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Notes -
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 ?
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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