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Notes -
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.
Tim Walz:
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
"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.
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?
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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:
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.
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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.
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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.
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.)
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.
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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.
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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.
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They're supporters.
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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.
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.
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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.
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Why was Little Rock the center of 101st Airborne operations?
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Other places cooperate, or at least dont display this level of constant obstruction and intransigence.
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How? Even if you think this is political ping-pong, it's completely par for the course.
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