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Here is what the Department of Homeland Security had to say on X/Twitter. (Alternative link for those without accounts.) Copying the text here:
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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:
EDIT: Formatting.
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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.
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He was more than "technically" resisting arrest, but if he'd wanted to massacre law enforcement he'd have come in shooting.
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.
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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.
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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.
Protestors are not perfect efficient rartionalists.
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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)
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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.
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Obviously not- was that not apparent over Covid at the latest?
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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.
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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.
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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 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).
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.
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