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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   31838 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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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:

  1. Patrol of various kinds - foot, car, stationary (not sure what a stationary patrol is.) They look out for suspicious people, activity, or vehicles and then notify dispatch. Also join in mobbing once a federal official has been located.
  2. Dispatch - people who assess the information coming from patrols and decide to send people out to harass what they presume are federal agents enforcing federal law.
  3. License plate checker - here is where it gets interesting to me. They have people who are able to check license plates to identify the driver. In the case of a rental car, they are able to identify who rented it. This indicates someone is misusing their access to government databases.
  4. Commuters - Their word for people who stalk what they presume are federal officials or hostile journalists with their cars.
  5. Medics/aftercare - people who help those who have been injured or pepper sprayed for breaching the peace and trying to impede federal officers from enforcing the law.
  6. Donors and others providing material support towards the cause, including providing housing assistance.

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 ?

At what point is this no longer just people exercising their first amendment rights?

I think a lot of people misunderstand what First Amendment means. It protects the freedom of speech, but it doesn't mean anything you do with speech is now outside the law. It means you can not be prosecuted just for speaking, but if you speech was part of another crime - fraud, murder, insurrection, conspiracy to obstruct law enforcement, any crime - then you can be punished for that crime, and 1A would not shield you just because your participation used speech as a medium. It's of course more complex, but the point is - you can exercise your 1A rights and still be prosecuted, if conspiring to attack ICE officers is a prosecutable offense. It'd be probably hard to upgrade it to felony murder because the prosecution would have to prove direct causal link between what somebody said and the actions that led to death - which will be very hard to do, since nobody probably told them explicitly "now go and drive over ICE officer that is standing on the corner of This and That!" (though Good's partner, saying "drive baby drive!", could be in legal jeopardy for that, if the feds would want to go after her). But if feds can establish the causal link between something said on the char and some lawless action, like attacking ICE officers, then they have a basis for prosecution. If they find an organizational structure (which is almost certainly there, the question is whether the feds can find the hard evidence for it) then they could also employ RICO which doesn't even require causal links. But Republicans, for whatever reason, have been very reluctant to use RICO against the militant left.

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 ?

I am not sure there is a statue against annoying and frustrating law enforcement. Perhaps if they coordinated to prevent the arrest of anyone specific, that could be an obstruction charge.

Looking out for feds and reporting them seems to be covered by 1A. Coordinating protesters also seems fine as long as you have an expectation of them not engaging in violence. (I would argue that for the most part, the protesters do not want to break the bones of ICE agents. This is wise, because ICE carries guns, and getting overwhelmed by a mob would likely cause them to shoot their way out without even the benefits of me calling it excessive force.)

The license plate checkers are clearly abusing their access, but likely providing license plates to them is covered by 1A. Commuters should also be fine, if there was a law against following strangers then a lot of divorce detectives would be out of work.

Medics are fine if they say their role is to provide aid to people who got injured, and leave the question if they were trying to impede anyone open. I can't imagine them going "yes, you were pepper sprayed, but sadly, you did nothing to provoke it. As you did not actively try to impede law enforcement, we will not help you", so I guess they are in the clear. Donors likewise.

I am sure that the Trump administration has access to some competent lawyers, and if there was a nice big federal law all the protesters were breaking, they would get arrested and charged.

The license plate checkers are clearly abusing their access, but likely providing license plates to them is covered by 1A. Commuters should also be fine, if there was a law against following strangers then a lot of divorce detectives would be out of work.

There's some complexity here. Many states require private detectives to be licensed. Also there are specific laws against stalking federal officers.

If a bad actor were to start submitting the license plates of Federal Judges and Clerks as verified ICE, the whole system would be shut down quickly.

I am not sure there is a statue against annoying and frustrating law enforcement. Perhaps if they coordinated to prevent the arrest of anyone specific, that could be an obstruction charge.

There are definitely local laws against stalking and harassment, and obstruction of law enforcement does not need to be physical. However, it seems extremely unlikely that charges will be pursued.

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”

Sidenote from the Walz clip: there is a fascinating trend of liberal sign language interpreters desperately trying to get their social media moment in the spotlight by making the facial expressions of a toddler eating a lemon. They have the plausible deniability of helping the disabled (despite live captioning being cheaper and more effective) but always make the politician they accompany look less like Che Guevara and more like Elmo.

Like @OracleOutlook said below, facial expressions are part of sign language. Not doing them, or doing them too subtly, is the literal equivalent of poor diction.

