interested in maintaining a veneer of legitimacy.

Also, from a realpolitik perspective, you can't easily enforce a law the people (or some concentrated geographic subset of people) legitimately won't tolerate. Until we have a literally omnipotent government with infinite state capacity, the vast majority of a law's power comes from voluntary compliance. People see that the posted speed limit is 50, use some heuristics to see how likely enforcement is, and compromise by driving 55 miles an hour. Speed cameras and automated enforcement could change things, but there is some level of enforcement short of the most severe draconian enforcement that gets the most voluntary and happily willing compliance from the vast majority of the population.

Also, from a realpolitik perspective, you can't easily enforce a law the people (or some concentrated geographic subset of people) legitimately won't tolerate.

Tell it to George Wallace. With modern state capacity you can enforce anything, if you have the will. For whatever reason only the left has the will.

For whatever reason only the left has the will.

I believe it would be more accurate to say that democrats have convinced themselves that only the left has the will and that's what makes these incidents are so shocking to them.

Recall that one of the first unguarded reactions captured from one of the protestors present at the Renee Good shooting was "WTF! Why would you have real bullets?" These people are so coddled that it never occurred to them that force might be met with force.

Renee Good and the other people at the sharp end are patsies. The people doing the organizing want them to be harmed and/or killed by ICE in order to shock the conscience of those who would otherwise support the ICE side in this. And I expect it to work.

It should be remembered that George Wallace was more of a showman than a committed segregationist, the stand at the schoolhouse door was an engineered photo op, and that most of the Southern Democrats were to the left of their voters on segregation. Wallace himself campaigned hard on segregation mostly because he lost the '58 primary while endorsed by the NAACP to a guy endorsed by the Klan (who lived long enough to endorse Barack Obama; Southern politics can be funny like that).

Immigration is another one of those issues where the vast majority of politicians from any party are to the left of their electorate. Steven Miller might be serious about mass deportations, but the Congressional GOP is not and has spent the last 20 years desperate to enact IRCA: Part Two. Funding ICE instead of doing things like employer-based enforcement is meant to show that immigration restriction is impossible. Even Trump spent most of his political career calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi before aping his platform.

I think it’s less true today that politicians are once left of their voters on immigration. The lefts focus on woke made the right thing a lot more intellectually on race. And now you have hbd and Saylor and plenty of people with scientific arguments on why race matters and you need to get the people of the wrong races out of your country.

I would say pre-2020 you are in fact correct but in 2026 it’s a lot more popular with the average politician.

You have popular twitter accounts followed by everyone that promote “black people destroyed urbanism in America”. A lot of lefties actually agree with that comment.

Congress and the Judiciary are overwhelmingly pre-2020 and Twitter is not real life. No Republican politician, let alone Democrat, would dare utter the words "Black people destroyed urbanism in America". Steve King was castrated by the House GOP for less.

Illegal immigrants (and, really, most first-gen legal immigrants) have almost nothing to do with woke. Those people are mostly Made in the USA Americans like Kimberle Crenshaw with a helping of highly educated second-generation children of legal immigrants.

The GOP does have some genuine restrictionists (motivated by, if nothing else, being able to read exit polls), but the party as a whole is squishier than their rhetoric and quick to sell out to whatever lobbyist shows up. The old school labor types who used to act as a brake within the Democratic Party are all but extinct.

The young though are changing. Perhaps the current members of congress have not changed but they will die out. A lot of people though have pivoted on these issues. I’ve gone from a billion American believer to a decade later preferring 0 immigration and mass deportations. I bet some members of congress have gone down a similar path. I don’t think 5 years ago you could even find any sub anywhere with as many higher IQ anti-immigrant posters. I doubt this is the only place now. The uni-party existed back then.

Funding ICE instead of doing things like employer-based enforcement is meant to show that immigration restriction is impossible.

I am generally a fan of expanded mandatory E-Verify for interdicting illegals more cheaply/efficiently than battalions of ICE agents, but I have to admit there is an obvious failure mode: what’s stopping Big Totally-Compliant Employer, Inc. from contracting $SHITTY_JOB out to some fly-by-night outfit that hires illegals and pays them in cash, and then going all surprised_pikachu.jpg if and when it comes to light that—shock, horror!—the contractors were not, in fact, unimpeachable exemplars of regulatory rectitude?

As, indeed, regularly happens in a variety of sectors. That's how construction basically works- the company doing the whole job subcontracts most of the individual parts, and the shitty parts get subcontracted in turn out to fly-by-night companies employing illegals. This is because the native working class dysfunctional enough to want those jobs is dysfunctional enough to be incapable of holding down a job, unless lacking in freedom(hence why companies doing roofing and drywalling with citizens invariably have those citizens be on probation or parole).

Yep, exactly: construction, hotel cleaners, fruit pickers, meat packers … all of them are complicit in this blatant end run around the law. To be fair, though, many immigration restrictionists need to take a good, hard look in the mirror and come to grips with the fact that if a genie magically granted their stated policy goals, a trip to Disneyworld, or even just to the grocery store, would suddenly get a whole lot more expensive.

It doesn't even have to be that way.

The illegals staffing some of our most crucial industries are a tacit admission that labor "protections" are too restrictive and burdensome to at least these businesses. It's a weird role-reversal where conservatives insist on keeping the strict labor practices and instead enforcing them better (for benefit of citizen laborers), and liberals recognize that illegals are better off when they're not priced out of the labor pool (as would low-skill citizens if they were allowed to lower their bids to the same level).

More comments

You write the regulation such that "Compliant Employer" is vicariously liable for any violations by the subcontractor, as is done to varying extents by OSHA and the NLRB.

For an example: busting Hyundai for using child labor. You would want to make the fines larger, but the principle applies. The factory and the temp agency are both fined for the labor law violation.

We could create this whole totalitarian bureaucratic paperwork nightmare with significant vicarious liability if anyone employed directly or indirectly by you turns out to not have authorization to work. Or we could just go after the people who are primarily responsible in the first place. The latter is better; there's a cost to all that Orwellian shit.

The libertarian idea echoed by Republicans that business owners are too special a class to fill out paperwork or obey laws is what is "primarily responsible" for widespread illegal immigration. Business owners are the original open borders constituency.

Yes, filling out paperwork has a cost. Paying competitive wages that command American adults and/or building one's facilities in a place that people actually live instead of staffing one's factory with migrant children in a rural nowhere county with less than 10K working-age residents is indeed more expensive.

Failing to govern also has costs. Republican politicians have spent the last 20 or so years either lying about being opposed to illegal immigration or being too spineless to actually enforce immigration laws if it meant irritating the Chamber of Commerce. Lying/failure to deliver has expensive consequences like incompetent populists winning primaries and becoming the face of your party. CPB/ICE's budget increase for the sake of deportations exceeds the budget for the entire Department of Labor.

If the right can't tell the Chamber of Commerce types (who, last I checked, are entirely incapable of mobilizing voters, let alone street protests) to take one for the team or try their luck with the Mamdanis of the world they don't stand a chance in Hell of accomplishing any goal that faces any organized opposition.

At this point the Republicans might as well give up and go back to the Reagan/H.W. Bush position of open borders.

More comments

For whatever reason only the left has the will.

Well, I'd imagine that the small government side of things would be less inclined to do big things while wielding the government

The right isn't really the small government side; that would be libertarians, and they're never in power.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

No, that's only half the question. The full form of the question is "does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence when the wrong side wins the election?" And considering most of human history revolves around this question, I don't think it's particularly simple.

The US is special because its supreme law is very explicit that the State does not have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence. It makes this clear in the original document, not just the second amendment to them. But those statements are insidious, because they also imply that you're going to have to be strong enough to assert your own monopoly (re: Shay's Rebellion) for that to be of any use to you- and so in practice, the monopoly on violence belonging to the citizenry legitimizes the State's -> People's institutions. (And can also get them to back down when they're doing something sufficiently stupid re: Battle of Athens.)

In this case, Minnesota, and its citizens, are very well aware that Taking The Sign Down and starting (or gearing up for) a shooting war over this would end very badly for them. 5 years ago, it would have been their opponents that would have been on the losing end if they started killing rioters- and this was the case right up until that FONOP incident in Wisconsin where 3 of BLM's enforcers were gunned down (and BLM reacted badly to this).

These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that

I am in complete agreement that they're trying to bring rise to their own authoritarian dictatorship. BLM = brownshirts, plain and simple.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here?

I don't think de-escalation is the right call for either side right now- it's not what the people want, and it's not healthy for the system to tolerate aggressors in this way.

I think that reminding the aggressors that they should have hammered out an agreement back when they had the ability to do that (and not the 2024 "changes nothing" agreement, I'm talking about what's currently the status quo in 2026 where some big businesses are allowed to keep slaves, criminal slaves are deported right after being granted bail, Southern states are allowed to enforce border law again, and the other slaves are paid a small sum to hop a plane and get out... [in exchange for the anchor babies being allowed to sponsor their folks for citizenship, and provisions in law allowing for this] would have solved a lot of the current problem; and the fact that they listened to the destabilizing element and failed to do this means they're at fault. Everyone walks away grumbling but the problem is mostly solved.

This is the flip side of the "cuckservative": now it's the Progressives that are unambiguously in opposition to the law (and their arguments that in fact, they are following the law are Sovereign Citizen-tier... because that's exactly what they're doing), and those who would normally vote Blue for law and order must now vote Red. Because Blues are the Establishment (which is not the same as the legislature or the executive) this will hurt them more than Red (which is also why all other non-US Western countries have shifted Blue).

If the system is truly broken, then this won't work, and the people should be making war on the rebels now while they still have a chance. If I were the People, I'd want a few battalions stationed there- maybe that's enough?

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence? It seems as though a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no.

A large number of right-wingers also believe that the answer is no. They're just largely keeping quiet about it at the moment because right now it's their opponents who are feeling the violence of the state.

Half the country voted in an almost single issue fashion to have our immigration laws enforced.

I understand your point, but to be precise only about 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump, and that 32% includes some voters (probably not many, but some) whose reasons for voting for Trump did not include immigration.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here?

I don't know, but the mainstream media, the alternative media, and social media are not helping much. We are living through years and years of events that act as scissor statements and videos that get analyzed like the Zapruder film, argued endlessly about online even if the events that they capture are statistically quite rare. When Charlie Kirk was killed I pointed out that statistically speaking, assassinations are extremely rare in the US given how angry people are about politics and how many guns are in private hands. But many right-wingers in media made it seem like the killing meant that the cold civil war had gone fully hot and that it was time to prepare to deliver retribution.

Now with these ICE-perpetrated killings, something similar is happening. I am not a fan of what ICE is doing, but to get a clear picture it's probably a good idea to take into account statistics and try to figure out how frequent ICE killing someone is as a fraction of the total number of interactions between ICE and other people. Then one could compare it to how other law enforcement agencies measure up in similar situations or compare it to an ideal but realistic model of how high quality law enforcement would behave - and thus try to figure out whether ICE really are the crude violent bumpkins that their opponents often depict them as. But on social media, which after all rewards engagement more than anything else, too often the discussion is more like "this means fascism has come to America". Meanwhile some people on the other side aren't helping by celebrating the shootings, just as was also the case with the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Almost needless to say, consistent principles other than "my side should win" are rare and both sides flip-flop in their opinions of what the boundaries of proper interactions between law enforcement and "civilians" should be depending on which side currently is in charge of the law enforcement.

to be precise only about 32% of eligible voters voted for Trump

By this reasoning, "the people voted for" doesn't matter for any issue and any president, since the number of voters for everyone is pretty much always going to be below 50%.

I smell an isolated demand for rigor here. This is not the standard used where Democrats are involved.

One could also check and see if Congress signed off on something like this. And as it turns out, they signed off a huge expansion of the ICE budget! Perhaps it was used in ways they didn't anticipate, but it's true that not only did Trump run on an immigration enforcement platform, but Congress also supported immigration enforcement.

I'm pretty sure under 50% of eligible voters voted for Congress too.

Obvious way to understand this, did Biden winning in 2020 mean >50% of the public supported student loan forgiveness?

There's tons of different reasons why people would have voted for Trump (or not voted at all). From standard Republican reasons like Abortion, 2nd amendment rights, or against price controls (even if ironically, Trump has come out in support of those). Or maybe they just think Biden was responsible for inflation and thought Trump would bring prices down to 2019 levels. Remember "Biden high prices, Trump low prices" signs?

Even people who voted for immigration reasons don't necessarily back things like revoking legal immigrants status or having ICE act like thugs beating people up and shooting them.

Mistaking an electoral victory as a full permission slip to do whatever you want is a major part of what sank the Dems. Why embrace the same delusions they did?

Biden’s campaign wasn’t strongly connected with student loan forgiveness. Trump’s was with immigration.

I am not saying that people voting for Trump doesn't matter. What I am doing is giving more precise figures. I don't recall having ever claimed that 1/3 of eligible voters voting for a Democrat meant that one of the Democrats' favorite policy stances was supported by half of the country.

This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

Shouldn't that be nuanced somewhat? I'd suggest narrowing it down to a legitimate right to a monopoly on the initiation of violence.

Most people would, I would guess, say that there is a legitimate right to individual self-defense. If someone is trying to do violence to me or my property, I have a right to respond with violence myself. This isn't a communist position, and in general the right or conservatives have been more supportive of an individual's right to use defensive violence.

If we limit the state's monopoly to the initiation of violence, we allow for defensive violence by individuals, and I think that better captures most people's intuitions.

In the context of the United States it's a little more complex than this again, because the American political tradition in particular grants that there is a right for the people to organise themselves and overthrow a tyrannical government, by violent means if necessary. Sic semper tyrannis is not merely a slogan. Here there is, I think, more overlap with communists, since both liberals and communists accept that in principle it can be legitimate to engage in revolutionary violence. In that case the dispute is more about in what circumstances that kind of violence is justified, and I think American conservatives, borrowing from the just war tradition, would have a lot to say about that. Revolutionary or rebellious violence must be proportional to the level of tyranny, must have a reasonable chance of success, must conform to some sort of jus in bello in terms of legitimate targets, must happen under the aegis of some sort of revolutionary organisation or authority, and so on. 'Revolution' is not a blank cheque to just go and shoot anyone you associate with the oppressor, but rather, legitimate revolutionary violence must be organised, strategic, and proportional to the threat posed by a genuine tyranny.

(Disclaimer: this is all on the abstract, theoretical level. I'm talking about political philosophy, not current events.)

I'm also a bit surprised we haven't seen bombings yet.

The real question is: how do you de-escalate from here? These people (some of them) have convinced themselves that they are living through the rise of an authoritarian/fascist dictatorship and have precipitated some things that do pattern match to that. Aside from some sort of science fiction style deprogramming effort: how do you bring them back to reality?

You cannot. There is only one way out, and that is that the left gets what they want.

As in, the left gets what they want politically, or they get a hot war?

They get what they want politically. All they have to do is escalate, and eventually either the right will back down or the "moderates" will throw the right out.

If that comes to pass, we no longer have a functioning government or country; we just have a tyranny where the left gets everything it wants as long as they scream loud enough.

Like Capital_Room said, we're already there.

If that comes to pass

You mean when it comes to pass… and that "when" is now. The "tyranny where the left gets everything it wants as long as they scream loud enough" is what we are currently getting.

does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?

Of course it does, except when it doesn't.

Very few people have anything approaching a coherent political philosophy. I would assert that the vast majority of people never think about the state in terms of the monopoly of violence. Maybe they heard it in school, but they never internalized the concept.

I am and was always skeptical of how Trump would be able to pull mass deportations off because of this. Even if there wasn't actually violence, the media would manifest it like in Texas where they used forced perspective to make it look like the illegal aliens were getting whipped. Law enforcement is inherently violent, and with millions of interactions there was going to be violence, and scissors.

Not just inherently, definitionally violent. Every single thing the police do is something being done against the will of the person it is being done to.

I wasn’t aware that having my passport and ID card renewed or being granted a drivers license was ”definitionally violent”…

If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply. Your drivers license is the state's permission to drive without falling afoul of the state's monopoly on violence. Whether this is the non-central fallacy or not, it is practically how society works. We just abstract much of the unpalatable stuff away behind a veneer of civility so we don't need to remind ourselves of how violent the world is and how fragile peace is.

If you forgo the drivers license, and still drive on the road, the state will fine you. If you refuse to pay the fines, eventually the state will arrest you, if you refuse to come quietly because you don't recognize the authority of the state, the state will inflict violence on you until you comply.

This is a perfect example of precisely what I spoke about here:

There are plenty of government rules, which, on their face, are not enforced through violence and kidnapping. In many of those cases, you have to posit a persistently-oppositional figure and a continued escalatory cycle to get to an eventual end state where the ultimate response to unending opposition is, indeed, violence/kidnapping.

If such a proposition holds, it should hold in other domains as well. Let's consider household/family rules. At different stages for children, some household/family rules are directly enforced via spanking or timeouts or whatever (violence/kidnapping). For others, you can often find a similar escalatory process if you posit a sufficiently oppositional child. Another end state may be 'exile', kicking someone out of your house. Of course, if we assume a maximally-oppositional child, what might it take to actually enforce kicking them out of your house? If they just refuse to go? Violence? Kidnapping? Calling the state... to use violence/kidnapping?

I think this reasoning about maximal-opposition holds for essentially every rule ever, government or not. That is, under the hypothesis of maximal-opposition, essentially every rule ever is either ultimately enforced via violence/kidnapping or... well, at some point, it just goes unenforced, as efforts are dropped in the face of maximal-opposition. Of course, one might think that choosing to present maximal-opposition is, itself, a rule that is chosen by someone.

That is, there doesn't seem to be anything unique to government rules here. Yet, I don't think that most people are willing to apply this same standard to the entire set of rules in the universe.

If anything the parent x child interaction is very similar to the government x citizen one. I don't think the violence based enforcement holds for every other domain.

