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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12036 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 ?

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?

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.

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