The hyper theatrical nature of the interpreters is largely due to the fact that they might not have the best camera angle on them. In ASL, squaring up to talk to whomever you are talking to is best practice. If the camera is often an angle, or there are multiple cameras and you are signing to the "primary" but maybe the broadcast jumps around to different camera angles, you have be extra demonstrative.

However, you're still right that it's in group virtue signaling. First because sometimes no one checks the credentials of the interpreter. And, second, because deaf people who do watch TV are going to used closed captions. Or they're going to read whatever the press release is five minutes after the press conference comes to its conclusion.

There's actually an interesting culture war going on within the deaf community. Cochlear implants are seen, by some deaf folks, as betrayals to the culture and they will not let their deaf children get them. You may have heard terms like "gold star" gays - men who have never had sex with a woman ever, only other men. There's a kind of equivalent for deaf families. When two deaf people have a baby, if that baby is deaf, in some circles, that's a special awesome superstar deaf baby. Dating outside of the community is sometimes looked at with suspicion. At all deaf events (parties and the like) if it is discovered that someone signing can hear (i.e. they learned ASL for some reason beyond necessity) they're often quite rudely booted from the party.

Facial expressions are actually part of sign language. The sign meaning "late" has no facial expression attached to it, while the same hand movement accompanied by sticking out the tongue means "not yet." Other facial expressions add adverbs. Still others are the difference between a statement and a question.

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.

Maybe the governor’s house? I guess his brother is a tranny but they definitely have friends who watch Fuentes. The city though seems have gone far more leftward especially since the budget because so pension f’d for anyone to fix it.

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.

Yes, they piss money away, because that's what corrupt political machines do. They don't pick fights with the federal government for ideological reasons because that'll get their toys taken away.

I saw an interesting take retweeted by Elon from Eric Schwalm, a retired green beret who operated during the GWOT. Reproduced here:

As a former Special Forces Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counterinsurgency ops—both hunting insurgents and trying to separate them from sympathetic populations—I’ve seen organized resistance up close. From Anbar to Helmand, the pattern is familiar: spotters, cutouts, dead drops (or modern equivalents), disciplined comms, role specialization, and a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly.

What’s unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn’t “protest.” It’s low-level insurgency infrastructure, built by people who’ve clearly studied the playbook.

Signal groups at 1,000-member cap per zone. Dedicated roles: mobile chasers, plate checkers logging vehicle data into shared databases, 24/7 dispatch nodes vectoring assets, SALUTE-style reporting (Size, Activity, Location, Unit, Time, Equipment) on suspected federal vehicles. Daily chat rotations and timed deletions to frustrate forensic recovery. Vetting processes for new joiners. Mutual aid from sympathetic locals (teachers providing cover, possible PD tip-offs on license plate lookups). Home-base coordination points. Rapid escalation from observation to physical obstruction—or worse.

This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition. Replace “ICE agents” with “occupying coalition forces” and the structure maps almost 1:1 to early-stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000s.

The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in. When your own citizens build and operate this level of parallel intelligence and rapid-response network against federal officers—complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal—you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.

I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus. Now pieces of it are standing up in American cities, enabled by elements of local government and civil society. That should keep every thinking American awake at night.

Not because I want escalation. But because history shows these things don’t de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists and the cadre believe they’re winning the information war.

We either recognize what we’re actually looking at—or we pretend it’s still just “activism” until the structures harden and spread.

Your call, America. But from where I sit, this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore. It’s phase one of something we’ve spent decades trying to keep off our own soil.

I wonder like /u/Gillitrut mentioned - what legal remedies are available here, under what law would the administration fight this, if this is an actual insurgency? 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?

As an active duty US Navy SEAL with over 300 confirmed kills, I'm extremely disappointed that anyone has even bothered to read that wall of AI slop, let alone believe it has any factual value.

You don’t believe the individual has his claimed credentials or you disagree with his analysis?

I am skeptical of the value of anything that starts with an appeal to authority, but then it's clear that the entity writing the piece does not have the claimed credentials.

Maybe the person posting really is a former Special Forces Warrant Officer, but the words did not originate from a former Special Forces Warrant Officer's brain, they came from a computer without any of that experience and at most a former Special Forces Warrant Officer signed off on them. The post starts off with an appeal to the author's unique experience, but that person with a unique experience did not generate the thoughts, a computer generated the thoughts.

You are saying he does not have his credentials, how did you verify that? Who would you rather read for an assessment on insurgent behavior as it applies to these agitators in MN?

I talk to people at my office over Slack who are obviously using LLMs to generate replies to conversations, but the content of their text could only come from their own unique experience and context otherwise it would be useless. It gets on my nerves, but I recognize they just prompted a modern scribe to put that experience to words.

