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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   28993 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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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.

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