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Should we discuss Signalgate? No, not the time Republican leaders embarrassed themselves by inviting a journalist into their private top secret (almost-literally) group chat. The new and improved Signalgate in Minnesota.
Many people have noted the coordinated nature of the "I'm-not-touching-you" mostly-non-violent stalking and harassing of ICE in Minnesota. I have also noted that included in their list of targets were just random people in the wrong kind of car.
Some conservative journalists and activists have been able gain access and insight to the method of coordination - a massive Signal chat where people divide into different roles and then join training sessions, read a manual, and then go off into the streets to take part in a coordinated effort to prevent ICE from arresting people and with the long term goal of ICE no longer enforcing bipartisan and popular federal law in the city of Minneapolis.
The roles are as follows:
Here's where it gets speculative: one of the admins on the group has the Username "Flan Southside" which many suspect is Minnesota Lt. Governor Peggy Flannigan. I'm not sure if there is evidence beyond just the name similarity, but one member of the Signal chat seemed to think (after these rumors became wide spread) that "Flan has been exposed." and the Signal member was going to go to Cuba where they had friends. Of course, by this point, the entire chat could be filled with Right Wingers trolling.
Also, it seems like Good and Pretti (seriously, good and pretty? How does this happen?) were members of the Signal chat and were being coordinated by the Signal Dispatch during their fatal encounters with Homeland Security.
At what point is this no longer just people exercising their first amendment rights? At what point is this a conspiracy to undermine the laws of this country resulting in the deaths of two people ?
https://x.com/ericldaugh/status/2015237261164437504?s=42
Chicago police chief - clear it’s illegal to fight ICE. ICE is real Police
https://x.com/trippyliberty/status/2015159673029001545?s=42
Minnesota - Ice is Fake police. Go fight them.
This is like two armies deciding they agree on the field to fight on. Entirely preventable if Minnesota behaves like Illinois.
I did not expect to have on my bingo card “Illinois Well Governed”
The whole thing about Chicago democrats is that they're consistently moderate compared to other big city democrats, because they are a corrupt political machine and not an ideological movement. Deciding they're just not going to fight ICE because what's in it for them is very in character.
Didn't they spend a bunch of money on illegals during Biden's term? I heard some complaints about it in the recent budget row. Doesn't seem like amoral cupidity to me.
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I saw an interesting take retweeted by Elon from Eric Schwalm, a retired green beret who operated during the GWOT. Reproduced here:
I wonder like /u/Gillitrut mentioned - what legal remedies are available here, under what law would the administration fight this? Is this why I hear so much on the right about invoking the insurrection act? What is interesting about that (according to my lawyer and personal constitutional scholar, Grok) is it does not do away with civilian courts, laws or constitutional protections - and if the courts are captured (can’t get judges to sign arrest warrants, can’t get prosecutors to prosecute, can’t get juries to convict, etc etc) then what is beyond that, if the insurrection act even if invoked is still hogtied by judiciary capture?
Grok is correct, at least to my understanding. The Insurrection Act merely permits the use of federal military forces for domestic law enforcement purposes. Such usage is otherwise forbidden by the Posse Comitatus Act. The escalation beyond this would probably require suspending the Writ of Habeas Corpus. Although the Constitution (and Supreme Court precedent) limit this suspension to an Act of Congress. As a historical matter, the only time it was actually suspended was by Lincoln during the Civil War. Though the Supreme Court ruled Lincoln's suspension unconstitutional he ignored them. Not an encouraging precedent!
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This entire wall of text is from ChatGPT. Is there any signal in this noise at all?
I noticed this too, but it seemed contextually weird enough for it to be ChatGPT to make me wonder if maybe people who spend long enough talking to ChatGPT pick up its voice.
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Everyone outside this forum is baking their own thoughts in LLM ovens, but what I noticed here is the baker (here’s hoping this isn’t an AI-generated warrant officer!) and the framing of the activity, supported by the signal chat leak. Does anyone else who has experience with insurgencies have a take on Minneapolis we can read?
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What set of actions you've described do you think are, or perhaps ought to be, crimes? What section of the United States Code do they violate? The closest one, in my mind, is the license plate one. Which could be a CFAA violation depending on how they are getting the information about plate owners. Although the Twitter thread you linked shows the database described as being crowd sourced, which would not be a crime. The one ICE usually cites to is 18 USC 111 but note that statute requires the use of force in impeding federal officials going about their duties.
What section of the United States Code describes the crime of "undermin[ing] the laws of this country resulting in the deaths of two people"? What are its elements?
Here are a few that I'm thinking of:
Assaulting, Resisting, or Impeding (18 U.S.C. § 111)
This statue criminalizes any act to "forcibly assault, resist, oppose, impede, intimidate, or interfere with" a federal officer while they are performing their official duties. Even without physical contact, acts that "impede" or "intimidate" can be prosecuted as misdemeanors (up to 1 year in prison). If the harassment involves physical contact or the intent to commit another felony, it becomes a felony (up to 8 years in prison). If a weapon is used or serious injury occurs (like throwing an ice brick at someone), the penalty increases to up to 20 years.