I spent years training partner forces to dismantle exactly this kind of apparatus.

So, what did he train these partner forces to do, what's in the playbook? I know how one playbook goes:

  • grab a suspicious "legal observer" off the street
  • put a sack over her head, take her to a secure location
  • beat her up so she stops thinking you're bluffing
  • force her to unlock her phone and Signal app, make a copy of all data
  • force her to say who invited her to the group chat
  • beat her up again to keep her on her toes
  • go through her contact list one by one, make her tell you everything about each person, identify potential activists and loved ones
  • keep her detained for a couple of weeks just so she can't blab too early
  • beat her up regularly so she starts associating even minor noncompliance with pain
  • while she's detained, repeat the process with the person that invited her to the group chat and other potential activists
  • release her and threaten to go after her loved ones if she doesn't change her wicked ways or dares to complain

The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded, trained (somewhere), and directed by people who live in the same country they’re trying to paralyze law enforcement in

Pangram says 100% AI generated. Make what assessments you will about the reliability of the author and how likely it is that they're actually a former Special Forces Warrant Officer.

Two Jews are sitting on a bench. One of them is reading the local Yiddish newspaper. The other is reading Der Sturmer. The former says to the latter, “Why on earth would you read that drek?” The other replies, “Well, when I read our paper, we are a poor and battered people who suffer in ghettos, pogroms, and all manner of tragedies. But when I read Der Sturmer, we run the banks, the governments, the whole world – life is great!”

Who said anything about Jews? From what I glanced at, the judges facilitating this have Star Wars names - just recently a federal judge in Oregon with the name Mustafa Kasubh (more golem-sounding than Jew) rejected a DOJ effort to uncover fraudulent voter rolls.

This is a good line of inquiry, what is the national origin, ethnic and religious make up of these judges?

The joke is that if you listen to this right-wing guy it sounds like the left are super scary and all-powerful and about to become literal ISIS.

It's funny because Der StĂĽrmer's take much more accurately describes the position of Jews today.

then what is beyond that

Extra legal interesting times.

Times where one side has, among other things, by OP admission, "low-level insurgency infrastructure" of "early-stage urban cells" built out of nothing operating on the streets, while the other has few thousands bottom of the barrel thugs and few tens of million spectators watching and cheering these thugs on screens.

Log on your Polymarket accounts and place your bets.

Urban revolutionary movements crush ruralites, historically, where there is a single capital and urban revolutionaries can easily take control of the military. I'm not sure that's the current situation. It takes total mobilization of the entire lib population of Minneapolis, united against an external threat, to cause significant annoyance to federal law enforcement. How many chuds in pickup trucks would it take to cut Minneapolis off from the power grid? I'd wager Kulak's twitter followers in Minnesota could do it alone. What the """urban insurgents""" have is organization and structure, which works well under a rule-of-law framework, but it doesn't go very far to mitigating the extreme strategic disadvantages modern cities would face without direct US military support.

I'd wager Kulak's twitter followers in Minnesota could do it alone.

Maybe they could, but they are not, so far, doing anything at all. And there are lots of (nonviolent, legal) things that could be done right now, no need to wait for the full boogaloo.

Where are, for example, counterprotestors, protecting ICE from liberal protestors? Imagine three sided standoff - ICE, anti-ICE protestors and anti-anti-ICE counterprotestors duking it out on the rough streets of Milwaukee (all dressed in identical camo and armed up the wazoo).

If you could produce the link, that would be appreciated.

Here you go.

https://twitter.com/Schwalm5132/status/2015470661490057540

Thank ye

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!

This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2 (command and control) with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, and task organization that would make a SF team sergeant nod in recognition.

This entire wall of text is from ChatGPT. Is there any signal in this noise at all?

I picked this up as well. It's actually...incredibly dense with classic LLM tells. We've known about these for over a year now. Do these not even get proofread before posting?

This isn’t spontaneous outrage. This is C2

The most sobering part? It’s domestic. Funded,

eral officers—complete with doxxing, vehicle pursuits, and harassment that’s already turned lethal—you’re no longer dealing with civil disobedience. You’re facing a distributed resistance that’s learned the lessons of successful insurgencies: stay below the kinetic threshold most of the time, force over-reaction when possible, maintain popular support through narrative, and never present a single center of gravity.

^^this one's a doozy. Em-dashes, "not x, it's y," and a list in a series all in a row.