It appears to me that for voluntary contractual interactions, violence is not the fundamental enforcement mechanism. Take your job, if you don't wish to do something you can leave, if you boss wants you to do something and you refuse, they can stop paying you. No violence needed. Friend group social situations: no violence either. Generally, voluntary contractual interactions are enforced by reputational damage, trade/compensation, or right to association.

The parent x child much like the government x citizen is one of forceful unchosen hierarchy, in the sense that it is forced upon you and only through extreme measures, at great personal costs, can it be severed. And since you did not chose to participate the really only enforcement mechanism that is available for the government or your parent is to threaten you with further violence if you refuse to comply.

It would be different if we were still a tribal society and people could just leave society, go out on their own if they did not wish to engage in the social compact. However, the edges of the map are gone, and there isn't really anywhere people can leave to. Just merely exchanging one tyrant for another.

Take your job, if you don't wish to do something you can leave

What if you don't leave? Remember to apply the assumption of maximal-opposition at every stage.

More comments

Nonetheless, the act of granting a drivers license is not remotely ”definitionally violent” and to even suggest that granting an ID card (for those rare situations where a drivers license isn’t accepted as an ID) is violent is completely ridiculous. The claim was that ”every single thing the police do is something being done against the person it’s being done to”.

Police do many things, some of which are violent, but police in the US leaning so heavily on that side does not mean that police is definitionally violent.

I don't see what's hard to understand about this.

By the state enforcing consequences - of violence - for not having a permit or not having an ID card, it granting people these things is still a violent act.

Of course it feels different in the moment. Or maybe "It's just a piece of paper". But it's all control at the barrel of a gun, even if it's a permit/ID regime I think is practically useful or even required in a modern western nation.

for not having a permit or not having an ID card, it granting people these things is still a violent act.

Ah, but here's the important bit: said ID card is entirely optional (around here). It's one way to identify yourself but not even the most common one. There are no negative consequences to not having one (in fact mine is past its validity date by a year or two). Nonetheless the police are the ones that grant it (because they have the means and existing infrastructure to verify the person's identity securely). If you claim that asking for an ID is an act of violence, does that mean the delivery guy who wanted to see my ID before giving me the parcel was violent? I don't think anyone reasonable would support that.

A claim that police is definitionally violent and that "every single thing the police do is something being done against the will of the person it is being done to", is like trying to prove a negative. Any counterexample invalidates it. In the case of an ID card, the thing being done is verifying that I am in fact me and it is done at my behest, not against my will. Likewise if I were to end up in a minor traffic accident, I'd call the police to witness the situation so that the other party can't make outrageous claims. They are not there in the capacity of violence (nobody is going to get arrested) but to act as impartial witnesses.

It may be that the police in US has degenerated so much that they are only capable of violence but that's a peculiarity of that particular style of policing, not a definitional feature of the concept of "the police".

More comments

I'd disagree with the original poster that all state actions are definitionally violent. Like providing permits or ID cards. However the police are the agents of the state empowered to carry out it's monopoly on violence. The police do not issue you the ID card or the driver's license, that is done by different agents of the state that are not empowered with its monopoly on violence. All enforcement of the laws of a state by police are violent explicitly or implicitly and the job of the police is the fundamentally the enforcement of laws. What jobs done by the police do you think are non-violent?

The police do not issue you the ID card or the driver's license, that is done by different agents of the state that are not empowered with its monopoly on violence.

Here the police are the ones that issue me the ID, not any other agents of the state. IOW, the police have multiple duties, some which aren't in any way related to their monopoly on violence.

The claim was notably about the police / law enforcement being definitionally violent, ie. police anywhere and everywhere is always violent which is very easy to find counterexamples for that invalidate the claim.

What jobs done by the police do you think are non-violent?

Granting that (entirely optional) national ID card for one. Another is acting as a witness in various situations (eg. someone hits your car and you or they call the police to take written statements and observations on the spot so that it isn't just your vs the other guy's claims two months later in court about who has to pay damages). Guiding traffic (as opposed to observing or giving tickets) in case of major disruptions (eg. an accident requires redirecting traffic to prevent further casualties). Taking criminal complaints. Handling lost and found goods (a typical example would be finding some person's lost wallet and taking it to the police station).

Yes, one of police's duties is to enforce the state's monopoly on violence but that's far from the only thing they do. It may be that it's the only thing they do in some places but that's not part of the definition of police, just a feature of policing in that specific place (the way police behave in US vs Europe differs massively and unless I'm severely mistaken even the difference between the police in US vs Canada is striking).

a very small contingent of revolutionary communists believe that the answer to this question is no

I don't see how this is an extreme viewpoint at all. The purpose of the second amendment is partially to check state power, by giving the government something to fear (in minecraft) if they behave unreasonably. I'm not sure what that has to do with communism. Communism in practice generally involves the rule of law and "the people" having absolute power over the individual.

Here's the timeline as of about 6:30 Western time day of:

  1. Alexi Petti shows, armed, up to participate in an ICE observation/disruption event in Minneapolis.

  2. Alex gets into an altercation with police, possible involving a woman who was pepper sprayed.

  3. The police/ICE pepper spray him as well, and tackle him to the ground.

  4. Alex appears to, during the scuffle, also attack the initial woman who was sprayed. He seems to grab her and try to pull her somewhere (possibly trying to "de-arrest" her)

  5. A so-far unknown law enforcement officer appears to disarm Alex while many other officers are wrestling with him on the ground. The scene is chaotic

  6. A second or so after Alex appears to be disarmed, he also appears to reach for his (no missing) gun

  7. This is when he is shot and killed.

Here is a slow motion video purporting to show him reaching for his missing weapon: https://x.com/KimKatieUSA/status/2015181670576775302

Here is an annotated/slowed video showing what appears to be an LEO disarming him: https://x.com/brandonstraka/status/2015140156806934987

Non-Twitter links: 1 2

Here is a slow motion video purporting to show him reaching for his missing weapon

I personally can't see any reaching in this video. But the uploader claims to see Pretti reaching at the 27-second mark, which is well after he was first shot by the officer at the 21-second mark. So your items 6 and 7 need to be corrected:

(6) An officer draws his gun and shoots Pretti.

(7) All the officers disperse and stop holding Pretti down. Pretti partially rises from the compressed kneeling/dogeza position in which the officers were holding him, but soon falls back to the ground. Pretti allegedly (observer opinions vary) reaches for his empty holster as he rises.

(8) The aforementioned officer shoots Pretti several more times.

Who fired the first shot (at 21 seconds in the first video)? Logically it should have been the agent in center who pulls out his gun at 15 seconds and points it at Pretti. He obviously fires the second shot at 26 seconds - you can see the slide move and the casing eject. None of the other agents appears to have a gun in hand (other than the guy who pulls Pretti's gun from the holster and immediately turns and walks away).

Listening carefully, the first and second-fourth shots sound different. Does that have any significance?

I saw this post on Kiwifarms, but I've also seen others make the same argument elsewhere. The gun Pretti had on him is incredibly unreliable. Pretti was disarmed, but the gun still went off by itself in the officer's hands. You can see this in the linked video. There are a few frames where there's a muzzle flash and the gun jumps up. The gunshot spooks the other agents, who then promptly execute Alex Pretti as a result.

https://uploads.kiwifarms.st/data/video/8457/8457365-a397cfea4716acf38f4dfed2c6bb7098.mp4

Having painstakingly reviewed the video frame by frame from the 0:37 to 0:40 mark, when the first gunshot happened, I am as sure as I can be that this is what happened:

  1. ICE agent retrieves the gun from the guy
  2. As we would find out later, this gun is a SIG Sauer P320. This is a crucial detail that pretty much everybody is overlooking but it's the entire lynchpin of this unfortunate incident.
  3. ICE agent with the guy's gun starts to move away
  4. The gun just goes off. No, the agent did not fire the gun. If you look closely, the agent's finger is not on the trigger. The gun just went off. At 0:38 and 0:39 if you go frame by frame you can see what appears to be a muzzle blast and you can see what is definitely the gun suddenly jumping in his hand, both telltale signs that the gun has just discharged. Despite the distance and the video quality, it is still obvious the agent does not have his finger on the trigger.
  5. This spooks the rest of the ICE agents and they shoot the guy dead.

Why did the gun go off? Short answer: the SIG P320 is a notoriously dangerous piece of shit and it literally does just go off sometimes.

Long answer: The P320 has a specific design feature intended to make the trigger lighter, however this introduces a safety problem that could cause the gun to go off if dropped, put in a holster, placed gently on a table, or even shaken or jerked around, as happened to that particular gun in the footage. If the gun were made well, it would be safe, but SIG is notorious for its cost-cutting measures including the outsourcing of component manufacture, this affects the military, police, and civilian P320s. These guns have been built poorly and have in fact literally gone off, injuring many across the world. Don't believe me? Just google "Sig P320 incidents" or something along those lines and you'll have no shortage of articles to peruse. Ask SIG about all the lawsuits.

My analysis: the gun went off because it's an unsafe piece of crap, this spooked the ICE agents and they lit him up. That is what happened. That is history. Was it right? Was it wrong? Does this even matter? I won't answer the first two questions but I think we all know the answer to the third. Ultimately, the first shot being a not-so-rare accident from a known unsafe gun will be forgotten except by people like me who were here today and choose to not forget. Hopefully that's a few of you.

Wouldn't you expect him to react more demonstratively? He looks back over his shoulder, not at the gun in his hand. All the other ICE agents wrestling with Pretti flinch back as though the shot was from the agent who pulls out his own gun (in video 1).

Exactly, if the gun went off in his hand even if we wasn't sure where the sound came from he would've felt it. The fact he looks over his shoulder is pretty much proof (as far as I'm concerned) it wasn't the gun in his hand that went off.

Of all the ways I thought a SIG P320 could kill someone, this was not one of them (it's gonna be even more if this incident is what starts the second civil war).

If it was a SIG P320 AD (and I don't think it was, based on the reaction of the agent holding the gun), then maybe we'll get a rare moment of detente while a few SIG execs are crucified. Probably not literally. Probably.

There's some good discussion lending credence to this theory (including better video than I've seen elsewhere) in this thread

but the gun still went off by itself in the officer's hands.

I'm not a gun guy, but I know physics. I don't buy it yet. I don't see a muzzle flash. There is a bright spot that appears near the end of the barrel at about the correct timeframe, but it's also there in the exact same spot a few seconds earlier. This is a brightly-lit spot of background concrete. We also don't see any impact on the ground where the bullet would have hit if it had been fired from that gun at that moment. The recoil looks wrong too. The arm moves out yes, but there is no rotation of the gun relative to the arm. There doesn't seem to be any torque applied, as would be the case if the motive force came from the gun itself.

https://files.catbox.moe/vm5krv.png

https://files.catbox.moe/1fd7uk.mp4

I was referring to this. It looks like something is coming out of the barrel of the gun. I assume it is a muzzle flash because it appears at the same time as the sound of the gun shot is heard.

Previous discussion on the unreliability of the P320 here.

I saw this post on Kiwi Farms

Link

Big if true, I guess.

I would appreciate if people would reply to me with the best quality, most original videos from the original sources.

Angle 1:

[Twitter Link]

Length: 0:38 seconds

Posted: 10:19 PST

Description: Across the street where the shooting happened.

Angle 2:

[Twitter Link]

Length: 2:50

Posted 10:36 PST

Description: "Lady in Pink" angle. On the same side of the street. This video starts the earliest in the confrontation.

Angle 3:

[Twitter Link]

Length: 0:42 seconds

Posted: 11:13 PST

Description: Starts on the opposite side of the street, video moves to being in the street.

Angle 4: [Twiter Link]

Length: 0:33

Posted: 19:18 PST

Description: Inside the vehicle the end of the confrontation occurred in front of.

Aftermath:

[Twitter Link]

Length: 0:53

Posted: 10:56 PST

Image of The gun:

[Twitter Link]

I'm just so viscerally disgusted by this method of "shrieking women" protest, blowing whistles nonstop, trying to be as annoying as possible that I can't even be objective about this. This seems like an obvious failure of this type of protest strategy, anything that's annoying to ICE agents will also be annoying to the audience. I just can't bring myself to sympathize with people who are being maximally annoying, it's like a bully kid doing the whole "I'm not touching you" thing. This protest method may be effective in generating these snapshot moments of violent reprisal that work on some people, but for me it has the exact opposite effect. I watch about five seconds of one of these videos and have decided quite firmly that I hate the protestors. Additionally the way women react to violence just disgusts me, you see this in body cam footage from ghetto shootings too. The moment something happens dozens of fat women materialize somehow and just start shrieking their heads off. Maybe it has some sort of evolutionary purpose, like summoning aid or something, but god, whatever evolutionary impulse is totally absent in me.

lookouts who raised a racket by banging garbage-can lids when British soldiers approached

https://time.com/archive/6877571/northern-ireland-the-women-and-the-gunmen/

Not the same thing obviously but the same vein of the evolutionary purpose of raising a din so that “someone please look into fixing this”. I think you are primed to think of them as your enemies so they become annoying to you. I’m not saying you are wrong, I think most straight men like women that are “chill” and “cool”. The people who are on the side of the women probably think in total contrast to you. They probably think the whistling is effective and smart (in terms of low risk high rewards). Is it annoying for the supporters? Yeah, probably, but look at soccer fans in Europe (or World Cup 2010 in South Africa) to see how many decibels people are willing to put up with for their team.

"It's a tense, dangerous situation, where someone may have just been killed. You know what would help? Me screaming into a man's ear hysterically!"

In an old movie, a man slapping a woman for being emotional comes off as sexist, but perhaps it's just received knowledge from thousands of years of women screaming their heads off and making things worse. Perhaps they were onto something.

Everything makes sense viewed through the lens of politics. Both sides show hypocrisy on this issue. If this were jan 6th we'd see the same people arguing that it was excessive force or overreach. I saw that circulated video and could not see anyone pull a weapon. Looked like a scuffle and someone dead after gunshots. The question is, will this get worse or what are the longer term implications. MN has now sorta become the modern Fort Sumter. The thing is, ICE has the authority to make these arrests and use lethal force if necessary, and there isn't much that can be done unless Congress steps in, which they likely won't.

Specifically, the left seems to think federal law enforcement is a game. Their protests are part of the game, and it's just not just and playing by the rules to treat this as a serious issue that people can die in. Aside from toxoplasmosis, that's what all the outrage is coming from- this isn't supposed to be real. And to be completely fair, this attitude has treated them OK before this issue.

Right wingers have never treated their mass public protests as playtime. That's why you had state capital invasions with sufficient discipline that there weren't little incidents- that people could get seriously hurt in. And that in turn freaked out the left even more- when the Oregon or Virginia state capitals were overrun back in the late 2010's or the Covid protestors turned out the militias and everybody behaved with perfect seriousness and discipline. Remember the freakout about militias? Remember the contrast with the Not Fucking Around coalition(which was, actually, fucking around).

It’s not a game, it’s the government storming your city and demanding to see everyone’s papers and perhaps snatching up your friends, terrorizing people to be afraid to go out of their houses. I personally would feel like a coward if I didn’t somehow do something against that. At the same time I’m sure I wouldn’t do so because I don’t get involved in putting my ass on the line over politics. I know that about myself, but if the agents were on the streets of my city, where many of my friends are indeed immigrants, I’d feel like a piece of shit for not doing something about it. A lot of people are like me but they are willing to put their own ass in danger for this sort of thing, and I respect that.

I’m interested in this seeming total lock-in to your own perspective that’s happening among many people on the right on this subject. You’d feel the same way if you perceived that masked thugs from the government descended on your own town and started harassing and snatching people from your social network. Wouldn’t you?

  • -13

And buying and returning thousands of salt shakers at target has something to do with anything? It's being treated as a game. They don't get that federal law enforcement is actual law enforcement. That's why they throw themselves into the middle of active police investigations and pretend they can't be arrested for it. That's why they fistfight cops and are shocked it doesn't turn out well.

Deeply unserious people, utterly disconnected from the real world. These aren't teenaged petty criminals making a bad decision under stress like the blacks that get got and spark protests- they're full blown adults who ought to know better. And they're treating it as a game with ICE breaking the rules. I guess that's what you get with a political movement founded on the idea that men can become women.

No, it's being treated seriously by people who are being intentionally riled up and misled by those seeking to gain from the chaos. They don't "get" that federal law enforcement is actual law enforcement because they are being explicitly told by people they trust that ICE has no power over them. This chaos is being deliberately orchestrated. Don't let those doing the orchestration off the hook.

It’s not a game, it’s the government storming your city and demanding to see everyone’s papers and perhaps snatching up your friends, terrorizing people to be afraid to go out of their houses.

All those people running around blowing whistles and yelling, they're absolutely terrorized and subject to constant papers checks?

Their friends likely are. I know my immigrant friends are freaked the hell out with the news and would be afraid to leave the house if there was a surge of these masked federal agents grabbing people off the street here in our town. Maybe if you’re an obvious white citizen, like the two who got shot were, you do your friends a favor and make noise when those guys pull up.

This did sort of happen during COVID in a lot of places, though. Why people are storming your city and demanding to see your papers and making you feel afraid of going about your daily life, and whether you agree or disagree matters a lot to how you feel about it. Ultimately people's responses on all sides are going to be politically inflected.

This is true.

It creates lots of conflict when the sides are polarized and each perceives different threats, but I guess it does cause us to avoid certain civilizational failure modes.

It’s either this or be like the Chinese and just preserve social harmony above all else. In the end a trade off. Hope you are enjoying the show!

Right wingers have never treated their mass public protests as playtime.

Jan 6th was filled with playtime protestors. Remember "Qanon Shaman"?

That's why you had state capital invasions with sufficient discipline that there weren't little incidents- that people could get seriously hurt in.

Likewise, the 140+ police officers injured during Jan 6th might have a different view.

It's fair to call out that the right was not disciplined on J6.

That's one example compared to dozens (hundreds?) of instances on the left over the past decade.

And honestly that was in part why there was a massive reaction to it. It differed from normal.

Both sides show hypocrisy on this issue.

