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On the object level (or is it the meta level?) I think people have not yet developed antibodies for bots/shills, especially bots. There's a kind of rigid commitment to free speech, too – «so what if he speaks weird?! It's the content that matters!», because people legitimately haven't internalized the astronomically high prior for the provenance of emdash slop, pointing out bots looks like paranoia. AI is too cheap and too good, we are not updating fast enough. There must be some high profile case to drive the point home.
There also is opportunistic support for voices in agreement.
On the more serious base reality topic, I think the problem with ICE is that the US is forming a whole new class of empowered oprichniki. American cops are already notoriously low human capital, but these guys in the videos are glib, sadistic and power-tripping like the worst kind of cops, and they are getting even with not so much illegals as the entire blue tribe; and the red tribe vicariously enjoys what they're doing. The worse the reputation of the ICE gets, the worse people are attracted to join it; the more it's excused by Trump's entourage, and signal-boosted by the regime social media (I can't call the current White House X account anything else), the bolder they become. The nervousness and tribal defensiveness (which i suspect you feel) also exacerbates the spiral; in a vacuum, these news would be condemned just 5 years ago by all but the most psychotic Red Tribers, now it's being normalized. Trumpism wasn't (isn't?) destined to become a form of fascism, but the ICE is a bona fide project of creating brownshirts, whether intentional or not. These are scum, and they're personally indebted to Trump. It's a very nasty kind of thing to have in a nation.
You still think it's about the hard but necessary work of reversing the demographic replacement or cracking down on crime, about culture war and unfair double standards. I believe that's too optimistic a way to look at the situation.
P.S. Minneapolis Police Chief on the track record of his boys vs the ICE.
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