Not because I want escalation. But because h

tually looking at—or we pretend it’s still just “

this isn’t January 2026 politics anymore. It’s phase one of something we’ve spent d

I am getting so sick of this shit. Everything over 300 words on the internet sounds like it was written by the same thing. It's all over reddit. It's in my email inbox. It's in my newsfeed. It's in Youtube videos.

Edit: Fucking damn it all. Fuck this gay earth. I opened up my trading app to look at some news about silver, and the first sentence of the first thing I click on reads thus: "Silver didn't just rally—it went parabolic."

I hate you Sam Altman.

^^this one's a doozy. Em-dashes, "not x, it's y," and a list in a series all in a row.

LLM's didn't invent that rhetorical style, you know.

LLM's

At least I know you're a human.

Do you think I'm wrong that this was an LLM's output? Why do you disagree?

If you agree with me, what is the purpose of your comment? To point out to me that em-dashes existed before 2022? I'm aware. Thank you, Dean!

Do you think I'm wrong that this was an LLM's output? Why do you disagree?

It's more that I don't find those three particular points as particularly strong evidence. I've been known to use all three myself, particularly if I'm trying abide by a relatively limited format like twitter, and as you seem confident enough that I'm human. Then again, other people online (typically in other spaces where I don't have a reputation) occasionally accuse me of being a bot, so...

I am ambivalent about whether the overall post is LLM. I wouldn't be surprised one way or the other, but LLMs typically write about what's been well written in the training data. That sort of description of mid-2000s insurgency cell structure isn't impossible to find, but it's not exactly particularly common either. Parts of the text- what you refer to as the 'it's not X, but Y' tell- was a not-uncommon style of upfront caveats I loosely recall being more common from the era. Part of the challenges of counterinsurgency was trying to get (often senior) leaders to break their analogies or default framing devices. 'It's not familial complicity, it's a tribal dynamic' sort of distinctions. These tended to be more rhetorical than written, since you often needed to find the metaphor/analogy that would work for your audience.

So could I see an LLM picking up old reports for some prompt trying to analogize anti-ICE protests and the Iraq insurgency? Sure. But I could also see it being a rhetorical hangover of someone who actually imbibed in that language-culture back in the day, which would match their basis for claiming to recognize the patterns being discussed. And since I haven't seen a particular flood of media sketching out the structural similarities between anti-ICE protest groups and insurgency groups, it weakens my priors that a colon: list is 'just' AI output. Not enough to discount the possibility, but not enough to presume it either.

I do find it kind of tangential to addressing the point of the post, and the sort of thing that I occasionally see as a way to dismiss grappling with the argument entirely in a 'it's just AI, no reason to consider the argument.' I don't think that was your intent / purpose, but rather that you were focusing on a particular aspect of the post's composition, which I consider valid enough. I just raise an eyebrow only at a particular part of your part that I've been accused of being a bot over.

If you agree with me, what is the purpose of your comment? To point out to me that em-dashes existed before 2022? I'm aware. Thank you, Dean!

Any time. For my next trick, I'll point out that em-dashes and such are still used by non-LLMs after 2022 as well.

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.

EDIT: Wait, this is just a viral Xitter post? Totally AI.

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?

I started my career in Afghanistan. I don't have anything interesting to say except that the problem in both cases was the media. There was never a genuine kinetic threat that would cause the Coalition to fail. The coalition was winning by denying the Taliban access to wealthy cities. There was no reason the deployment couldn't have become a low intensity denial of movement operation around key population hubs indefinitely. But the media called it the forever war and assumed it had to end one day (plenty of occupations don't, actually, end).

If you're interested in reducing risk of civil war you need to deal with the media. If you can't deal with the media you can't reduce risk. How you deal with it is a whole other problem. But I'm of the opinion every single military/government operation needs an extremely robust media strategy, treated like a win condition. Because we keep losing winning wars due to hostile media reporting.

The surge worked in Iraq. We were preventing Afghan women from entering a lifetime of servitude in Afghanistan. And ICE is enforcing a federal (but unpopular) law. And all three of these have been defeated by the media.

Governments need to realise that without media support these operations will fail.

The WO who posted that tweet is a shooter. He wants to go shoot high value targets (figuratively I hope) in the anti-ICE protests. He needs to recognise that this isn't the path to victory. The structural insurgent groups he believes are forming are a problem. But they're a second order effect of the broader media campaign that is rallying these groups under a banner. Just like ISIS, young people are vulnerable to these types of calls to arms.

The structural insurgent groups he believes are forming are a problem. But they're a second order effect of the broader media campaign that is rallying these groups under a banner.