I think not. The left is united in claiming the Good shooting was bad. The right is NOT united in claiming this shooting was good.

hmm on twitter I have noticed very little objection by the right , or at least by the accounts i track

In the normie sphere Joe Rogan been talking against ICE performance. I think they will be some big defection among the right.

There were clips going around from his discussion with Rand Paul. If you listened to the entire conversation and not just the clips, you’d understand that he is saying it’s a difficult issue. For example, he doesn’t like them being masked up (what was clipped) but he gets the legitimate fear of them being doxxed and targeted. He was hoping they could come up with a compromise etc.

Link?

I just looked and it wasn't hard to find dissenting voices from 2A advocates if that counts as right wing. James Reeves has a bunch of skeptical tweets, and he is one of the most famous industry personalities, a lawyer, and shitposter. He quotes Kostas Moros in a few of his shared posts who is a fierce 2A advocate. It's still all speculative, admittedly.

I'm not watching each and every video to inform my speculation. It doesn't look like an "execution" to me, but it does look like a bad shoot. What it looks like to me: police attempted to arrest a man and successfully disarmed him during his arrest. The presence of a weapon heightened alert of agents who, despite the number of men in arm's reach, did not coordinate well enough to restrain the individual. That failure allowed the man to squirm and contort enough to the moment where a cop blasts him. That cop will probably claim he saw him reach into his pants or whatever and he will probably be correct. Doesn't make it a good shoot.

Let's throw Fenix in as well.

Users on /r/conservative and Kiwi Farms seem to be fairly split.

My stance is that we should wait for further information and investigation. What we have so far doesn't look good, but I'm not going to jump to calling them murderers when there's reasonable doubt over things like if the first shot was even commanded.

Doesn't look like murder to me -- that is, I don't think they intentionally killed a guy they didn't think was a threat. Some lesser form of homicide, more likely. Possibly the black hat agent had a negligent discharge and then the rest panicked, but I think more likely they wrongly perceived a threat.

The video looks BAAAAD. Would like to see resident Trump supporters explain this one.

My view is as follows: mass migration poses a greater threat to America than any 20th century war we participated in. As a consequence, I’m fine with the same amount of casualties if it promotes a sealed border. Total WWII American casualties were ~1 million, so I would be fine with 1 million casualties if it seals the border. The military is fine with a certain number of deaths during training, which I think comes to around 400 training deaths annually, and the whole purpose of the military is so that foreigners do not invade us and replace us. I file these police shootings as akin to training deaths, in that they are operation accidents which are entirely expected and which deserve a brief “ah, unfortunate” before we move on to greater concerns like improving civilization and maximizing wellbeing. If what we want is a safe country, or a beautiful country, or a developed country, then in my opinion we don’t want endless migration from people who perform worse according to a variety of metrics. If you can’t accept deaths in the pursuit of deporting those who are statistically guaranteed to replace you (current trends continuing), then I don’t know how you can justify any war whatsoever. You might as well just disband the military completely at that point.

How it looks? We're way beyond that now. Competing narratives will emerge. Each side will believe it alone possesses the truth. I think the people below debating the facts of the case as informed by this frame of that video or whatever are wasting their time. The truth is not relevant.

Do you know what time it is? The left has threatened to prosecute those who have participated in the current administration, yes? Is this an environment conducive to a peaceful transition of power? Is it surprising to a student of history that in an environment as factional as ours that faction-affiliated armed groups (Antifa, ICE) have emerged? Are you shocked that each faction won't prosecute its loyal enforcers?

The progression we're now observing is an almost comically central example of how republics die. Maybe there will n an election in 2028. Maybe there won't be. No matter who wins, violence will escalate further. Cycles of retribution will turn. At some point soon, somebody's going to cross a Rubicon.

I am, I guess, a Trump supporter, in that I simply take for granted that the process of stasis has proceeded to the point of being irreversible and prefer a MAGA Caesar to an expertocrat one quite strongly. Perfectly understandable, given the way that the expertocrats treated me and mine.

But the ICE claim is that he was pulling a gun on them. This is, in the understanding of every police force ever, a perfectly normal and legitimate reason to use lethal force. We have some evidence for this claim even if it's hard to see- they recovered a gun(I doubt they're capable of planting a gun on someone while being observed- this sounds legitimately very hard) from him, there was a shot preceding ICE opening fire, and the ICE agents seem to be reacting as if it was a good shoot, not in a 'dude, what the hell' way. None of these datapoints are dispositive in themselves, but all of them point in the same direction.

But the ICE claim is that he was pulling a gun on them.

Are they actually claiming that? This was conspicuously absent in the initial statement, even though one would expect it to be there.

Resident partisan hack checking in (well sort of). I am making this comment in the spirit of “expressing a worldview” of “resident Trump supporters” as requested rather than to argue the point per se. But I do earnestly hold the following beliefs.

We (the right) now clearly understand that the purpose of this sort of protest is to create violent situations with “bad optics” for ICE or whatever other group. The protestors (from “our” point of view) want violence and want shootings, because they perceive this as a win condition.

We’re quite simply not going to give them the win anymore. They want death and violence, and are actively going out of their way to create situations that can cause escalation. That makes them, in my opinion which is shared by others with similar worldviews, the baddies. This guy was being a baddy, played a stupid game, and won a stupid prize.

I honestly haven’t watched the video and don’t care. We consider the instant replay era over. It really has no bearing whatsoever on the question of whether illegal immigrants should be deported.

That is the main reason these protests are not really succeeding. The only reason these situations are happening is because of the protestors (who we really consider at this point, insurrectionists who are committing federal crimes). “ICE needs to stop deporting illegal immigrants from Minnesota because some protestors are getting hurt.” There is literally zero logic to this statement.

We also don’t consider them legitimate protestors. They don’t have a “right” to impede federal law enforcement from executing the legal and popular will simply because they lost an election in which they were fairly represented.

It was probably a good shoot if you slow it down to 10k frames per second. Like I said, we honestly don’t know or care.

That is the view of (at least my slice of) the overly online right currently.

The protestors (from “our” point of view) want violence and want shootings, because they perceive this as a win condition. We’re quite simply not going to give them the win anymore.

Is this a typo? ICE just killed a man. Seems like, if that's what they want, then you did in, fact, just give it to them.

"ICE needs to stop deporting illegal immigrants from Minnesota because some protestors are getting hurt"

No I don't think that's really the logic at all. The logic is that they perceive some injustice and protesting is the only tool in many of these people's toolbox.

Are actively going out of their way to create situations that can cause escalation. That makes them, in my opinion which is shared by others with similar worldviews, the baddies

Note that you will not hear the right say this about Kyle Rittenhouse, Proud Boys, the guys who killed Ahmaud Arbery, George Zimmerman, the deploymentment of national guard units for transparently political purposes, or any of Trump's intentionally inflammatory rhetoric over the last decade.

Thanks for the additional insight on the MAGA-right. It mostly demonstrates an inability to model the worldview of your opponents ("they want death and violence" lol), and a lack of objective standards for conduct.

  • -14

The people you mentioned for the most part were not fighting the state and its monopoly on violence. You could even make the argument that Rittenhouse, Zimmerman, and Arbery shooters were acting in alliance with state and helping the state deal with a temporary lack of resources.

There is a significant difference between standing guard outside a car dealership (Rittenhouse) and the tactics of anti-ICE protestors.

The latter is being actively physically violent, using cars as weapons, and moving as close to the line that justified lethal force as possible.

Lemmings on a cliff, pushing each other forward. The ones who survive get smoky, exciting Instagram reels and likes on blue sky. The ones who fall off are catching bullets. It's an acceptable cost to the group.

Is this a typo? ICE just killed a man. Seems like, if that's what they want, then you did in, fact, just give it to them.

I think the logic goes something like this:

"The protestors want violence because they believe the optics will win over neutrals and moderate rightists and thus result in the end of the protested behaviour. However, there are not many neutrals anymore, and the moderate rightists have hardened their hearts and no longer feel for the protestors. The protestors believe it's a win condition, but we and the world have adapted so that it no longer is one."

This is not my personal view. My opinion of the Blue Tribe protest apparatus is actually considerably lower; I think that probably over 50% of them do not actually have a solid picture of what their wincon looks like and how their actions will achieve it, and are merely protesting because protesting is cool within Blue Tribe circles. I think that any in the USA that do hold to the worldview Sulla described - and I'll admit there are some - are making a mistake, but not the mistake Sulla claims (there are still a lot of neutrals); I think the mistake is in assuming that there will be free, fair and competitive elections in 2028 in which the currently-constituted Democratic Party will have a chance but not a certainty of victory, which is required for the lean of neutrals to be relevant and to backchain into present actions of the Trump administration. Civil war and WWIII would both cause that assumption to be violated, violent protests increase the risk of both, and we're getting quite close to crunch time.

These are organized protests. It is possible, even likely, that the protestors on the ground are not trying to get themselves injured or killed to make ICE look bad, while the overall strategy developed by others who are safely ensconced in their ivory towers somewhere, and used to instruct the protestors on the ground, does have that as an intentional part.

From what I understand there is basically an entire playbook or script on nonviolent civil disobedience – people have figured out how to get their point across (and get the "cops arrest peaceful mom" pictures) while at the same time minimizing the odds that things turn actually violent by peacefully surrendering to the cops, not resisting arrest, possibly even notifying the police of their intentions ahead of time, etc.

I have not followed the protests in Minnesota closely but from what I have seen I do not think that playbook is being followed. Whether that's due to untrained "normies" turning out or the instructions of protest coordinators I do not know but if these are being coordinated (which does seem to be true to a significant degree) and the coordinators are deliberately choosing more escalatory tactics that's very telling in my mind.

One of the underlying problems reflect a large-scale normalization of 'de-arrest' tactics, where protesters work to free arrestees or prevent police from detaining them. It started being used seriously in 2020, but in those contexts it was largely recognized as a legally risky maneuver only really available when protesters vastly outnumbered police. The recent protests have mainstreamed it thanks to political advocates claiming (afaict, wrongly) that ICE has no arrest powers involving any action by a US citizen, and local police being actively instructed to not support ICE in any way and that being interpreted (afaict, not wrongly) as permitting widespread violations of local laws so long as ICE are the targets.

So you get a lot of people doing things that look like directly impeding federal law at best, and more often look extremely dangerous, and convinced that they're totally in the free and clear.

What's interesting to me is that de-arresting someone is a crime (obviously) that can be made to stick if you catch the people doing the de-arresting, but conspiring to de-arrest someone is also presumably a crime, and given that the laws being enforced in this context are federal laws, I imagine there's a federal conspiracy statute that can be leveraged, possibly against the coordinators even if they aren't actually participating in the "de-arrests."

I wonder if part of the goal of running these ICE operations publicly is precisely to invite this sort of behavior and then roll up as many people as possible.

Interesting link, thank you for dropping it.

Note that you will not hear the right say this about Kyle Rittenhouse

You really want to start your list with the kid who was running away from the people who chased, and who didn't shoot first, and who didn't create the situation of the fiery but mostly peaceful protests in general that led to escalation?

Not a particularly good list in general, but that one in particular is a weak foot to start off on if you intend to leave off with contempt. However low you think the MAGA-right is, you are at eye level.

Kyle Rittenhouse was the guy who decided it would be a good idea to open carry at a protest, as if that would help anything. The results were predictable.

You might think thats justified behavior given the circumstances but so do most people who escalate. It's not very convincing in and of itself. If there's a thing that makes the left "the baddies" and the right not, it can't be because only the left ever "creates situations that cause escalation" because that's false.

However low you think the MAGA-right is, you are at eye level.

I'd agree to be less contemptuous if I saw anyone take their own side to task in this area.

  • -15

Kyle Rittenhouse was the guy who decided it would be a good idea to open carry at a protest, as if that would help anything. The results were predictable.

The results, and the protest, and the chase that led to his self defense, were also not situations he created, let alone went out of his ways to create.

I'd agree to be less contemptuous if I saw anyone take their own side to task in this area.

Then you haven't looked well enough, possibly because you are contemptuously looking down on people you are actually at the same level as.

Then you haven't looked well enough.

Incorrect. I lurk more than I post and the motte has been in a downward turn towards low effort partisan bickering. What you are describing is few and far between. I will trust my own judgment on this.

I'm not really attempting to "rise above" anyone. Im comporting myself in manner which is well within the standards of decorum here.

When's the last time you spent any time tone policing your tribal fellows? Or are you subjecting me to a selective demand for rigor?

  • -10

Kyle Rittenhouse was the guy who decided it would be a good idea to open carry at a protest, as if that would help anything. The results were predictable.

Open Carrying at a protest where there's another party that has ostensibly been committing violence and vandalism is probably more logical than open carrying when dealing solely with US law enforcement. Both in that Rittenhouse had a significantly greater likelihood of running into random unapproved violence and in that generally trying to escalate things with law enforcement as a civilian results in you losing spectacularly.

I believe Rittenhouse, functioning in a fundamentally more lawless setting, had a better justification for carrying a weapon than the people currently in Minneapolis who are bringing weapons whilst interfering with law enforcement operatives. I feel that for the latter category of individual the vast majority of cases where their weapons are going to impact events are going to be increasing the likelihood of shit escalating off the rails like this most recent shooting

Is this a typo? ICE just killed a man.

Has someone hit the reset button, and it's year zero again?

There were at least two armed attacks on ICE prior to that, they were just executed incompetently, and the only people that ended up dead were the illegal immigrants (at the hands of the shooter), and the shooters themselves.

Apparently someone also bit off an agent's finger.

Don't see that widely reported outside of Fox.

I'm sure when Snopes gets to this claim they'll say "PANTS ON FIRE" because it was only the distal phalanx (there's pics, and they're disgusting) and not the whole finger.

I wonder similarly about pants on fire if it gets reattached - I gotta imagine that they'd be very aggressive in um, reappropriating, but last I saw they had "suspects" so it might have gotten torn off and then thrown somewhere.

The finger end was recovered, that was in the pics. I don't know they attempted re-attachement.

I think that the question of whether the protests are succeeding will not really be answered until the results of this year and 2028's elections come in.

The protests are not stopping deportations. However, whether or not these shootings were justified, the optics are bad - and that may have important political consequences which might possibly stop deportations a couple of years from now.

Also, a minor note about:

The protestors (from “our” point of view) want violence and want shootings, because they perceive this as a win condition.

I agree that for the protestors this is a good strategy. If law enforcement full-out massacres a dozen or two protestors in a big shooting, this might be one of the best things that could possibly happen "for the cause" of the protestors. However, I don't think that any more than a tiny handful of protestors are actually driven by a desire to pursue this strategy. Some of the organizers might be, but even then I think it's a very rare motivation. I think most of them are genuinely just trying to interfere with ICE, to impede ICE activities. But they are in part following, because it is easier to do what has been done before, the well-worn tracks of decades of leftist tactics - and those tactics have evolved in part in order to create sympathetic media footage in which leftists have violence used against them.

That makes them, in my opinion which is shared by others with similar worldviews, the baddies. This guy was being a baddy, played a stupid game, and won a stupid prize.

Ok now consider if appealing to only people with the exact same worldview as you, up to just straight up killing people without care because they're a "baddie" in your eyes is going to be a great strategy for 2026 and 2028 elections.

I had a similar response. It’s hard to see anything in the video. But even if the officer technically made a mistake, there was enough confusion there (due to the hysterical protesters) that I believe he is blameless.

There is no situation where Trump admin should give a single inch on this. No situation where the man should be subject to the hostile MN government apparatus.

Federal agents cannot be prosecuted by the state for actions that occur during their duties. They can only be prosecuted at the federal level. He'll be fine, or at least safe from the MN government apparatus.

Federal agents cannot be prosecuted by the state for actions that occur during their duties.

Just out of curiosity, does that include traffic violations? (E. g., an ICE agent going through a red light at 60 mph in a 25 mph zone.)

understand that the purpose of this sort of protest is bad optics

Yeah, that's politics. Why are you surprised ? The adversary baits you, but do you need to bite ? The protests are getting more heated, because Trump is biting onto the bait.

The US is maximally polarized, but it has been for a while. The other party does everything it can to block their adversary. It's Mitch blocking Garland's confirmation. It's red governors banning blue city policies. It's business as usual.

In Canada, the farmers protests were clearly a conservative bait that Trudeau bit into, and it caused his downfall. The farmer's protest is another example of a political torpedo that would have brought Modi down in India. He avoided a few baits, primary among them was Sikhs replacing the Indian flag on the red fort. But no. No anti-protest rubber guns, no tear gas, nothing. He held his nerve, and IMO, it saved his govt. He eventually reformed the bill to involve state-by-state adoption and had to take an L. But, it could have been worse.

Look, as a kid, when I made fun of my sibling, he'd eventually snap and break something. I'd get punished for instigating, but he'd get a bigger punishment for giving in and breaking something (I promise we are very tight now, and I believe I have been a good brother on the balance). Point is, it doesn't matter what the bait is. The individual is still responsible for how they respond. Humans have an intuitive smell for this. Govts, laws or individuals, it doesn't matter. Biting onto to bait makes you a sucker. You may call them reasons, but the people will always view them as excuses.

The US is maximally polarized, but it has been for a while.

Maximal polarisation is the state wherein everyone's picked a side and will stick to it. This is rarely achieved even in civil wars, and is definitely well beyond the threshold at which one will start (notice that massacres of political enemies become an effective tactic for winning elections when there are few neutrals who will change sides against the perpetrator).

The USA is highly polarised. Not maximally.

You're right. I have a bad habit of using hyperbole to introduce the dynamism of speech into my writing. Been working on it.

It is highly polarized. And that's bad enough.

It is highly polarized. And that's bad enough.

Agreed.

You understand this thing where someone does something wrong which is ignored by authorities, then the person wronged responds, and then is punished by said authorities, is generally considered a failure mode, do you not?

I mean, you pretty much described the American school system-

ba dum tss

Yeah, that's politics. Why are you surprised ? The adversary baits you, but do you need to bite ? The protests are getting more heated, because Trump is biting onto the bait.