People are definitely trying to impede Federal officers. They think they're "unarresting" people.. They actually succeed sometimes. This woman is here on camera saying that she harrassed federal agents in the process of arresting someone until they let the person go. She says, "dozens more [daily arrests] would be happening if it wasn't for the organized way that my community is showing up to stop these ICE agents. And we're scaring them."
I couldn't have written a better confession to this and the crimes below if I tried.
Influencing or Injuring an Officer (18 U.S.C. § 1503)
This law makes it a crime to "endeavor to influence, intimidate, or impede" any officer of a U.S. court through threats or force. The key here is the "corrupt intent" to interfere with the due administration of the law. It is generally punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Typically ICE would not be considered officers of the court. However, this statue may apply if the harassment is intended to influence a case currently in immigration court.
Federal Stalking (18 U.S.C. § 2261A)
If the harassment involves a "course of conduct" (repeated acts) that places an officer or their family in reasonable fear of death or serious injury, it falls under federal stalking laws if any of these people are coming from out of state. This is typically a felony carrying up to 5 years, but can be much higher if bodily injury or death results.
A coordinated conspiracy to stalk and harass federal officers significantly escalates the legal consequences. When multiple people work together to interfere with federal law enforcement, the government can move beyond individual harassment charges and use powerful conspiracy and obstruction statutes.
In a conspiracy, every member can be held legally responsible for the actions of their co-conspirators, even if they weren't personally present for every act of harassment. One could argue that this is overpowered, surely not everyone on the Signal chat is intentionally committing a felony. Never the less, here's the law:
Conspiracy to Impede or Injure an Officer (18 U.S.C. § 372)
This is the most direct statute for the Signal chat. It specifically targets groups (two or more people) who conspire to prevent a federal officer from performing their duties through force, intimidation, or threats. The penalty is up to 6 years in prison, plus fines.
General Conspiracy to Defraud the U.S. (18 U.S.C. § 371)
While "defraud" sounds like financial crime, the "defraud clause" of this statute is broad. It covers any conspiracy to obstruct, interfere with, or impair the lawful functions of any federal agency. Working together to "defeat the lawful function" of the government (e.g., preventing the ICE or CBP from enforcing laws) carries a penalty of up to 5 years in prison.
Obstruction of Justice (18 U.S.C. §§ 1512(d)(3))
If the harassment is aimed at officers involved in an active investigation or court proceeding, it can be charged as obstruction.
Which leads us to:
If the group is highly organized and engages in a "pattern of racketeering activity" (which can include threats, or obstruction of justice), they could face charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. RICO can put people in prison for 20 years per count.
(Full Disclosure, I used Gemini to get the list together but I checked each statue to make sure there are no hallucinations and that I'm willing to defend the applicability of each one. Then I edited the output so it's mostly my words where it isn't US Code verbatim.)
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The amusing thing to me is that there is an unwritten seventh role on which the whole operation depends, "retard who gets shot." If the operation proceeded as written with everyone playing their roles perfectly, nothing would happen. So some women stand on the opposite side of the street from ICE and blow whistles for a while, so what? This whole system only functions when somebody is stupid enough to get shot. Of course, none of the participants know that, least of all the people that get shot, but it is how it works nonetheless.
Yeah it seems very likely to me that part of the game plan is to goad ICE into killing or seriously harming someone who can be held up as a martyr.
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If they stayed on the other side of the street, that would be fine. But they seem to insist on getting right up close to the ICE agents, because, uh, yelling and screaming and noise-making at someone will never have any consequences, the other person is just supposed to stand there and take it, right?
The only rationale I can see for this kind of protesting is "disorientate the guy so he runs away crying and can't drag the poor brown person off to the concentration camp", and that's as likely to end in shootings like Pretti as it is in "cowardly bully jackboot thug runs away pissing himself and crying".
The whole thing is deeply unserious- they would never face the logical consequences of their actions. They're the good guys in an elaborate game.
Newsflash- it isn't a game. Confronting police like this is a very hazardous activity that gets people seriously hurt, or in some cases, killed.
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My mind keeps comparing it to accounts of melee infantry battles of antiquity: both sides have lined up and squared off, but mostly they just yell and taunt back and forth from outside of arms reach until someone is stupid enough to actually step forward. In this case, there's the added meta oddity that both sides would claim that they're not there for battle, although their formations suggest otherwise.