My only... quibble? addition?- is that there's a bit of a chicken-and-egg of whether the structural groups are caused by the media, or cause the media. Journolist and Ezra Klein of NYT fame was deliberately trying to shape the media framing of things as far back as the later 2000s. This doesn't even go into The Resistance phase of Trump 1, in which various media actors were willing partners in coordinated instigation, or some of the Biden-era totally-organic media campaigns.

I can agree that the structural insurgent groups in this discussion are downstream of the broader media campaign, but the structure with intent to resist had media allies/participants/collaborators from the start. The broader media campaign in this context is itself a product of structural insurgent groups. Even if the nature of the media insurgent groups is different from the whistle-blowing groups, that itself is consistent with the nature of those GWOT networks-of-networks.

I think I'd say that even if media comes second, it's a major force multiplier. You can have 500 guys in a city who all really want to fight ICE. But the NYT seal of approval turns that 500 into 50,000. Legacy media retains the prestige to set the ethical tone of these kinds of things, despite having fuck all readers. And their power to endorse or condemn movements is what matters to a lot of these protest groups. Most of protesting is signaling, and purely signaling. You need to be confident you're on the right side, and you need a third party you trust to make that clear. Prestigious media organisations can still act as those arbitrators.

The broader media campaign in this context is itself a product of structural insurgent groups. Even if the nature of the media insurgent groups is different from the whistle-blowing groups, that itself is consistent with the nature of those GWOT networks-of-networks.

Yes I agree. Which is why I'm saying the number one problem these types of anti-insurgency campaign need to deal with is that media campaign. You can tell everybody ISIS is evil because they are, and they relish in that. Working out how to do that with "save the whales" guys, who project via media that they're just trying to stop a hispanic mother of 5 from being deported is a very hard problem.

I am just noting I agree with this argument in general / don't feel we were disagreeing over anything in particular as much as emphasis or some order of operations, and have nothing else to add.

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.

At what point is this a conspiracy to undermine the laws of this country resulting in the deaths of two people ?

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:

  • RICO Act (18 U.S.C. §§ 1961–1968)
    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.)

I'll caveat that, in addition to various legal penumbras and interpretations that might make a frictionless-cow-spherical-plane model of these laws complicated to bring to bear, there's a more direct issue where the law is enforced by a system, and the system does not want to accept charges even where the crime was clear and documented.

Yes, I wonder how this was resolved in the South when federal law forbade segregation.

Identify / appoint judges willing to support the federal action, and process the actions through them specifically. If chokepoints exists, create redundancies that are more favorable to actions.

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.

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.

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.

they would never face the logical consequences of their actions

I mean, kinda? ICE is incidentally (and IMO, purposefully to an unknown but non-trivial degree) fulfilling the function of removing non-whites from the country, and you'll notice that almost all of the visible ICE obstructors are, ah, not the target demographic(s). Add on the pre-existing belief in white invincibility and they come to the (not wholly unjustified) conclusion that as White Saviors, they have the duty to save the helpless brown folx from the Evil Empire set on their destruction.

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.

This is the "penis sheath" model of warfare. Even the least advanced specimens of agricultural civilizations, like football ultras, don't fight like that.

The feeling I get from reading acoup (e.g. on "battle pulses") is that there was more of a clash of steel on steel than that.

In many cases, one of the parties is under time pressure (because other conditions are turning to their disadvantage, they are under archery fire, etc). "Stand there and insult your opponent" seems not a good strategy, and and army which can actually coordinate and make contact will outperform one who can not in the long run.

Of course, any infantryman who advances in bloodlust without checking what the rest of the line is doing will unlikely to fight more than one battle.

But I would expect at least the Romans (whose tactics were cutting edge, and whose swords had a reach disadvantage over spears) to be able to advance into reach.

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.

Eh, as others have noted a lot of these people are in healthcare or identify themselves as having interest in healthcare related topics like mental health.

You'll see aftercare mentioned in all sorts of therapy culture and misc. soft stuff.

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.

That could just as easily be labelled welfare or hospitality.

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.

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

not sure what a stationary patrol is

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.

I agree, it is uncommon usage.

The normal term would be "lookout". Just like someone is not "sneaking in place", but "hiding".

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.

In addition to the observations of @VoxelVexillologist, I don't think Florida man (or Florida woman for that matter) would be pussy-footing around with all this "plausible deniability" and "I'm not touching you" nonsense. Instead I imagine that some variant of "hurricane rules" would be in effect.

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.

if a future liberal administration massively expanded the ATF and descended on Jacksonville

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 the defeat of 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.

”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 ?”

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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