I dont think this is true. The nature of these riots makes it impossible for ICE agents to utilize public roads without provoking violence. If ICE does anything other than a complete withdrawal, these incidents will continue to happen, and they will continue to escalate into deadly use of force scenarios. We were actually getting close to the same point in the Chicago area a few months ago, but then some backroom deal was struck with the Johnson, Pritzker, and Homan (which they will all deny happened, but clearly did) and now random people aren't tailing ICE vehicles, ICE facilities aren't under siege as CPD watches paint cans fly at officers heads, and ICE aren't picking abuelas up out of taco stands, but they are being allowed to casually pick people up from the jails even though they aren't being officially "notified" when ICE warrants pop.

This. The problem here is Tim Walz.

Point is, it doesn't matter what the bait is. The individual is still responsible for how they respond.

See also: any sports flag for unsportsman like conduct. It's almost always the retaliation the refs notice and flag, not the instigation.

It's not about biting. It's about not backing down, because just packing up and going home is even worse then what's happening now. A surrender like that will only make the next round of protesting 10x bigger.

Trump and ICE didn't do anything in response to the protests except keep trying to do their jobs. The enemy forced this by making simply running a country impossible.

You may call them reasons, but the people will always view them as excuses.

I second this almost completely.

As soon as I heard the whistling that was going on - I mean, what are we doing?

I want ICE to deport illegals … if you want to protest that than ok but you can’t stop this - it’s what I voted for!

Unfortunately they aren’t going after the business owners so it’s mostly optics but good damn at least they’re doing something about an issue.

Let’s see if I can walk the streets at night in the cities within my lifetime like you can in Poland.

Perhaps it was unjustified, and if so, so what? Any sufficiently large scale operation will have things go wrong, especially when you have large numbers of people that are trying to harass, antagonize and violently obstruct things. Chernobyl happened, does this mean nuclear power is evil or forever forbidden? Car accidents happen and vehicular manslaughter happens, does this mean we should abandon cars? I'm not very moved by an individual incident, especially when the victim appears to have gotten into a violent confrontation with ICE, resisting arrest, while carrying a gun, that's Darwin Award territory.

My reaction would be, let's investigate this properly and perhaps prosecute the agents involved. But this should in no way cause us to pause ICE operations and is in fact a very good reason for the media to stop agitpropping retarded leftists into getting into violent confrontations with ICE.

Edit: For the record, after reviewing all the angles, I can say that the shooting appears to be unjustified. I don't think he reached for his weapon and I don't think it accidentally discharged, I think an ICE agent just basically executed him by shooting him in the back then shooting him a few more times when he attempted to stand. That said, this is an extremely predictable outcome of having a gun in your waistband when choosing to physically confront ICE and resist arrest.

Chernobyl happened, does this mean nuclear power is evil or forever forbidden?

No, but we recognized that there is such a thing as a nuclear plant that's been built too haphazardly. Just like Trump's expansion of ICE.

Note, ICE was still deporting about 60% of the current amount of people during Biden's terms. They mostly dressed in official clothing (vs plain clothes), avoided masks and avoided overt display of large weapons. the criticisms of ICE have to do with the 2025 avatar of it. Not the institution that existed before.

Car accidents happen and vehicular manslaughter happens

To be fair, I am very anti-car, pro-transit and pro self-driving cars. I say this begrudgingly, because I love engineering cars and consider them the pinnacle of late-20th century art. But, fast cars should be driven on the track, not the road. Until recently, banning cars was impractical. But the US has been extremely reckless in tolerating a 3-4x higher automobile death rate than other developed nations.

while carrying a gun

What's wrong with carrying a gun in a public place in Minnesota ? Isn't are American LEO not trained to handle situations with gun-owners peacefully ?

What's wrong with carrying a gun in a public place in Minnesota ? Isn't are American LEO not trained to handle situations with gun-owners peacefully ?

Peaceful gun owners, yes. Not ones who enter into a rugby scrum with officers.

Carrying a gun while peacefully protesting is something that American LEOs are generally trained to deal with, because outside of DC and NYC it is legal and at least common enough to need training for. Carrying a gun while interrupting police operations is a very serious crime that they are trained to deal with as a threat. Same thing as how you can carry a gun on your belt but absolutely not in your hand. It's a different brightline than the rest of the developed world has settled on, but it is a brightline nonetheless.

If you plan on committing a crime to act as a human shield, do so unarmed. Don't break the law while you're breaking the law. One crime at a time and all that.

Comparing Biden ICE is missing the point — Biden’s ICE could be “professional” since blue states weren’t actively trying to resist the feds.

Biden's ICE left all these aliens with final deportation orders and multiple felonies in place. That's not so professional. What's left of the libertarian in me is opposed to current immigration controls, but getting rid of felons I'm wholeheartedly for.

I’ve become convinced that libertarianism works but not for all societies and especially not for democracies with open borders.

Yeah, if you have a libertarian democracy with open borders, you have no defense against your libertarianism being voted away by the new arrivals who just want to pry up the surface of your gold-paved streets.

The question isn’t what’s wrong with carrying a gun in Minnesota - you’re muddying the water attempting to ask it.

especially when the victim appears to have gotten into a violent confrontation with ICE, resisting arrest, while carrying a gun, that's Darwin Award territory.

It’s putting it all together that’s insane.

Fair.

Still think Darwin award behavior isn't reason enough to be shot. The average person is not very bright. The system should be built with an assumption of dysfunctional behavior from randos.

True but if people are going to en-masse make a habit of maximally interfering with police operations whilst armed it's going to increase the likelihood of something spiralling out of control.

I mean, dysfunctional behavior while carrying a gun is, well, FAFO territory. And don't need to be anti-second amendment to think that.

Exactly. My take on the Minneapolis protestors conspicuously arming themselves a few days ago was more 'Well this is going to increase the chance that something stupid escalates way harder than it should' versus the protestors actually accomplishing their aims through being armed.

The system should be built with an assumption of dysfunctional behavior from randos.

It is, but it isn't perfect.

Yeah, basically the goal is to ethnically cleanse the country, and if you resist the agents it’s their right to kill you

  • -30

ICE, which is about 30% Hispanic, thinks they're going to ethnically cleanse the country by killing white people? Man, they must be really dumb.

Seems like pretty much a fact that much of the anti-immigrant right wants America to be a nation of whites, or at least a white majority. NYTreader said as much explicitly elsewhere in the thread.

So I don't know what point you're making. Also lots of ice agents probably are dumb yeah.

Always fun to check in on this place from time to time to see how far it's descended. I'm grateful at least /r/SlateStarCodex and most other rat-adjacent places are still sane.

  • -21

Still better than Reddit, or X, or shudder bluesky.

I hate this place more than anywhere else on the Internet, except all the other places.

The quality keep going down. But I don't know any alternative

If we actually have fallen so far we are what you made us, as was predicted:

My Id On Defensiveness

There’s a term in psychoanalysis, “projective identification”. It means accusing someone of being something, in a way that actually turns them into that thing. For example, if you keep accusing your (perfectly innocent) partner of always being angry and suspicious of you, eventually your partner’s going to get tired of this and become angry, and maybe suspicious that something is up.

Declaring a group toxic has much the same effect. The average group has everyone from well-connected reasonable establishment members to average Joes to horrifying loonies. Once the group starts losing prestige, it’s the establishment members who are the first to bail; they need to protect their establishment credentials, and being part of a toxic group no longer fits that bill. The average Joes are now isolated, holding an opinion with no support among experts and trend-setters, so they slowly become uncomfortable and flake away as well. Now there are just the horrifying loonies, who, freed from the stabilizing influence of the upper orders, are able to up their game and be even loonier and more horrifying. Whatever accusation was leveled against the group to begin with is now almost certainly true.

This is just condoning being low agency and having low commitment to objectivity.

Im generally sympathetic to people with low agency but let's not act like it righteous in any way

  • -12

What is the high agency response? Building a new website after being driven from two consecutive communities seems pretty high agency. Is the high agency response silencing the bad speak?

you have to learn to ignore the noise. There are good discussions on here. The rhetoric has gotten heated the last few weeks. Most times, it's less .... heartless.

Personally, I find 2026's /r/SSC to be full of wannabe Mensa types. The internet is dead. a healthy dose of diverse echo-chambers is the next best thing.

modern rssc is boring. ACX open threads are better than ssc but you have to deal with substack comment system. the schism is on life support.

For better or worse, at least this place has some activity and some (if fewer than ideal) interesting conversations.

It hasn't descended, pointing at the crazy insane partisan hobo on the street is no more indicative of the local communities culture than an indictment of what is considered mainstream.

I’ve been reading SSC for - a decade now?

This is the cultural thread … not every rat should be a progressive cog.

I want UBI and free healthcare / university and basically agree with the poster on this matter.

  1. You can’t see the hands or arms of the decedent. It looks either good nor bad. More facts are required.

  2. Even if LEO did something bad, the benefits of removing thousands of illegal immigrants is worth it. Probably saves American lives in the aggregate.

  3. LEO are under immense stress. Listen to the start of the video. Multiply that day by day. These protestors are nuts.

The argument against it is pretty easy and clear. You can remove thousands of illegal immigrants without this chaotic clusterfuck the Trump admin has unleashed on Minneapolis. It's a cliche at this point, but Obama deported illegal immigrants at twice the pace of Donald Trump. And he did so while managing not to kill any American citizens.

And he did so while managing not to kill any American citizens.

Technically untrue in a darkly funny way (an ICE agent shot his supervisor and was subsequently shot and killed by another ICE agent).

The Obama administration did detain and possibly wrongfully deport American citizens, as well.

The intra-ICE shooting happened in 2013.

Yes; Obama was President in 2013.

But that line of argument basically goes 'the left can veto any right immigration policy enforcement with a heckler's veto', because they'll never cooperate with the right, ever, even when they lose elections.

The left won't cooperate with the right? They passed an immigration reform act the summer before the 2024 election and Donald Trump torpedoed it. This was a commonsense reform that Trump knew would harm him politically, so he cynically (politically effectively) killed the bill. The right would rather use immigration as their bogeyman than do anything real to prevent it.

What do you think a sanctuary city is?

They passed an immigration reform act the summer before the 2024 election and Donald Trump torpedoed it.

The act in question would still allow significant illegal immigration. Also, it was perfectly in their power to do something about it without an act of congress, and they refused to, thus proving they never wanted to stop it to begin with.

  1. Your basic facts are wrong. Turnarounds aren’t the same as deporting. Obama didn’t actually deport people in meaningful numbers where deportations mean people living in the U.S. illegally.

  2. Blue states weren’t going to obstruct Obama in the same way if he tried to remove illegals living in the States.

So your premises are wrong. I do think there is a better way of doing this though — cut off funding to illegals, e verify, and offer free ticket + cash to leave

Fine, even if you wanted to consider these numbers "tricks" (which I do not concede), use George W Bush as an example. Was ICE killing American citizens during his years? How people can justify this sort of violence for immigration enforcement is imbecilic.

  • -11

Why don’t you concede? Are you arguing factually I am wrong? Or are you arguing categorically a turn around at the border is the same thing?

Also W was much more immigrant friendly with much fewer illegals to deal with (with states that weren’t as ideologically opposed to the feds).

I put most of the blame for the killings on the imbeciles who are trying to thwart ICE from doing their legal job.

Were people acting like lunatics to protest ICE during the Bush era?

Do you understand how cause and effect works?

ICE agents swarm American cities. --> American citizens begin peaceful protesting. --> ICE agents shoot and kill American citizens.

I recommend leaving your news bubble and not taking the most egregious social media videos of protests as representative of the millions of people in the streets.

More comments

Obama deported illegal immigrants at twice the pace of Donald Trump.

No, he did not. His admin changed the metrics and counted turnbacks at the border as deportations to juice his stats. Why this idiotic talking point refuses to die is beyond me.

Fine, even if you wanted to consider these numbers "tricks" (which I do not concede), use George W Bush as an example. Was ICE killing American citizens during his years? How people can justify this sort of violence for immigration enforcement is imbecilic.

  • -13

I’d tolerate thousands dead for immigrant enforcement. We are going to be piling up bodies if the left doesn’t begin to accept the rights monopoly on violence.

Is the left willing to die for migrants more than the right is killing to kill for migrants? The calculus of the state is, for now, bafflingly still on 'migrants can to kill US citizens and we will defend the migrant', a brake on tensions while pressurecooking animus. What happens if the state says "fuck it, you guys settle it how you want."

More comments

Damn. Well there you go.

"See! Democrats could care about the border and be humane about it! You republicans just love brown people suffering! Wait what do you mean Abbott is bussing them to my suburb? Biden said the border was secure, its just 2 million migrants camping in Eagle Pass, Texas is big why don't they stay there"

And, notably, Eagle Pass doesn't have any higher of a standard of living than the towns on the Mexican side of the border(once you take local cost of living into account- northern Mexico is the nice developed part). The migrants got on the busses voluntarily because they wanted to go to the big cities with higher wages.

Initial thoughts, this reminds me of 2020 in the leadup to BLM. Remember Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor? I think the Arbery shooting was in February and Taylor in March and then Floyd of course came at the very end of May. In retrospect there was a clear agitation by the media, and it took them about 4 months or so to rile people up enough for mass action. The first case (Arbery) didn't do it and. neither did the second. I think we're seeing a similar agitation by the media for Spring/Summer 2026. I don't think this case will do it (it's a White man that died), but be on the lookout for something in April that finally activates people.

Arbery is the case that SHOULD have rallied people, he was just a jogger that got shot for being in the wrong neighbourhood. Breonna was in the wrong place when her dipshit boyfriend shot back at police. Instead the rallying point was an overdosing career criminal who got recasted as a gentle giant, because he providing the spark for 4 years of US anger at Trump which was accelerated by COVID and progressives thought they could harness the energy for their revolution. They did, they succeeded, and the revolution failed. This next revolution will fail again, whether it will fizzle early or burn cities again is another issue.

There is fairly strong evidence Arbery wasn't "just a jogger". That you bring it up in that way is pretty strong evidence to me that your media diet probably should be amended.

Where can I read this strong evidence?

Here.

Nah, that one a once in a quarter century event. The left learned that BLM, and civil unrest in general, ultimately was a failure. They didn't get any of the sought policing reforms (except perhaps body cams , which have only hurt their cause by showing the arrests and homicides were justified ) and it arguably killed wokeness, too. Also, the liberal establishment is not going to break the law over White deaths--that is only reserved for blacks.

You are neglecting the principal agent problem. 'The left' is not a unitary entity to learn, or judge success for failure.

A lot of people got very rich from BLM and associated advocacy funding. A lot of agitators got experience, social credibility, or organizational relationships and boosts to their careers in the party-NGO patronage complex. That BLM-unrest harmed the Democratic Party, or even 'killed wokeness' outside of the democrat political machines, does not mean that those inside the political machines felt it was a failure. Survivor bias alone, mixed with the bromides of 'lived experience,' gives a basis for many to go 'it worked well enough for me / here.' It's not like there's ever a shortage of socialist-adjacent politicians arguing this time will be different.

'The liberal establishment' is in the midst of a party civil war only barely papered over by Trump as a unifying antagonist. That civil war is because of a lack of consensus on what went wrong, or what is wrong.

I would counter that it was a wild success. They demonstrated they can riot with impunity and use this to threaten their opposition at will. Wokeness (just universalism) is further entrenched. Two steps forward one step back is a very successful long term strategy.

I am not saying that there were no media trying to fan the flames, but what did end up riling the BLM protests was videos of what a jury would later rule was a cop murdering a Black suspect over minutes, while his cop buddies prevented onlookers from interfering.

Against a setting of COVID lockdowns, this was clearly enough to start race riots. The parts of the media itching for blood did not have to do a lot of spinning, distributing the video via the usual platforms (which is their job) was quite sufficient.

That's how modern propaganda works though. In a country with 340 million people, you don't need to make things up whole cloth. Just find that one outlier incident that suits your narrative and blast it out for weeks until people are suitably outraged.

There's a reason normies were blasted with the George Floyd footage for weeks, but not the Irina Zaretska video, which was arguably even more horrifying.

There's a reason normies were blasted with the George Floyd footage for weeks, but not the Irina Zaretska video

One of them was also committed by an agent of the state, with many arguing it wasn't the officer's fault, whereas the other... was definitely not in that category.

The killer was released from custody something like 25 times? At that point you're an agent of the state.

committed by an agent of the state

I get why this is a distinction, but I'm still amazed at just how strong of a distinction this seems to be for some people.

Does this also come with an explanation why no one knows the names Malinowski or Finicum or Shaver? Why there was a front page post on Reddit yesterday comparing Rittenhouse?

I’m reserving judgement until we have more information in this case, with my gut leaning lightly toward bad shoot (though not necessarily criminally bad), but whether a shoot is bad or not, or committed by a state agent or not, does not control whether it is a source of outrage.

-I don't think it's reasonable for Democrats to create a massive mess, and then to expect Republicans to have perfection in how they clean up the mess made by Democrats. And I think that should be one framing that conservatives use- "sometimes bad things will happen when Democrats create a mess and we have to clean it up for them".

-I think conservatives should use incidents like this to raise attention to the fact that the media, and the left (but I repeat myself a bit), comparatively give so little attention to the victims of illegal immigrants and recidivist criminals out on the streets from liberal policies. The people getting into incidents with ICE are much less "innocent" than the random victims of recidivist criminal nutjobs or illegal immigrants let out on the streets by liberal policies.

-Conservatives tend to get into the weeds about whether or not a shooting was "justified", instead of simply pointing out that almost all of the unwanted tragic incidents that relate to politics are mainly committed by the groups which are the chief recipients of liberal sympathies.

Every time the left gives a massive amount of attention to someone getting into a confrontation with ICE and it ends badly, conservatives should be asking why Iryna Zarutska et al didn't get the same level of concern for not seeking out any trouble whatsoever.