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I thought "aftercare" had to be a joke, but no, they've really got a role in that signal chat called "aftercare provider". Although that term has been around for a very long time in the context of care for convalescing patients, in the current cultural consciousness I think it most commonly comes up as a very leftish-inflected BDSM/kink scene term-of-art that has leaked into leftish spaces more generally. Choice of language may not be conscious but it's not coincidental, and I find it very interesting that the term they've chosen is from a conceptual realm in which participants playact pain and danger but no one is really going to be hurt and it can stop at any time. I think this is another element communicating the unseriousness of this movement, and by "unseriousness" I mean the failure to act like the things they claim to believe about the world are actually true.
I do believe that the protestors "mean it" when they talk about Trump's gestapo going through the street killing anyone they please and kidnapping people and acting with total impunity, that there's no accountability, that they are evil and can get away with anything and something must be done. I believe that they believe these premises. What I don't understand is the "unseriousness", the failure to follow from premises to conclusion. Why be surprised that the jackbooted thugs with guns have real bullets, not rubber? Why tell the SS agent to go take a lunch break? Don't you know they are murderous and won't be held accountable?
I think some protest movements (left or right) in the United States have a touch of "video game logic" to them, where if they do the right thing a victory screen will display and they get what they want. I don't think that is the problem here. Part of it might be the extension of adolescence that all millennials seem to suffer from and its concomitant black-and-white thinking and sense of invulnerability. Part of it might be that people have been calling everything Nazis and brownshirts for so long that the reference became unmoored from the referent and the conclusion no longer follows from the stated premises. I don't know and I don't know how to know.
But that choice of language sure is weird.
Considering that many anti-ICE folk I know work in healthcare, it is probable that the culture is actually informed by their profession - not their hobby.
Personally I doubt that the amount of healthcare people protesting overwhelms the number of merely heavily-online-leftish people enough to drive language choices. Further, I don't think the medical sense of it applies at all. I very much doubt that they're planning for long term injury aftercare vs emotional "I had a hard day playacting danger and now I need to be cuddled and validated" aftercare in a more BDSM sense of the term.
At the very least, these people are going to need to step inside a heated shelter and have some tea. Possibly change clothes and get into a different vehicle as well.
Sure. If we assume for the sake of argument that would fall under their "aftercare" label, then I would still assert that language choice is informed by squishy-leftish-queerish-sex-playacting-without-the-sex and that unconscious choice communicates unseriousness.
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This and the refusal of local authorities to cooperate with ICE has been the main problem all along. Likely that Good and Pretti would both be alive otherwise. This is all about trying to obstruct Federal law enforcement but done in a way with some legal plausible deniability. We all know what they are doing, and they know that we know what they are doing, but all the while they repeat "I'm not touching you! I'm not touching you!" Meanwhile, the media has leaned heavily into the hysterical propaganda, because they've finally seen their opportunity to hurt Trump and are going hard.
They're successfully distracting from the fraud scandal, which is likely to lead to a more general government corruption scandal down the line. There are strong incentives to create as many dangerous situations as possible and blame ICE for whatever happens. It's working very well so far, but I suspect it doesn't have the legs to keep going in the long run. Question is who will blink first--it'll be Trump
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of course this means keeping watch while standing still (not moving). I agree, it is uncommon usage.
As to the question in your OP: if the Lt. Governor is committing crimes then indeed there could be a criminal conspiracy. Some people in discussions have thrown out the word insurrection. I am wondering if there is a principled difference: for example, is insurrection a kind of formal and legal term that describes the state of minnesota itself and not any of its individual leaders. I suppose in a trivial way being a sanctuary city or state might be insurrection. I'm not sure this signal chat stuff really adds any more to that.
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CUBA? These people are so desperate to become part of a rebel alliance they can barely contain themselves. That link makes them come off like a bunch of people who watched One Battle After Another and who finally have a chance to liven up their revolutionary LARP. The sense of adventure must be exhilarating for them. I wonder if Jungle Pussy is in that chat. I hope their threat of prosecution is as real as they want to be.
Maybe it's a LARP, but if a future liberal administration massively expanded the ATF and descended on Jacksonville doing intensive searches, do you think the right could come up with any kind of effective organization on this level? The LARP lets them push a counter-narrative quite strongly.
No, the right couldn't do that because it wouldn't create some nebulous antifa group that operates behind a strong shield of plausible deniability. They'd immediately be taken seriously.
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This sounds a lot like what the ATF was up to in the 90s. Ruby Ridge and Waco really did prompt some effective red tribe organization: on the bad side McVeigh and Nichols, and less-violently a bunch of grassroots interest in gun rights that has been pretty politically effective, like defeated renewing the assault weapons ban, constitutional open carry in several states, and all-time highs in gun sales. The political weight of the NRA (and adjacent organizations) in the last couple decades is exactly what "effective organization" should look like.
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It is right now. This isn’t 1st amendment protected activity. The problem is that there isn’t a federal statute that clearly and unambiguously covers this sort of operation. There is no “use of noisemaking machines to harass federal law enforcement” section of 18 USC.
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