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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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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 Stürmer'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.

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