-Speaking as a former leftist, if conservatives really want to get the media to not be such overwhelming propaganda outlets for the left, then I think they absolutely must implement 2rafa's idea of jobs quotas by ideology.

The simple reality, and many studies back this up, is that liberals are more bigoted against conservatives, than conservatives are bigoted against liberals. And the level of liberal bigotry is at an all-time high.

-Especially when it comes to the media, it's easy to portray it as a free-speech right. If conservatives can almost never be admitted nor hired by colleges, nor hired for media jobs, then they are cut off from major sources of "speech" in their country. (And colleges often have received federal grants, making it even more egregious that these institutions are taking tax dollars from conservatives, while refusing to admit or hire them).

-I think the jobs quota needs to be portrayed as universal protection for every ideology. And to emphasize that free speech is completely protected, I think quotas should be proportional to the ideology of the audience.

So, if an institution deliberately wants to only cater to a universally left-wing audience, that's fine, then they can hire only leftists, if that is their desire. And conservative institutions would have the same freedom to hire only conservatives, if they want to cater exclusively to a conservative audience.

But I can guarantee that nearly every single media and academic institution in the western world has more conservative audience members (and taxpayer funders), than the number of conservatives the HR-liberals are willing to hire.

-Everyone would then clearly be free to engage in any speech they want. This is just about hiring practices in cases where there is a clear discrepancy in who is getting hired.

But any conservatives by now should see that it's obvious that "policy follows personnel". As institutions have hired more leftists, they have become more leftist in their policies & in their speech habits.

-I would suggest that ideological hiring quotas should also apply for government jobs, which skew massively leftist in practice. Voters deserve a government which matches how they vote!

-Hiring quotas by ideology in government jobs would accomplish a lot of major conservative goals at once: 1. Significantly lower the risk of civil war. 2. Massively expand conservative power. 3. Reduce liberal enthusiasm for spending and for government power in general (liberals will perhaps suddenly lose interest in having their taxes fund lots of conservatives in easy government jobs.).

-A major part of why government jobs have consistently skewed leftist is that government jobs tend to be concentrated in urban areas that lean left. So, government jobs not only tend to be functionally hostile to conservatives on ideological grounds, government jobs also tend to have a massive regional bias against conservative-leaning rural areas in particular.

-"Regionalism" is underdiscussed as a type of bias which badly harms some people. I think this is because "regionalism" mostly harms conservative-leaning groups. A lot of liberals have been very good at making a massive fuss about some types of bias which evidence suggests harms relatively few people (like racism), while ignoring the more common harmful biases which can get wielded against people based on where they live, what religion they practice, or how they vote.

Interesting, but in practice this would be super hard and cause major problems for some institutions.

How are you going to get a 50:50 split in the police or military? Do you really want aome of these organisations to reflect the voter base, rather than the base of people who want to work in that field?

My understanding is that the military is already fairly split by voting preferences among active-duty military, e.g. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2020/08/31/as-trumps-popularity-slips-in-latest-military-times-poll-more-troops-say-theyll-vote-for-biden/.com

In general, in all nations, the military is a fantastic candidate for balanced ideology, since coups require the support of the military in 100% of cases (the support of the media is also essential).

But if the military is always split relative to the nation's voting preferences, then it's really hard to take over the military as a part of a coup of the government. It's a great way to protect democracy.

And regarding the police (and ICE), a great way to get the left to stop attacking law enforcement so much (and to hopefully improve community relations and improve the skewed perspective most leftists have about law enforcement), would be to get more leftists working in law enforcement. I'm sure there would be some negative effects, too, but there are some big major positives about ideological balance in law enforcement.

Do you really want aome of these organisations to reflect the voter base, rather than the base of people who want to work in that field?

This is a good question, and I think that ideological fairness should be assessed in the same way that things like gender fairness or racial fairness are often assessed: that as long as you can show that the workplace is not hostile, and that no minimally qualified candidates were rejected, then if there simply aren't enough qualified leftist/rightist candidates that applied, then it's fine if there is a resulting imbalance.

The reality is that a lot of media/academic/government workplaces are massively hostile to conservatives, and a lot of conservative talent is not being admitted nor hired.

And regarding the police (and ICE), a great way to get the left to stop attacking law enforcement so much (and to hopefully improve community relations and improve the skewed perspective most leftists have about law enforcement), would be to get more leftists working in law enforcement.

This has not worked out well for the UK.

would be to get more leftists working in law enforcement.

No I agree that this would solve the problem you're describing, and I think it's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard of before.

But operationally, how do you encourage e.g. lefties to go to police academy or righties to go to the department of fairness and equality (or whatever).

Institutions bust their ass to get e.g. women into the police and they can't really make it happen.

It's another good question.

Since I come from a leftist activist background, I basically fall back on the types of suggestions that leftists make to increase "representation" in other areas:

-Advertise more in those spaces

-Increase representation in the media

-Reduce any hostility in the workplace for those kinds of people, if you reasonably can

-Make them aware that they have legal rights

-...and if all else fails, simply accept that if people don't want to do those jobs, even when fully aware of the opportunities, then so be it. People can't be forced to do things they don't want to do. But you can at least make the opportunities available and raise awareness.

-I think conservatives should use incidents like this to raise attention to the fact that the media, and the left (but I repeat myself a bit), comparatively give so little attention to the victims of illegal immigrants and recidivist criminals out on the streets from liberal policies.

The typical victim of an illegal immigrant might be killed by an illegal the Democrats did not deport after he served some sentence for a crime (not sure what their exact policies were).

Note that the Biden admin generally did not use federal taxes to buy guns for illegals and paid them a federal salary to engage in behavior where they were somewhat likely to shoot people, so we might want to hold Trump's ICE to slightly higher standards.

The people getting into incidents with ICE are much less "innocent" than the random victims of recidivist criminal nutjobs or illegal immigrants let out on the streets by liberal policies.

Is that so? The central case of an illegal murdering someone is not a serial killer murdering some random women. It is likely either an acquaintance or romantic partner of the criminal or a member of a rival narcotics gang. Also, we do not generally rank murders by how innocent their victim was, so we do not need to get into discussing if a woman who elects to date a man who previously committed violent crime is more or less innocent than a woman who tries to hamper ICE through nonviolent means. A judge might be a bit more lenient when a murderer kills the rapist of his sister in revenge than when he guns down a random stranger in the streets, but at the end of the day either is murder. "He was a bad person, the world is better off without him" is not an argument we let anyone make in court, and I see no reason why we should let ICE make it.

-Conservatives tend to get into the weeds about whether or not a shooting was "justified", instead of simply pointing out that almost all of the unwanted tragic incidents that relate to politics are mainly committed by the groups which are the chief recipients of liberal sympathies.

I would not euphemize killings as "unwanted tragic incidents".

Furthermore, I think "killings that relate to politics", which I imagine you imagine as "killings by illegals, prior offenders whom liberals released, and killings related to political protests" is unfortunately a bit broader. In 2019 (the latest year for which the FBI has data), there were 13,927 homicides. Of these, 10,258, or some 73.6%, were committed using firearms. The degree how easily firearms should be available is clearly political as much as which offenders should be released. I am sure that somewhere in the 13927 murders, there is one which it totally non-political, not touching illegals, prior offenders, narcotics, firearms, sex work, domestic violence, housing policy and so forth, but for practical purposes it seems simpler to assume that most murders will touch policy somewhere.

(Your point technically stands, Blacks commit disproportionally many murders (mostly on other Blacks), and are certainly recipients of liberal sympathies. As most of the Blacks in the US are not recent immigrants, it just does little to motivate the removal of illegals.)

-I think the jobs quota needs to be portrayed as universal protection for every ideology. And to emphasize that free speech is completely protected, I think quotas should be proportional to the ideology of the audience.

I think you would need a new SCOTUS for that. Citizens United clearly established that companies enjoyed free speech. Seems kinda hard to exempt media companies from that.

To be honest, "X% of the NYT readers are conservative, therefore the NYT should have X% conservative commentators", seems rather un-American to my European ears. Are you sure you are on my side of the pond? In fact, it seems slightly worse than just extending affirmative action to political ideology, because it would incentivize consuming media to neuter them. Imagine millions of liberal college students hate-watching Fox News so that they can force them to carry their viewpoints.

Quite frankly, in human history, it has never been easier to broadcast your viewpoint than it is today. You have social media companies run by people with very different political leanings. Anyone can open a blog or substack or video channel. MAGA-adjacent billionaires are spending billions to acquire platforms to get political clot. Big Tech has kissed the ring of the Donald and seems unlikely to offend him by shadowbanning MAGA content. Crying that CNN would not hire you seems as petty as some pink-haired liberal crying that Fox News would not hire them. There are a ton of other options, and the audience only reachable by traditional TV is growing smaller every year.

Note that the Biden admin generally did not use federal taxes to buy guns for illegals and paid them a federal salary to engage in behavior where they were somewhat likely to shoot people, so we might want to hold Trump's ICE to slightly higher standards.

If we actually care about innocent people dying, then no, we shouldn't care any more about someone that dies at the hands of ICE, than someone that died from some criminal the Democrats let out on the streets. And there are VASTLY more people that die from those Democrat causes, than at the hands of ICE.

If the left actually cared about innocent people dying, their crime and immigration policies would be vastly different. But from what I can tell, their focus is mostly on making life easier for convicted criminals, and known illegal immigrants.

Also, we do not generally rank murders by how innocent their victim was

Most members of the public do this, actually. Most people don't care that much if some gang member is killed by some other gang member. They care a lot more if some innocent child dies. This is perfectly logical and normal.

"He was a bad person, the world is better off without him" is not an argument we let anyone make in court, and I see no reason why we should let ICE make it.

I'm not saying the people that confront ICE are bad people (though I think that they are misguided). I am mostly noting that someone that gets in a confrontation with a member of law enforcement wielding a weapon is knowingly taking on a big risk. They are not 100% innocent in the situation, like Iryna Zarutska and other victims were.

And since members of ICE are humans, and all humans make occasional mistakes, these incidents will keep happening as long as the left goads on enough people into getting into confrontations with LEO.

This is a major part of why the left is so incredibly complicit in these deaths. It isn't just that the left deliberately imported millions of illegal immigrants and forced the voters to elect Republicans to clean up their mess, it's the fact that they keep goading suggestible people into confronting ICE. These incidents will keep happening as long as the left keeps doing that.

Can ICE policies be improved? Sure. But it's actually a lot harder to perfect that side of the equation, than for the left to stop creating these problems and confrontations in the first place.

I think you would need a new SCOTUS for that. Citizens United clearly established that companies enjoyed free speech. Seems kinda hard to exempt media companies from that.

What I'm proposing would be massively beneficial to conservatives, and SCOTUS does lean conservative.

BTW, I'm not suggesting at all that corporations should be forced to make ANY specific changes to their speech. I am only suggesting that corporations should be forced to engage in fair hiring practices, and then expect that as the personnel changes, the speech will likely change, too, once conservatives finally get a fair shot in the workplace in the media, academia, and government.

Are you sure you are on my side of the pond?

I am an American, and I feel deep sorrow at once-astonishing Europe's slow slide into irrelevancy, so I will probably stay here.

Imagine millions of liberal college students hate-watching Fox News so that they can force them to carry their viewpoints.

Amusing :). I'm sure Fox News would be completely happy with that outcome, though, and so would most conservatives, to see liberals finally get more exposure to conservative viewpoints. (Studies show that liberals are generally much more ignorant of conservative media and viewpoints, than the reverse.)

There are a ton of other options, and the audience only reachable by traditional TV is growing smaller every year.

The audience for traditional media is still absolutely vast. And all "new media" would also be included. And in some cases it would help to protect the left!

Couple of thoughts:

  1. If Trump is going to fulfill the left's dictatorship fantasies - better do the coup soon. After the midterm he will be the lamest duck that ever quacked. Holding to any shreds of power will be miracle even by his standards.
  2. Do you think that body cameras will be turned off or exonerating?
  3. The second Trump is way way more outrageous than the first one. And people mostly shrug. This is what happens when you are 10 years with emotional afterburner on.
  4. I wonder how the things will go down now when there are real consequences to larping or being the resistance - will it put more people on the streets or will it change the calculus?

Folks on Reddit are openly calling for the murder of ICE agents, and for a leftist coup.

Sure, who is going to carry out the leftist coup? The field grade officers in the military are still conservative. Federal law enforcement by the numbers is still conservative, even if certain agencies aren't.

Mid-level environmental protection bureaucrats don't carry out coups.

The field grade officers in the military are still conservative.

Yes, but they still follow lawful orders from leftist superiors, don't they? I've been reassured by veterans that, while it might be different in other countries, the men of the US military are a higher breed of soldier, who will never put their personal political sympathies ahead of obedience to the chain of command (particularly their immediate superiors), never mutiny, never refuse an order unless they're certain it's unlawful (which makes sense; after all, if you do refuse, and the following court martial decides the order was lawful? Say hello to Leavenworth), will never violate their oath to uphold the Constitution… as defined by SCOTUS and their superiors, will never carry out a coup, will never…

You get the idea.

Tell that to Greg Abbott.

When did Greg Abbott issue orders to soldiers of the regular US Military, and have those uniformed soldiers obey him in open defiance of contravening orders from their superior officers?

Why hasn’t the FBI gotten to Reddit yet? They do open terrorist incitement all the time.

I assume they do a lot of monitoring.

Reddit is not real.

That being said, I am surprised that the US doesn't have more violent rebellions. That's what the 2nd amendment is for right ? From a purely strategic perspective, say you believe that Trump's people are a few years away from turning the US into a dictatorship. In that case, wouldn't you want to be violent before they consolidate all power and not after ?

I mean, the second amendment people are on Trump's side, because the opposition will betray them immediately and they know it.

Should've made friends long ago.

No, The 2nd amendment folks support Trump because they inhabitant the same object level political space. Thats it. In reality, the right's tendency to power-worshipping and love of armed agents of the state (LEO) means that the 2nd amendment types are as likely to be fighting on the side of the tyrants as against them.

Trump backs the 2nd amendment people's policy requests. Therefore they back him, and the tyranny is being directed at people who openly hate them. It has nothing to do with attitudes to authority and a lot to do with tribal dynamics. I can remember the organized and disciplined state capital takeovers during the 2010's.

From a purely strategic perspective, say you believe that Trump's people are a few years away from turning the US into a dictatorship. In that case, wouldn't you want to be violent before they consolidate all power and not after ?

The optics on who shoots first matter a lot, and I think people understand this intuitively. The South probably did more harm to its cause than good by shooting first during the Civil War.

The United States refused to leave a fort they were occupying in a newly foreign state. South Carolina attacked the invading forces sent to resupply the occupiers. And no one even died in that battle.

I think it was the conditions of large-scale American slavery that did the most harm tbh.

Everyone is brave on reddit.

https://apnews.com/live/minneapolis-ice-shooting-updates-1-24-2026

Gov. Walz has activated the national guard. It's unclear what, exactly, they're going to be doing. ICE claims to have recovered a gun from the scene; they're not going to admit fault, obviously, but planting a gun on a suspect seems like a pretty far bridge when they're on video. Obviously, the footage looks really bad.

It's unclear what, exactly, they're going to be doing.

"Is Walz about to attempt an open rebellion" is, indeed, the trillion-dollar question, making everything else pale by comparison.

The suspect did have a gun. It was pulled off of him just before the first shot was fired. The officer who fired should have had a clear view of this. I don't know what he thought he saw.

I've watched the video a bunch of times and it's unclear to me where the first shot comes from, which this entire thing hinges on. IMO we need the footage from the lady in the pink who was right there. If we're to believe the posted photo of the weapon from DHS, it is a SIG, though I'm not sure if it's a P320. The only thing I want to add to the discussion is the dark possibility that if this is a P320, there's a small but non-zero chance that this is another case of a self-discharging P320, which caused the agents here to believe he had fired at them and caused them to unload on him.

Edit: her video is linked in this thread and it's not looking good for the agents but also it's still unclear if the guy could have pulled a gun. I'm leaning towards bad shoot.

Immediately after the grey-jacketed agent gets the dead guy's gun (we can see the red dot sight; it's definitely the weapon DHS says was the dead guy's, not an ICE weapon. I'm pretty sure it is a P320 but it did not go off), the agent to his left (in the pink lady's video) draws his weapon and fires the first shot, I believe. Not clear why, but it seems like he fucked up. Then there's a bunch more shots, which seems like a further fuckup. I assume if the guy had a second weapon, DHS would be crowing about that from the heights of X, so it definitely seems like an unjustified shoot. But I predict that the less-sympathetic (i.e. male) victim means this makes less news.

Yeah, after seeing more video it does seem like they disarmed him during (one of the agents is shown to have his gun, the same one that can be seen taking it from him during the struggle) and that one agent did fire the first shot. Real bad and none of the angles is redeeming the administration. No idea why they're doubling down on the "domestic terrorist" rhetoric. They're out of control.

White House is doubling down because admitting fault here offers no advantages compared to not admitting fault.

I actually disagree. The rhetoric from the administration over the last 24 hours is losing normies, independents, 2A die-hards, and probably even some formerly committed MAGA people. They're compressing their base into a small bloc of only the absolute most die-hard Trump cultists and it's going to cost them. If they'd admitted fault I think it'd buy them a lot of credibility with the remaining "normal" supporters. Doubling down alienates them.

We can't easily look at the counterfactual today. But I suspect if the admin were conducting Minneapolis in a way you deem normie-friendly, we'd instead be getting continuing coverage of Trump attacking the federal reserve or fresh Ukraine drama or more Greenland inflammation. Or when there's nothing for normies to be scared by, they can make up a conspiracy out of whole cloth like they managed to do for the entirety of Trump's first term.

Trump has demonstrated with Hegseth's embarrassing behavior that he's learned he won't satisfy a media who have already committed to hating him and scaring the normies with max-volume hysterical coverage, so he'd rather spite the media than try to satisfy them by appearing above-board. There's no world where the Republicans do well in the upcoming midterms, and there never was. Voters got tired of Dems, but when they elected Not-Dems, they shrieked, "NO, NOT LIKE THAT!!" There never was a "that" which they would have liked. So it will ever be.

Remember that universal suffrage is only about a century old. We don't know how this ends.

No idea why they're doubling down on the "domestic terrorist" rhetoric.

It's the same playbook the left has been using. As for why... because it worked for their enemies.

The video from the other side is posted e.g. here: https://x.com/i/status/2015131503622021472

But it doesn't make the situation clearer.

Good luck to all rightists in the next years, trying to dodge the incoming 1000 years Unlimited Immigration Reich. The problem is that immigrationism is an extremely powerful ideology, because everytime you try to go against it you need to use force, and force make normies have the ick, and reinforce immigrationism. A lesson for all future societies, if we will ever have one (Demography is the most important thing ever and nothing else matters)

(Demography is the most important thing ever and nothing else matters)

Tell that to North Korea!

Instead of luck, maybe the rightists could use some competence instead ? They have dug their own graves.

I bet if ICE roamed in suits with slicked back hair, they wouldn't have half the issues they're facing. Instead, they chose maximally aggressive optics, and they're getting the obvious reaction. You expect Americans to view ICE favorably when they dress and act like bank robbers from a crime procedural ?

Were they forced to to digitally alter images of people to make them uglier ? Was the white house forced to post AI memes about detention centers with alligators in them ? The right is setting themselves up to fail for no good reason.

Either way, ICE's operation isn't particularly effective either. The number of convicted criminals being detained has remained unchanged. There is a modest increase in detentions for those pending charges, but nothing ground breaking. At the same time, the amount of arrests (esp. of non criminals) has skyrocketed. The deaths in custody numbers tripled, and 2026 has gotten off to a horrifying start. More people have died in ICE custody in January (15 days) than died in the entire year of 2023 !! (This warrants 2 exclamations)

With the Somali scandal, Trump had a solid narrative for the midterms. If MAGA loses the mid-terms, it is because they are both incompetent and intensely dislikeable. Hilarious that Trump came to power by swinging non-white voters and gen Z. Now that the same voters are turning their back on him ( in polls at least), it is somehow a sign of the woke mind-virus and immigration led anti-Americanism.

Were they forced to to digitally alter images of people to make them uglier?

While that photoshopped image was clownish behavior, I don't think it's quite right to say that they were trying to make the subject uglier. Seems pretty clear to me that they simply wanted to make her look more distraught, because an image of an arrested enemy breaking down crying is better PR (from a projecting-strength POV) than an image of stone-faced stoicism. To the (IMO limited) extent that they made the subject look "uglier" in the process, I think that was just a side-effect.

Either way, ICE's operation isn't particularly effective either. The number of convicted criminals being detained has remained unchanged.

...you did catch at least a half dozen of the ways that link was trying to manipulate the reader, no?

Like, there are way more than a half dozen techniques being used. A common one was making a big deal of % increases without giving base numbers, or whether % increases they don't like correspond to % increases in things they don't care to admit. The 'Annual Deaths in ICE Custody' chart takes the deaths in the first half of January- without establishing any cause of death or even alleging they were a result of ICE mistreatment- and then multiplies them by the time for the rest of year to claim 122 'projected deaths' for 2026.

It's also notably including in the 2025 death count the migrant detainees killed by anti-ICE people trying to shoot ICE.

I particularly liked how the 'Systemic Accountability Failure' accepts "billions of dollars in claims" against ICE as the baseline (invented by people opposed to ICE no less) for which 'less than $1 million in settlement' is the systemic accountability failure in question to make the reader upset... and then goes on to blame / concede that acts of congress, longstanding judicial policy, and the sovereign immunity of the state. Only not in that order, of course, because sovereign immunity is the scary boo word, and the New Deal law passed by the Democratic Party and regularly used over the last half-century is to be last-noted and without such context.

The sort of people who will be moved by that website are not the sort of people whose opinions would be changed if and where ICE behaved particularly differently. That is an advocacy/propaganda website, and there will always be propaganda to make anything come across as a travesty. The only thing that would change the position of the people so easily moved by such blatant propaganda is if they didn't get propagandized.

This, in turn, would require the propagandists in question to not see a need to generate the propaganda. Which would primarily be if ICE wasn't doing deportations, as opposed to if ICE was doing deportations differently.

Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.

The statistics I am interested in, were still sound. I deliberately highlighted the 3x number which is over an entire year, instead of the rather ambitious 2026 projection. Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.

That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.

Yes, they have an agenda. But I couldn't find the detentions and arrests bar chart anywhere else.

The availability bias is truly a wonder, and an easy tool to exploit.

Cause aside, 7 deaths in 15 days is anomalously high and warrants explanation.

Sure. But also questions. Among which- what would have been the death rate in 2023 had the Biden Administration surged ICE differently? After all, a core premise of your critique is the (in)competence. Incompetence requires a baseline of competence, which in turn requires a baseline of 'acceptable' failures across an institution.

And also- what would the death rate in January 2026 have been had the Obama and Biden administrations not taken their benign neglect for over a decade? Had they changed policy, would the downstream factors of January 2026 been possible?

But also- 115 compared to what base number? Not only what is the base numbers in January 2026 versus 2023, so that you can have some % comparison, but also what is the 'acceptable' number of deaths in general?

And this is if we concede 'cause aside.' Someone might- quite reasonably- believe that cause must not be put aside. It matters quite a bit for discussions of competence if deaths in ICE detention are because ICE beats the detainees to death, or if the prisoners kill eachother, or if they die because of heart attacks but previous administrations didn't have such figures because they were ideologically opposed to deporting people at risk for heart attacks when stressed.

That's usually how it goes. The dirt is usually unearthed by those who want to bring you down. Back during the excesses of the work movement, opposing statistics required swimming through doomer incel sewers. Just because they wanted to radicalize me into giving up didn't mean their numbers were wrong.

Ah, but numbers are wrong. Quite commonly. Especially numbers provided for the primary purpose of propaganda- and especially numbers presented to prime emotions. As they say, lies, damn lies, and statistics.

How about “ICE is under siege so violent events are more likely to happen?”

Leftists want to identify and harass or kill ICE agents. If my brother or dad worked for ICE I'd want him to cover his face.

The memes are dumb, I agree.

I simply no longer care if people get killed while impeding efforts to deport invaders. As @Armin states succinctly, immigration is a ratchet especially when you have a rabidly pro-immigration media. If people don't want to get shot, they can stay in their countries of origin or not get aggressive with federal law enforcement trying to work in a hostile area.

MAGA will lose the house because the average normie is clueless and because the persecution complex energizes leftist. But there was really no way to avoid that as the entire media complex has gone into overdrive spinning a narrative of persecution since 2016.

Leftists want to identify and harass or kill ICE agents. If my brother or dad worked for ICE I'd want him to cover his face.

I am sympathetic, it is a human impulse. However, "criminals and leftists want kill police officers" is not a new phenomenon, but > century old. If you make it "leftists want to kill authority figures", that goes back to OG French revolution, which makes it older than modern policing (as attributed to SIr Robert Peele). Yet it used to be norm that a civilized people are policed by unmasked officers. the law enforcement needs sufficient methods to stop people who want kill them (and get them when they do), but it would be vastly preferable they used the normal policing methods to get that outcome. Find the perps, arrest them, preferably for conspiracy to kill law enforcement agents before they kill anyone, throw the book on them.

Hiding your face because you are afraid of the perps has very much South American failed state energy. Wannabe criminals should be scared shitless of the idea of killing a law enforcement agent, who can show his face like an upstanding citizen (which he probably is). One step getting in that direction is managing perceptions.

I am also sympathetic concerning use of weapons. Like, I don't find it ethically distasteful notion for the police use violence or shoot people who interfere with legitimate policing action. My problem is that the shoots that make the news from the US rarely appear intentional and purposeful. I recall was one of conclusions I made about Jan 6 debacle (after mulling it over) was that the shoot was "directionally correct" action but whole situation was suboptimal because shitty mission parameters: the law enforcement didn't come in sufficient numbers, initially employ insufficient force to establish a clear perimeter, and no surprise, they find them in situation where they are confused and perhaps panicked and have to shoot. I found it darkly ironic that the same description and complain matched quite well the Jan 7 shooting of Renee Good. (Uncertain if it matches this recent case)

Trump was shot a year and a half ago, Kirk was shot a few months ago. Those high profile cases of leftist violence are just the tip of the iceberg. Antifa is a real impediment for right wing politics in the US. The professional activists are not going to stop. These are the same people who rioted in 2020. Getting rid of them is a strategic victory and the price is a news story that will live for a new cycle.

The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up. There are plenty of narcotics related charges that could be used on antifa types. Rioting creates opportunities to arrest people, to search their houses and find things.

I will grant you the Kirk shooter being a leftist (a trans activist, though raised as a Mormon (and gun enthusiast), IIRC).

Calling the Trump shooter a leftist is a bit of a stretch. As he had made bomb threats before I would rather categorize him as "crazy" than "central leftist".

These are the same people who rioted in 2020.

My feeling was that the rioting was mostly done by various opportunistic criminals, while the SJ activists mostly stood on the sidelines and celebrated their empowerment or something. I would be extremely surprised if either of two people recently killed by ICE was credibly implicated in committing felonies during the BLM riots.

The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up.

I think you are confused. There is no Antifa version of Bin Laden who decided that agent Crooks should go forward with trying to shoot Trump, or who assigned Goods to "hampering ICE" duty on the day she was shot.

Crooks was a complete lone wolf by all accounts though Goods seemed to be plugged into some sort of social network ICE-botherer network from what I can see, which surely would have ringleaders of some sort.

My feeling was that the rioting was mostly done by various opportunistic criminals

Most of the rioters but who got it started? There are some people who get it going, a handful of people doing the outrageous acts and then a larger number of people who just stand in the crowd. The pure criminal element shows up when the rioting has already started.

A sizeable portion of the casuals won't participate in rioting if the consequences are too high.

The most strategic thing Trump could do would be to get the ring leaders locked up.

IMO it'd be to push Congress for a bill to mandate a minimal level of local/state cooperation with federal immigration authorities in exchange for federal funding eligibility, and in return offering a stand down of current operations. I don't see another real offramp available to the right, here: they can't practically expect to focus so exclusively on Minnesota indefinitely.

What other practical political goal are they trying to achieve while they're there burning political capital like The Joker burns piles of cash?

Interesting but how does that survive anti commandeering? You would need to tie things like federal spending grants but that becomes tricky where the official policy is “help ICE” but you allow deviation from policy.

Would a straight quid pro quo tying state/local law enforcement cooperation with federal funding to those agencies run afoul of that? We manage to tie highway funding to highway drunk driving laws.

Alternatively, mandatory E-Verify, but the lack of interest there hints in a deep unseriousness about the issue overall.

Not sure I follow the logic here, what about enforcing immigration laws necessitates a mass of poorly trained officers taking down and beating on a citizen, seemingly just for recording them, and then shooting him multiple times while he's on the floor?

Immigration is a not a dichotomy between "full immigrant open borders" and "government thugs just executing people on the streets", there's plenty of room inbetween. The incompetence and open abuse of ICE is a fixable issue and you should be mad at the Trump admin for creating a problem that doesn't need to happen and causing unnecessary PR problems. The public was on his side for a long while, it was his failures that lead to polling shifts against.

Immigration is a not a dichotomy between "full immigrant open borders" and "government thugs just executing people on the streets", there's plenty of room inbetween.

You're right, because in-between is exactly where we are.

The incompetence and open abuse of ICE is a fixable issue and you should be mad at the Trump admin for creating a problem that doesn't need to happen and causing unnecessary PR problems.

What sort of ICE behavior would you would find acceptable? Because from what I can tell the vast majority of anti ICE leftists seem to believe that the only acceptable ICE action would be "disband entirely." They may claim otherwise, but I don't believe it. If you take away ICE officers' guns, leftists will complain about "beatings." If you ban clubs and fists they'll complain about nebulous "excessive force." It's strategic and disingenuous moving of the goalpost towards their ulterior goal.

What sort of ICE behavior would you would find acceptable?

Behaving like normal professional law enforcement for one. Bad trigger discipline, widespread violation of rights ike that recent memo that was leaked trying to allege they can search houses with just an administrative warrant, which is of course a theory you know they're confident about when they kept it hush hush and told people not to take notes about it, a propensity to escalate situations with unnecessary violence and threats etc are all things that can be improved on dramatically.

I'll say the same thing I said in previous threads, go watch the British show Police Interceptors and compare their professional deescalatory polite behavior to the current thuggery of the ICE and you'll understand how much room for improvement there is while still getting a job done. They are public servants, they should be professional instead of behaving like some sort of legalized gang.

The British don't have to deal with anywhere near as much of an armed and belligerent population as US law enforcement, before you add the active efforts from a lot of anti-ICE 'protestors' to purposefully muddy the situations as much as possible. In both of the high profile shootings cases it's a random third-party interloper on ICE activities that's getting shot after injecting themselves into the situation, this kind of thing rarely happens in other law enforcement.

I'll say the same thing I said in previous threads, go watch the British show Police Interceptors and compare their professional deescalatory polite behavior to the current thuggery of the ICE and you'll understand how much room for improvement there is while still getting a job done. They are public servants, they should be professional instead of behaving like some sort of legalized gang.

The British approach of being polite and "Policing by consent" has led to large parts of the UK essentially getting to make their own laws because the dominant ethnic group doesn't consent to being policed like the rest of the country. It's not a strategy I'd recommend.

the vast majority of anti ICE leftists seem to believe that the only acceptable ICE action would be "disband entirely."

There are those who would favour deporting some people (those who have individually done Very Bad Things), but believe that it should be done by a different agency with a less bloodthirsty institutional culture.

Prior to 2003, deportations of undocumented/illegal immigrants were handled by the same agency processing documented/legal immigrants; this may have resulted in fewer xenophobes and more Lawful Neutrals.

what about enforcing immigration laws necessitates a mass of poorly trained officers

I freely confess that I don't know what the view looks like from the inside, but I sort of suspect a lot of the way ICE is being used is to create political pressure/optics.

I wonder if it would be much more efficient (to say nothing of much less optically problematic) to just send a few guys in plainclothes to pick up each dude ID'd as illegal. I sort of suspect that "running around in camo and plate carriers" is either the idea of people in ICE who think it is cool, or the idea of admin higher-ups who think that creating a scene like that is necessary to intimidate would-be illegals and deter illegal immigration. But part of me suspects that quietly and efficiently deporting massive numbers of illegals is in its own way scarier and more deterring than these highly visible scenes, if run at high volume for a sustained period of time.

Really interested to know if there is anyone here who can speak to that though.

the idea of admin higher-ups who think that creating a scene like that is necessary to intimidate would-be illegals and deter illegal immigration.

Don't border crossing numbers suggest that they've basically already done this even before the current drama?

Border crossing numbers started declining when Greg Abbott intimidated the Biden admin into letting him seal the border(well, most of it).

That seems likely, but I could see the rationale being that you want to make a lasting impression.

The political pressure on jurisdictions that aren't cooperating with ICE might be much more relevant, though.

We have individual rights in the United States, you don't respond to societal-wide problems by violating the rights of individuals for no reason in isolated incidents.

given the scope of demographic replacement.

If you believe it to be important then isn't that all the more reason the Trump admin should maintain good PR and keep public opinion in support of ICE operations?

If you think the media is against you, then again that just makes it more important to not give over free wins for no reason. Americans all over, many independent and otherwise supportive of kicking out illegal immigrants, are going to see this video of a man being beaten, thrown to the ground and then shot multiple times and think twice of supporting your cause.

If you think the media is against you, then again that just makes it more important to not give over free wins for no reason.

You've always got to consider the alternative here. AFAICT you don't seem to be at the point of "if you don't do outrageous things, they will deepfake them" where the media reaction is fully a sunk cost, but you are at the point of "if you don't do outrageous things, most of the media time that would be devoted to them is devoted to rehashing the last outrageous things you did instead", which still significantly reduces the marginal loss, and at the point of "most people who consume the hostile media are already going to vote against you", which does likewise.

High polarisation causes a lot of incentives to flip from prosociality to antisociality.

This isn't some RTS where you get to micro every local unit. One of the main criticisms against the protestors (and the reason for a growing absence of sympathy for them) is that they are intentionally engineering scenarios where violence and even fatalaties become a statistical inevitability. There is no way to avoid 'giving a free win' in that kind of rigged game, short of just packing up and leave.

This isn't some RTS where you get to micro every local unit.

That's true most of the time and something I've argued relentlessly before about various groups from Gamergate to the 2023 French protests to Jan 6th to BLM and now. You can't control every person, they're individuals not hiveminds and every group and movement has its share of dumb and violent people, yet alone third party trolls and exploiters.

Governments and law enforcement however are a bit of an exception. They're formal organizations with the ability to explicitly choose who joins their rank and an ability to actually kick out people who do wrong. In the same way, governments also have the ability to distinguish between proper protesting individuals and improper criminal individuals. Both in punishment (arresting and prosecuting actual criminals and not using lawfare against innocents) and in forgiveness (like Trump always could not have pardoned the cop beaters of Jan 6th).

Those are actual real choices that could be made without having to say "lol just use your hive mind to stop that stranger you don't know" like most discourse about informal groups tends to devolve into. Ability and responsibility go hand in hand. I can't reasonably control what my neighbor does in his own home so if he beats his wife, I'm not responsible. But a CEO of a company is responsible if an employee beats a customer and they don't get fired. The difference is, I can't do anything meaningful about the neighbor but the CEO has the ability to fire the aggressive worker.

More comments

The way it works is that ICE is held to difficult standards (and even when they meet them, are reported as not meeting them), the protestors are held to no standards at all, and any issues are definitionally the fault of ICE for being there. As long as that frame holds there's no win condition for ICE, and the frame is unbreakable.

That seems like more of a media control problem. Right now an illegal immigrant who murders someone typically gets called a "Texas man" with no photo and a stub of an article in the local newspaper. Rare exceptions exist, but they are usually because Trump forced the story into the national conversation, and the national media coverage is to "debunk" whatever he said. Meanwhile these ICE incidents get weeks of breathless coverage by national media, orders of magnitude higher than comparable police shootings that happen every day. It's easy to give normies the ick, the problem is that the right doesn't own the propaganda apparatus.

Yes. A "Culmore man" is a white man. If he is a foreigner, it needs to be phrased as "A Salvadoran (or whatever) living in Culmore."

Doubt this change will ever make it to the AP Stylebook though.

What about a black man whose ancestors lived there when they were freed by the Emancipation Proclamation?

What about a man whose ancestors came from El Salvador during the Fillmore Administration?

What about a man who was born in El Salvador, but naturalised twenty years ago and no longer has Salvadoran citizenship?

You could always do "A Negro living in . . . "

And you have to know where I'm coming from. I grew up in the seventies, when the Washington DC area had hardly any non-European immigrants. Things were a lot simpler back in my formative years; neighborhoods were either white or black (and nearly all the blacks lived in remote areas I never visited).

Had I lived in LA or El Paso as a kid, I might feel differently, but I will always feel in my heart that third-world immigrants remain foreigners no matter how long they've lived here.

Additionally, my post was partly a reaction to a new mortal sin among the left: mentioning someone's ethnicity if they're anything other than "generic white" except in a very few special cases, most of which involve denouncement of "white supremacy". The specific Reddit post that reminded me of this was basically: a woman met another woman in a coffee shop or something, first woman thinks she made a new friend, but second woman was just out to recruit for Amway.

The natural assumption was that both were white, but late in the post, it was mentioned #2 had recently immigrated from Nigeria.

I guarantee you that if this had happened in 1990, the account would have started, "So I met this black woman with a foreign accent, and . . . "

Ethnicity is important! It's vital for getting a proper mental picture of the situation, and I don't like having important details deliberately concealed.

Just my two cents.

And you have to know where I'm coming from.

Where you're coming from doesn't seem to justify it.

You might be able to justify "a Culmore man is a man who lives in Culmore and accepts American culture", but surely black people can qualify for that.

You could always do "A Negro living in . . . "

My point was that the black man's ancestors have lived there as long as his white neighbour's ancestors have; thus if his familial tenure is insufficient to make him a '_____ man', then his white neighbour would be 'An Englishman living in _____'.

Things were a lot simpler back in my formative years

...and you're upset that someone moved your cheese?

I will always feel in my heart that third-world immigrants remain foreigners no matter how long they've lived here.

What about first-world immigrants? If someone was born in London, will he always be British to you?

Additionally, my post was partly a reaction to a new mortal sin among the left: mentioning someone's ethnicity

I guarantee you that if this had happened in 1990, the account would have started, "So I met this black woman with a foreign accent, and . . . "

My understanding of the left's argument is that:

  1. ethnicity isn't relevant in many circumstances; her being from Nigeria had nothing to do with her recruiting for Amway. (Maybe it would have been relevant if she had claimed to have received an inheritance of $50 MILLIOIN[sic] USD DOLLARS and needed to borrow $500 for legal fees....)

  2. treating 'white' as an unmarked default and all other ethnicities as a marked perpetual other is both rude and dangerous, as it lays the groundwork for the sort of atrocities all too familiar to the student of history.

Ethnicity is ... vital for getting a proper mental picture of the situation, and I don't like having important details deliberately concealed.

...what if we were to include the ethnicity of everyone including white people?

"Miguel Gutierrez, a Culmore man of Salvadoran origin, ... James Baker, an East Culmore man of English origin...."

"So I met this white guy with an American accent...."

I'm a xenophobe; it's part of my essential temperament.

I know damn well I'm not a nice person and probably do not qualify as a good person; I know I'm not worthy of love, and if the Christian hell is real I'm 100% going to end up there because I just can't do the "love-thy-neighbor" bit. But that's just the way I am.

The right can't own propaganda in a current day liberal society. All the right can do is react to the receipts of long term progressive policy and gain power temporarily. Then the right will overplay their hands and power will switch back to progressives because liberals are completely averse to use of force and can't actually defend our society from left leaning bad actors. It's like we've contracted HIV as a society and our cultural antibodies have no clue what to do. We don't have the self-preservation instincts to protect anything worth protecting on a societal level. We see a terrible incident and shape our entire social policy based on that incident. We are extremely sensitive to seeing and doing harm, but almost completely indifferent to being harmed slowly.

Well, the upside here is that it can't possibly remain stable for more than a generation or two before the inevitable and utterly ruthless backlash commences, after which whites will never again forget their place at the head of humanity. My two cents, I guess.

Make babies and raise them to rule with an iron fist.

Our Volk?

The only 'Volk' I consider meaningful is that of the scions of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve.

I think you are joking but would endorse entirely and ask you why you don't.

Contingent on you having been insincere, I ask why you are insincere. Maybe you've been forthright, in which case I'd like to know that too.

Even if it's legal to carry a gun, violently resisting a bunch of cops while having one is a bad idea. Firstly I'm pretty sure this guy wasn't just taking a walk and a bunch of agents jumped him. Secondly, if you have a piece and police are trying to arrest you, justified or not, it's a really really good reason to be extremely polite and respectful to show you're not going to use it.

The media is so vulnerable to this kind of shit though. Hamas explicitly has a defensive policy that baits Israelis into bombing an apartment block full of kids. Media: "israel bombed an apartment full of kids".

Protestors do everything they can to stress law enforcement into fucking up: "police kill protestor".

Zero accountability or culpability to those who deliberately create the confusing circumstances that result in these things going wrong. But an absolute demand for complete and perfect performance that transcends any fog of war from the authorities.

When the media can't honestly engage against their preferred social groups you have a major asymmetry that most neutral readers just don't ever think about.

Obviously if you don't want to get shot or have your children bombed, the onus is in you to control what you can, rather than bizarrely expect that the powers that be cowtow to you.

The media is ao vulnerable to this kind of shit though.

Not so much vulnerable as complicit. They know what's going on, certainly in the Hamas case if not the instant one. They report what their favored side wants even though they know it is deceptive.

There is a lot of behavior which is a Bad Idea which might get you killed but still no excuse for murder.

We do not let the guy who kills his ex get off the hook because her decision to date a guy with a criminal record and anger management issues.

In this case, if the body cam of the cop (which was clearly on, right?) shows that from his perspective, it looked like the suspect was going to reach for his gun, then I will file this under "sometimes people do risky things and tragedy ensues". If it does not show that, I would be inclined to convict on murder 2 from the videos I saw.

Tim Walz:

I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening.

The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.

The left seems to be running a massive hecklers veto. After GF, the right can’t do it again. It’s only going to get worse

I just spoke with the White House after another horrific shooting by federal agents this morning. Minnesota has had it. This is sickening.

"Spoke with the White House" is incredibly vague. It can imply that he spoke with Trump. It can mean he merely spoke with a White House staffer. It can mean he spoke with a White House receptionist who wrote down his message and was like "Okay thanks for calling! I'll tell someone to let President Trump know you called." It can even mean he just left a voice message after his call went straight to voicemail.

The President must end this operation. Pull the thousands of violent, untrained officers out of Minnesota. Now.

Cringe as fuck that Walz blusters like he's in a position of strength to make any demands, a few weeks after ending his re-election bid to become a lame duck because he let third world immigrants steal hundreds of millions from under his nose.

Trump could further bury what remains of Walz's career by responding to Walz with the Jennifer Lawrence "thumbs up" gif. However, knowing Trump—if he does respond directly—it'll likely be in the form of a rant with lots of ALL CAPS. Where's Vance and his millennial genre savviness when you need him?

A hecklers veto being used against federal law enforcement being used to provoke and punish a city. There's no defense of Minneapolis of all place to be crawling with immigration agents.

The defense is pretty simple:

  1. There are still people in Minneapolis who have no right to be roaming the United States.
  2. INS and now ICE is the duly appointed agency responsible to enforce the immigration laws our Congress has repeatedly passed with large bipartisan support over the last hundred years.
  3. Minneapolis and Minnesota have refused to cooperate with these federal laws, necessitating a disproportionate number of agents in the area to help do both their job and the job of the police at crowd control and mitigating disturbances of the peace.

Immigration on a massive scale impacts the country as a whole due to many factors, but one of the biggest is how congressional seats are apportioned and how our birthright citizenship works. Minnesota cannot just press the defect button and rake in the political rewards.

This defense is a bit thin since you can use it to justify an uncapped amount of federal agents as long as there's non-zero illegal immigrants in Minneapolis, which applies to basically every American city.

A much more reasonable defense is that they are doing it as a punitive expedition to make Minneapolis an example so other sanctuary cities start to less resistant to federal authority on immigration. However, it is still a punitive expedition. And after these shootings, it has clearly failed, because I don't see how it will be effective at persuading other liberal strongholds to cooperate with ICE rather than digging in their heels and be even more resistant.

Yes, I could justify an uncapped amount of federal agents to enforce very popular and longstanding bipartisan federal law. The only restraining principle is the expense.

The most reasonable defense is that this is what it takes to capture only a tiny percentage per capita of people who do not have permission to be here compared with cooperative jurisdictions. Just because jurisdictions are non-cooperative does not give them the right to defect from the country's laws.

Edit: And before you come at me saying ICE is suddenly unpopular in polls immediately after the shooting of Good and relentless negative news coverage, a majority of Americans still want more deportations.

I probably want illegal Somalis to be deported. However, I do not want illegal Somalis deported if the only way to do this is spend crazy amounts of money on an agency that seemingly cannot stop escalating encounters with protestors into shootings that leave US citizens dead. Further, I am very unconvinced that ICE's current incarnation would be very effective at its job (deporting illegal immigrants, ideally prioritizing bad actors) in the absence of active protestors. This really seems like a failed project staffed by and led by incompetent people. The correct move is to clean house and start over, prioritizing optics; most of all, don't shoot people!

There are functionally no illegal Somalis. Perhaps they shouldn't have been granted legal status but they were.

The only restraining principle is the expense.

Yes and that is the key here isn't it? There's no infinite amount of federal agents available, and there's clearly diminishing returns dependent on the amount of illegal immigrants actually in the city and the number of federal agents present. Add on the current volatile circumstances, I hardly think this is the most efficient strategy if your goal is to maximize deportations. I would expect any good defense to actually address the part that Minneapolis is singled out compared to the other cities, which was the main point of the comment you initially replied to.

Does it matter to this conversation that deportations in the abstract is popular? The whole point is how they are being done. If the administration maintains their current tactics and ICE continues to shoot a US citizen every couple of weeks, would you say it would improve their electoral chances or lessen them?

There are no infinite amount of federal agents, but it is possible that surging to one city for a few months, then another city, and so on might be the best strategy. Or by refusing to back down in Minnesota, the feds are showing the other sanctuary cities that resistance is futile. Minneapolis is a good starter city - medium size, possibly fewer organized international gangs, a good place to develop new tactics.

ICE will not continue to shoot a US Citizen every few weeks because either the states will capitulate and the peace will be kept or the states will not capitulate and the Federal government will step in even more until the peace is kept. As far as electoral chances, what is the point of electing more GOP if they don't enforce immigration laws? This is the biggest issue they ran on.

If the shooting of Charlie Kirk is this generation's Charles Sumner, Minneapolis is turning into this generation's Kansas territory.

If I had a dime for every time affluent white Democrats tried to kick-off a Civil War over whether they should be allowed to exploit a racial underclass I would have two dimes. Which isn't a lot but it's weird that it happened twice.

Oh come on. Why is Minneapolis now become the center of ICE operations? The whole thing is getting so heated because everything was done in bad faith from the beginning. I really don't think ICE on the corners in Minnesota is the result of a sober cost benefit analysis of how to deport the most illegals. It was designed to provoke tensions and it did. People don't like it when armed outsiders show up in their home and end up shooting. （justifiably or not) locals. Renee good was a lot closer to the average resident of Minneapolis then an ICE agent is. This kind of nakedly tribal provocation was always going to lead to bad blood.

It's a standard badguy move to use resistance to force to justify further force with no actual reason for the initial force. It's also a standard braindead-institutional move to stay the course, grip the nettle firmly, the boldest measures are the safest, et cetera. I err towards incompetence.

They're there because of something to do with Somalis, who are almost all here legally.

The specter of AntiFa hangs heavy in the minds of conservatives; maybe there's a desire to re-litigate the last war and anti-ICE protesters can be called AntiFa with some squinting.

I don't get the antifa denialism that some people have. The group has flags, posters, uniforms, websites, safehouses etc. It's extremely easy to find photos of all of these things on the internet. Yet there's a constant group of people who continue to say that antifa isn't a thing.

Who says that? Antifa is so clearly and manifestly a thing that I could just walk over to their clubhouse right now and here, and encounter the dregs of last night's antifascism.

See: "antifa is an idea"

The antifa of right-wing paranoia is some sort of well-organized shadowy terrorist group with coherent plans. The antifa that actually exists is a loosely-federated movement with no true leadership or strategy, whose "members" include people with very disparate beliefs and abilities - including a substantial, though not overwhelming, percentage of posers whose idea of praxis is stealing traffic cones. The problem isn't that there's no flags, posters, uniforms etc. - it's that any idiot can and does create an antifa website or leave antifa posters or cosplay as antifa with no oversight or endorsement by anyone else already using the name.

(Of course, this doesn't necessarily make them harmless - you could phrase the comparison as "right-wingers think Antifa is like ISIS, whereas in fact Antifa is more like Jihadis in general", after all. But it does at the very least render "there were antifa members at such-and-such protests" a kind of meaningless statement. Even if there were people who like to think of themselves as antifa members at that protest, it does little to prove that there's some shadowy men in a bunker pulling the strings of all protests at which such people are found. It just proves that left-wing protests attract a fringe of the kind of edgelords who are attracted to the antifa memeplex. You don't say.)

"right-wingers think Antifa is like ISIS, whereas in fact Antifa is more like Jihadis in general"

While this seems very true, it is even messier. At least international Jihadi terrorists roughly agree on the acceptable means (killing infidels in countries which mess with Muslim countries) and broad ideological world view, even if they differ on concrete strategy and priorities.

Within the left, you would be hard-pressed to find two people who agree on the political theory. Some are anarchists, communists, others are likely more moderate. And SJ did not make that any simpler.

Basically, anyone who subscribes to "fascism should be violently resisted where required" can adopt the label Antifa. (Indeed, I myself subscribe to that, though I do not consider myself Antifa. I just do not see any fascism which could be effectively neutered by me violently resisting anyone.)

The devil is in the details. What counts as fascism, now that Hitler and Mussolini are dead? Paleoconservatives? MAGA? Nethanyahu? Putin? Any Western capitalist society? Neo-Nazis?

And what violence is required? Smashing the state to bring about a communist utopia or stop the colonial exploitation? Beating up a few Neo-Nazis? Celebrating the traditional riots on the first of May in Kreuzberg? Spraying ACAB on a cop car, or a wall?

A lot of it is armchair activism. Certainly subject to the usual signaling spirals. You don't convince anyone that you are the hot shit by being a moderate on the internet. There is probably three to five OOMs more people willing to endorse deadly violence in memes and comments than there people willing to even commit property damage personally. Still, it can give the odd homicidal member the impression that the community endorses their violence. Which it does, verbally, just not by revealed preference.

The other group identity one might liken Antifa to is Anonymous. Both are very much grass root things. There is no Antifa pope who consecrates or excommunicates bishops (who then consecrate priests (who then baptize believers into Antifa)).

Exploit some shitty website, post about it on 4chan using the Anonymous logo: congratulations, you are now Anonymous. Buy a button with the red and black flag, go to a protest wearing a black hoodie, or commit some petty property crime and upload a picture on indymedia (or whatever kids use this century): congratulations, you are now Antifa.

It is more a category than a group, really.

"right-wingers think Antifa is like ISIS, whereas in fact Antifa is more like Jihadis in general"

This is a great analogy. It always really irritates me to see left-wingers engage in their standard disingenuous rhetoric to run interference for Antifa, only for right-wingers to completely fumble the argument by misunderstanding the nature of the problem.

It's a still a thing. I'm just comparing its presence now to 2020 and not seeing much. They been subsumed by generic normie protesting and now I only hear about them as a boogeyman from boomers.

I thought the fiction was that they exist, but they're the good guys, it says it right there in the name.

Yet there's a constant group of people who continue to say that antifa isn't a thing.

They're supporters.

This is an oversimplification. Are there supporters who downplay the role of Antifa? Sure. Are many of them denying that the label Antifa (or antifaschistische Aktion) refers to anything in the real world at all? Doubtful, though the strategy of calling the sky pink when it suits your needs has recently had some success, and the left might borrow it.

I would argue that it is normal to make a big deal of the mainstream-unappealing fringes of your enemy while downplaying the importance of your own fringes. So Antifa is not a big deal, but White supremacists are, or vice versa.

That some unsavory connection gets downplayed does not in itself tell you how important it is. A supporter of Gazan Palestinians would certainly downplay Hamas when trying to convince normies (even though they were kinda important), and a MAGA supporter would downplay the right-wingers who sometimes shoot up synagogues as isolated crazies (which seems pretty correct from what I can tell).

If you believe that anyone who downplays the importance of an organization $X is secretly a supporter of $X, it will reliably lead to a trapped prior. "Even the FBI, the CIA and CNN are not talking about the lizard people. This thing must be big!"

Are many of them denying that the label Antifa (or antifaschistische Aktion) refers to anything in the real world at all? Doubtful, though the strategy of calling the sky pink when it suits your needs has recently had some success, and the left might borrow it.

Biden referred to it as just an idea, and this was way before the current drama, so I don't see how it can be a case of borrowing. That's without going into all the times was loudly claiming the sky is pink over the years, and how outrageous it is to claim anything other than that they've pioneered the tactic.

ICE is in Minneapolis for the same reason federal troops were deployed to Arkansas and Alabama back when segregation was the hot-button issue of the day.

The City and State Leadership have openly broadcast their intent to not only not enforce but actively defy federal immigration law, and this is happening in the context of what appears to be rampant fraud and abuse of federal programs.

In short, the feds don't need to enforce the law on states that are already cooperating.

ICE is in Minneapolis for the same reason federal troops were deployed to Arkansas and Alabama back when segregation was the hot-button issue of the day.

I basically agree with this. For the system to work, it needs to be made clear that rioting and obstructionism won't have the desired results.

The difference is that Arkansas and Alabama were two of the more adamant segregationist states. Minnesota is not exactly a hotbed of illegal immigration.

That's not a difference, it is a similarity. Minnesota and New York are two of the more adamant "sanctuary" states and that's why ICE's attention is on them and not states like Texas.

As I keep saying, the Feds don't need to enforce compliance on states that are already cooperating.

Why was Little Rock the center of 101st Airborne operations?

Other places cooperate, or at least dont display this level of constant obstruction and intransigence.

everything was done in bad faith from the beginning.

How? Even if you think this is political ping-pong, it's completely par for the course.

"At 9:05 AM CT, as DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here.

The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming.

Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots. Medics on scene immediately delivered medical aid to the subject but was pronounced dead at the scene.

The suspect also had 2 magazines and no ID—this looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.

About 200 rioters arrived at the scene and began to obstruct and assault law enforcement on the scene, crowd control measures were deployed for the safety of the public and law enforcement.

This situation is evolving, and more information is forthcoming."

What a strange statement. What does, "approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun," mean? I can't imagine the guy had the gun in his hand when he approached. If he did, that would be extremely relevant context that I would expect to be included. What did this guy actually do to get arrested? Why was disarming him warrented? What caused the officers to decide to shoot?

Indeed a strange statement. I'm seeing people on social media claim that ICE had already disarmed the victim, holster and all, prior to the shooting, and I'm also seeing people claim that he was pulling his gun and the first few gunshots were from him, which lead to his death. As far as I'm aware there's no good evidence for either of these interpretations. But judging by the fact the government is merely claiming that "he had a weapon", rather than "he fired at the officers", I'm inclined to believe it's a bad shoot and this is damage control.

EDIT: With more evidence coming out it looks like they DID disarm the guy before shooting.

What a strange statement.

It's fairly standard legalese. Depositions often read like this because the point is to state only that which can be demonstrated in court.

  • Questioner: What color is that house?
  • Deposee: This side of the house appears to be light brown.

It's also why they hedge in the latter part with bits like "this looks like" and "Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers".

That sounds like dialogue straight out of Stranger in a Strange Land, the whole "Fair Witness" bit.

It basically is.

The "Fair Witness" bit from Stranger in a Strange Land is often used as a training example when teaching students how to give and take depositions.

Damage control it looks like.

The context of the Goode shooting after the fact made it reasonable - I’m gonna hold my tongue for a few days.

For some reason my favorite Libertarian podcast The Reason Roundtable still talk about the Goode shooting as if it wasn’t at all reasonable - so I’m not sure anything will have any meaning with this shooting either.

But it LOOKS egregious.

yeah I don't feel any reason to have an opinion on this for 4 days. Seems like the MN Governor disagrees.

Tim Walz is a giant douche. He is also preventing any climb down even if he wanted it

I mean, it's a shooting by federal agents in his state. Guy is supposed to have some sort of early opinion on it, one way or another.

Once again, this is not X and we would prefer people actually wait until they have something substantive to say about breaking news rather than rushing to be the first to start a thread about it.

It seems obvious that there is going to be discussion about it and also we won't know the substantive truth for 48-72 hours if not longer, isn't linking the initial reporting and videos sufficient to start discussion?

Yes, there is going to be discussion about it, and you wanted to be FIRST!!!!

It's not a race. You don't have to wait until there is "substantive truth" but you should wait until you have something more to post than a link. Yes, that means someone else might start a thread before you.

I don't understand the point of this rule. It is less a comment and more of a sign saying "[Talk about the recent Minneapolis shooting here]", what is the harm in that? We could just put into Chatgpt "Generate 200 words of filler text that will make Amadan happy that really says nothing about the recent Minneapolis shooting". I would get it if he had some low effort take and posted the link with his only comment being "Looks like another murder by the fascist death squads" but I don't really consider this different from a megathread. If you're starting a megathread, does the post body need to be substantive? No, it is more or less the same just "Talk about the recent Minneapolis shooting here"

This rule isn't new and it's not "my" rule. We don't want low-effort posts. That's not an invitation to violate the spirit of the rule while obeying the letter- the point is not whether you can generate 200 words by yourself or with ChatGPT. The point is we are not a news aggregator, we are not reddit, and taking a little while to reflect on whatever big happening is happening before posting about it would improve the quality of discussion.

I don't care about being first as should be obviously evidenced by my extremely small number of threads started. I wanted to see thoughts on this that weren't reddit hivemind, there was no thread, I started a thread.

I promise you I'm not counting up votes or stats on themotte.org as a meaningful part of my life haha

I wanted to see thoughts on this

This is also exactly why the rule exists. Everyone wants high quality discussion on their particular issue. But that takes effort by other people. So we gate that behind having to put in some effort yourself.

You could at least be useful and edit your top comment with new information or things coming in.

I mean honestly I think we should just have a megathread on this. I don't see discussion going away

I think a good start would have been an analysis of the video, plus Twitter link because I have to enable so much Javascript to watch a newsweek article video, plus relevant facts, plus the reaction from social media/leftists, plus an analogy to a past incident (he had a gun and yet this is going to be rioted over, my guess is that it's Jacob Blake shooting part 2). I understand the impulse, comments here are great. But you have to play by the rules.

Fair enough. Slap on wrist accepted

The Reddit Department of Justice has already determined it to be murder. I have to admit that the optics again do not look good, but there was a gunshot during the struggle that initiated the rest of the shooting. DHS has claimed the guy was armed with a handgun and "two magazines".

DHS has claimed the guy was armed with a handgun and "two magazines".

Time and Newsweek?

Playboy and Car and Driver.

Before the man was shot, he yelled "I buy it for the articles!" This obviously enraged the ICE officers.

The person standing at the back of the current angle in the Red Jacket seems to be filming and that'll likely give a ton of clarity to the proceedings

Red jacket woman on the far side seems to be filming, her clip'll likely provide a lot more clarity.

Does seem crazy that 5 or so guys couldn't better-restrain the perp, though if he did indeed pull a gun as people are claiming then it probably justifies the shoot.

Here's her clip: https://files.catbox.moe/sp296e.mp4

edit: the same video that @4doorsmorewhores linked

Seems like there were two perps. But after watching both angles I really can't tell a damn thing about the shooting.

Here's the other angle, it seems much more egregious

https://xcancel.com/anythingelsegg/status/2015130851764318288

It definitely seems a lot less defensible than Good did from the footage - having watched both angles of this shooting, I'm going to say that unless footage comes out of the arrestee drawing/firing a weapon, this was an awful shoot. From the footage, it isn't possible to tell if he drew a weapon; to my eyes, he seems unarmed in both (but to be fair, I also can't see which officer shot him).

The only reason I'm putting this caveat in place at all is due to around ~1:00 in the video; from what I can tell, there is a gunshot, all agents recoil, then two more gunshots and the arrestee drops. If the first gunshot was from the arrestee, that provides an adequate excuse for the officer(s) to shoot him in self defense.

Struggling with the cops while armed is a terrible idea. If I struggled with the cops while armed and was shot (while not agitating for a popular cause with media backing) , I wouldn't expect anyone to give a damn.

The proper thing to do if you are looking to obstruct police officers while exercising your second amendment right is to peacefully and respectfully submit to arrest. Guns make people jumpy, even if they shouldn't be, even if it's a mistake, you're still dead.

If the decedent first shot at LEO, then that isn’t “an adequate excuse” but fully justified.

He didn't, though; his gun is taken from him by the gray-jacketed agent just before the first shot is fired, I believe by the agent roughly center of frame in the light-colored jacket.

I don’t know how you can tell that. Looks like trying to see a fumble in a scrum.

People on X and other forums zoomed in on video from the first side e.g. so you can see the gray-jacketed agent talking the gun. In the second video from the reverse angle you can identify that agent and while you can't see what he's doing, you can match it up with the first video and figure out he's got the dead guy's gun when the agent in the middle draws and fires.

Sorry, yes, agreed.

Good stuff. Honestly hope there is body cam footage. Would help a lot.

"This definitely seems a lot less defensible, besides the part that might make it far more defensible, which I can't tell one way from the other in the video" is certainly a way to form an conclusion.

I mean, given that I was all over the Good thread defending the shoot, I wanted to at least leave my impression of this one. I can't see if there was a weapon on the arrestee, but it doesn't appear so from my viewing. If evidence comes out that shows a weapon, I've pre-committed to changing my mind, but as it is now, I think the ICE officers were wrong.

Maybe a better way of phrasing it would be something like this:

  1. Shooting unarmed people who do not pose an imminent threat is bad.
  2. ICE claims that this person posed an imminent threat.
  3. Video evidence is unclear at best, leaning towards "does not have a weapon". Audio evidence indicates that a shot was fired before the arrestee was shot, but the origin is unclear.
  4. As such, currently my opinion is "ICE fucked up big time".

Given that I attempted to analyze the evidence presented and form an opinion of it based on the videos, I find your statement kind of rude; I tried to clearly indicate what I could definitively tell and what I could not, so people could understand where my opinion came from and understand where I was uncertain, and what would change my mind on it. I suppose next time I should just say "lol ICE obviously evil" and leave it at that.

Video evidence is unclear at best, leaning towards "does not have a weapon". Audio evidence indicates that a shot was fired before the arrestee was shot, but the origin is unclear. As such, currently my opinion is "ICE fucked up big time".

And basing your judgement on unclear video evidence, with potentially contradictory evidence, when you yourself note the gaps, it is what you are receiving a raised eyebrow for.

Given that I attempted to analyze the evidence presented and form an opinion of it based on the videos, I find your statement kind of rude;

And I find ignoring the conclusions of one's own analysis, such as how the cited evidence does not support a conclusion is but carrying on as if it did, also rude. Rude towards the persons who will be accused of murder regardless of what clearer evidence might show, but also rude towards other readers trying to come to conclusions.

Maybe we should form a rude club.

I suppose next time I should just say "lol ICE obviously evil" and leave it at that.

If you want, but that too would be rude.

Well, yes, what else can one do? "Here's my impressions from the video, here's an important question it leaves unanswered, here's the sort of evidence that would change my mind" is perfectly reasonable and I have no idea why you seem determined to describe it so uncharitably. It's more thoughtfulness than you'll see from the vast majority of people on social media.

Well, yes, what else can one do?

Refrain from judgement until you have sufficient information to reach a sound conclusion. If you can identify key variables that would radically change your conclusion, start there.

This is all the more important in an information environment known to be contested by people who want to shape your first impression and conclusions regardless of ultimate accuracy.

"Here's my impressions from the video, here's an important question it leaves unanswered, here's the sort of evidence that would change my mind" is perfectly reasonable and I have no idea why you seem determined to describe it so uncharitably.

Because the 'key evidence' in question isn't evidence to change a mind, but to justify the conclusion one way or another in the first place.

There is a term for making a conclusion before you have the evidence for it, and it is 'assuming the conclusion.' This is a bad practice because it triggers fallacies and psychological biases that lead people to interpret later information in ways that confirm the first judgement..

It's more thoughtfulness than you'll see from the vast majority of people on social media.

That is a bar low enough to trip over.

A few things

a) I didn't draw a conclusion, I posted a better snippet and compared it to the other shooting (Which legally speaking, seems pretty cut and dry like the Kyle Rittenhouse self defense situation).

b) "Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion" at best thought-terminating and at worst bad faith. You could indefinitely not talk about anything you choose forever, I'm not going to listen to people who tell me to not to think about and discuss things.

c) New information could come to light 5 or 10 (or 500) years from now, take the recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s. I'll discuss with what current information I have and continue to update it as I get more information.

recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s

Wait what recent examples?

I’m pretty sure it was well known that there were high ranking members of the military who were disapproving of the crackdown, from a letter co-signed by multiple generals to Xu Qinxian refusing to march into Beijing, or Xu Feng, or He Yanran etc.

More comments

b) "Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion" at best thought-terminating and at worst bad faith. You could indefinitely not talk about anything you choose forever, I'm not going to listen to people who tell me to not to think about and discuss things.

Fortunately I am not telling you to not think about or discuss things.

Your paraphrase is this-

"Don't talk about it until you have sufficient information to reach a conclusion"

And my position is this-

Refrain from judgement until you have sufficient information to reach a sound conclusion.

Do you recognize that the the later is not only not the former, but is itself a justification to talk and seek information to reach a sound conclusion?

c) New information could come to light 5 or 10 (or 500) years from now, take the recent example we found out of the Chinese officer who refused to march on the Tiananmen protestors in the 1980s. I'll discuss with what current information I have and continue to update it as I get more information.

Discussion was not what was being discouraged.

Those seem like valid observations to me.

Let's see Paul Allen's conclusion.

You can literally see the agent draw his gun and shoot the guy in the back. I'm not sure what part of this you think is defensible.

Edit: @ minute 1:00 you can see the agent in the middle reach and pull his gun from his holster. The victim appears to be kneeling resisting arrest with multiple agents holding him down. At minute 1:01 that agent points his gun at the victim, and then it is blocked from view by another agent, milliseconds later you hear shots. The victim is still on his knees, it looks like one hand is supporting himself on the ground. His other hand is by his side.

I'm not sure what part of this you think is defensible.

The question isn't my thought, but Zephyr's thought- which notes major gaps in the evidence ('it isn't possible to tell if he drew a weapon,' the 1:00 mark which is compatible with a defensible shoot) that undercuts its value as evidence to form an opinion off of.

Do you disagree with the principle that if evidence doesn't actually support or deny a conclusion, it should not be used to support or deny a conclusion?

I have a really hard time with considering shooting a man being restrained, kneeling, in the back regardless of evidence of having a gun or not, to be a good, defensive shoot. I expect competence from Agents of the State, and this is not it. I think much like a felony murder, an agent of the state acting in such a way that is negligent, and leads to the death of someone should be charged with manslaughter.

I have a really hard time with considering shooting a man being restrained, kneeling, in the back regardless of evidence of having a gun or not, to be a good, defensive shoot.

Is your difficulty in considering potential factors supposed to invalidate the relevance of factors you did not consider but which may apply to the validity of the shoot?

I expect competence from Agents of the State, and this is not it.

Are you competent enough in the particulars of Agents of the State to judge competence?

I think much like a felony murder, an agent of the state acting in such a way that is negligent, and leads to the death of someone should be charged with manslaughter.

Are you any more competent in judging manslaughter than you are in judging competence?

More comments

If the decedent shot first, then shooting him in the back is very reasonable since there were agents in all directions. Lethal force need not be solely for protection of yourself but also for others.

Here are some stills

/images/17692879616745007.webp

/images/1769287962086671.webp

You can’t see the decedent’s arms or hands so you can’t tell what the decedent was doing.

It doesn’t mean the LEO had a justification but it also doesn’t mean they didn’t. It does mean that based on the current evidence it is indeterminate and we ought to wait for more evidence to emerge.

More comments

I'm sure why this is relevant it's almost a non-sequitor, look at that video and tell me who had a gun drawn. I cannot see the victim with the gun but i can see the ice agent draw his and then fire the first shot.

I mean the fact that the other ICE agents didn't seem to react with shock and 'dude what the fuck did you do' indicates that some justification was present for the shooting- we have plenty of evidence that they interpret use of force rules more broadly than the cops in general, and very little that they operate random death squads.

More comments

That still seems impossible to tell if he drew a weapon or not. It seems like all the agents back off prior to a first shot suggesting something but really impossible to be definitive. Hopefully there is a body cam.

This one seems like a bad shoot but I really can't tell anything. I'm not even sure I know who shot first. I see someone draw their gun, but their arm seems weirdly angled for them to be firing in the deceased's direction. When I watched the video from the other angle I thought maybe someone was shooting from within the building behind them.

I'm someone who generally sides with police and thought Babbitt and Good were both good shoots. It's a harder sell when you have several men on top of the deceased. If they saw a gun, the simpler thing would be for one of the men on top of him to restrain his hands or to grab it themselves. Shooting him while there were still people holding onto him is reckless unless there was really imminent danger we don't see on the cameras.

I watched the whole video.

Self-linking may be gauche, but what I wrote about the Renee Good video seems bang on for this as well.

The videographer gives us a couple dozen "what the fuck"s and "oh my god"s. After the gnashing of teeth, we get the performative righteousness slogan; "You're killing US!"

Us? Us?

Lady, did you you just get shot? Or did the dead guy who got shot get shot?

The "us" is the tribe, the team, the cause. The videographer gets to self-identify as an innocent victim but also gets to go on living. She will receive accolades and tribute from the other members of the tribe for her volume and repetitive efforts.

The videographer gives us a couple dozen "what the fuck"s and "oh my god"s. After the gnashing of teeth, we get the performative righteousness slogan; "You're killing US!"

Reminds me of Lebron James's "We’re literally hunted EVERYDAY/EVERYTIME we step foot outside the comfort of our homes."

Us? Us?

Lady, did you you just get shot? Or did the dead guy who got shot get shot?

The "us" is the tribe, the team, the cause.

This would be consistent with progressives having a stronger sense of asabiyyah than conservatives, akin to how blacks like James have a stronger sense of ethnonarcissism than other racial groups (especially whites, who don't appear to exhibit any).

The videographer gets to self-identify as an innocent victim but also gets to go on living. She will receive accolades and tribute from the other members of the tribe for her volume and repetitive efforts.

She is now a Stunning and Brave survivor who now has to courageously fight the Trauma of this event for the rest of her life. Women have always been the primary victims of men getting shot.

There's pics of the supposed gun... but it's a P320, which ICE agents have carried (though I believe current issue is a Glock)

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats