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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31647 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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Just people who had been going to protests for 20 years and had an idea of how to disrupt police operations for these events.

Which is not at all the same as "so a bunch of teachers, shop-keepers, and Ordinary Decent Citizens attended a meeting in the school hall about what was going on and decided that they'd work to protest, and they spontaneously pulled out of the air good organisational tactics".

Have you ever tried to get parents to join something like the Parent-Teacher Association? Like pulling teeth. Ordinary people may have some loose kind of "so we all agree, we'll meet here next Tuesday" organising going on, but by next Tuesday half of them won't turn up. The guy keeping the rota for who does the hour's protesting outside the facility goes on holiday. Minnie says she knows she signed up for 3-5 pm on Wednesday but sorry, she has to take her dog to the vet.

For this kind of organised and consistent action, you need somebody (several somebodies) who already know what they're doing and how to identify the people who will consistently turn up and do what they're told. Maybe that is "someone who has been going to protests for 20 years and has an idea of how to disrupt police operations", but what you're missing is that those 20 years are training. Ordinary Bill and Sally who are vaguely outraged and horrified and turn up to the first meeting in the school hall don't know this stuff. They need the 'professional antifa black bloc veteran' to tell them what to do and how to do it and, most importantly, make sure they do turn up to do it.

For example, this post off Tumblr reblogging an article from "New York" magazine speaking of "muscle memory" from the Floyd protests. You don't need foreign spies or specially trained secret agents, just a hard core of committed activists who recruit the normies when the events are favourable to do so:

It is the misfortune of Minnesota’s ICE contingent to have invaded the state with the second-highest levels of social trust, trailing only Utah. Many activist networks were formed in 2020; we are seeing, Petrus says, Minnesotans call upon the “muscle memory” of the George Floyd protests. In mid-January, a neighborhood organization for a part of town called Whittier put out a call for a meeting to organize a “Neighborhood ICE response”; more than 800 people showed up at the local elementary school and formed a tidy line extending well beyond the door. (“Why a line?” I ask someone later. “Because we are in Minnesota,” he says.) In the cafeteria, in their big coats, adults struggled to get their legs through benches attached to long lunch tables. Because there were too many Minnesotans to fit in a single room, officials and parents and teachers went room to room giving the same speeches about how to help neighbors in hiding. They then gridded out the rooms, dividing the neighborhood into smaller subdivisions. Close neighbors met one another (“Oh, you live on the other side of the museum”) and formed hyperlocal Signal groups. At the first sighting of an agent, someone could ping the group and draw them outside. Their favored tactic was noise. They would make it impossible for ICE to conduct raids in secret.

If the whistle is the sound of resistance, the sensation is the never-ending vibration of a half-dozen chats on the phone in your pocket and all the anxiety that suggests. There are Signal chats for every neighborhood, chats devoted to finding out about other chats. ICE vehicles are often unmarked; there are chats where locals type in license-plate numbers and other residents check the numbers against a database of ICE vehicles. Idling in her rental car scrolling Signal, New York’s photographer came upon a photo of a Nissan Rogue with California plates: her car.

I guess the NYmag photographer was lucky that a mob didn't descend on her car under the assumption she was an ICE agent. But that's the kind of thing likely to happen sooner or later. But what "officials" were these, going from room to room gridding out neighbourhoods? School officials?

And the danger is in the attitudes on show elsewhere, the same attitudes that got Good (and possibly Pretti) killed; if the disruption is successful and the ICE agents leave without engaging with the protesters, this shows they are cowardly bullies (see bolded part below). If they do engage, they're Nazi stormtroopers. That's what gets you the disconnect in the reports around Good's shooting: she and her partner can turn up for verbal and physical interaction with the Bad Guys, who are not supposed to do anything in return, hence the shock about "real bullets":

Finally, there are those most at risk of coming into violent contact with federal agents, a group that’s come to be popularly known as ICE Watch, although the designation is unofficial—as far as I can tell, you’re in ICE Watch if you watch ICE. These are the whistle-wielding pedestrians and drivers calling themselves “observers” or “commuters” who patrol for federal agents (usually identifiable by their SUVs with out-of-state plates) and alert the neighborhood to their presence. Pretti and Good, the two Minneapolis residents killed by federal agents, fit in this category.

...On Wednesday, I met with two volunteers who went by the handles “Green Bean” and “Cobalt.” They picked me up in the parking lot of a Target, not far from where Good was killed two weeks earlier. Cobalt works in tech but has recently been spending more time on patrol than at her day job. Green Bean is a biologist, but she told me the grant that had been funding her work hadn’t been renewed under the Trump administration. Neither of them had imagined doing what they were doing now. “I’m supposed to be creeping around in the woods looking at insects,” Green Bean said.

Most commuters work in pairs—a co-pilot listens in on a dispatcher who provides the locations of ICE encounters and can run plates through a database of cars that federal agents have used in the past. Green Bean explained what happens when they identify an ICE vehicle. (Both ICE and Border Patrol are in Minneapolis, but everyone just calls them ICE.) The commuters will follow the agents, honking loudly, until they leave the neighborhood or stop and get out.

The commuters—as my colleague Robert Worth reported—do not have a centralized leadership but have been trained by local activist groups that have experience from past protests against police killings, and recent immigration-enforcement sweeps in L.A. and Chicago. The observers are taught to conscientiously follow the law, including traffic rules, and to try to avoid physical confrontation with federal agents.

If the agents detain someone, the observers will try to get that person’s name so they can inform the family. But ICE prefers to make arrests—which the ICE Watchers call “abductions”—quietly. More often than not, Green Bean said, when these volunteers draw attention, the agents will “leave rather than dig in.” She added, “They are huge pussies, I will be honest.”

They need the 'professional antifa black bloc veteran' to tell them what to do and how to do it and, most importantly, make sure they do turn up to do it.

I'm not sure we disagree on anything. I am saying that these methods are well understood in far-left protest-attendee circles. And trying to make flaky 20 year olds show up on time is a skill most Target managers have grappled with.

I'm just trying to balance out the WOs implication that this is America's Helmand province, or that insurgents might be arming themselves to the teeth, with an IED campaign just around the corner.

I am critical of these groups, believe me. They say they want peace, but they want war. They are incapable of having the kind of conversations that people on this forum consider critical for humanity. Every value is a disvalue, every truth, a lie. Every type of integrity a vilness of soul.

But at the end of the day they're strongest when taking over institutions, moving words around, and forcing compliance through abstract policy. I just don't see the American left as capable of what the WO is implying. These are small people.

I'm just trying to balance out the WOs implication that this is America's Helmand province, or that insurgents might be arming themselves to the teeth, with an IED campaign just around the corner.

I do and don't agree with you. Doubtless some of the extreme lefties would like it to be so, that now finally even the normies have had enough and are going to rise up, but that's not going to happen. It's not Northern Ireland or the US during the Civil Rights era and the days of the Symbionese Liberation Army. There won't be underground militias and the October Revolution.

On the other hand, the professional agitators do seem to have a field of opportunity in Minneapolis (as to the rest even of Minnesota, I don't know how widespread the activities of ICE are). So if they send in organisers to help out concerned citizens, this gives them the seed of setting up cells for guerrilla warfare. If you can talk even a few outraged and committed protesters into "transport this package in your car to the Whipple building, don't worry, this is for The Cause", then we might see bombing campaigns in Minneapolis.

If the FBI have any ability at all, it shouldn't happen - but it can't be ruled out as impossible. Maybe the likes of our "do some protesting in the morning, visit museums in the afternoon" guy won't go that far, but his wife (by his own admission) is much more involved with her 'clear moral conscience'. Work on her to the point that she'll agree that, for the sake of deported four year olds and diabetic abuelas and those great people she met in the Middle Eastern restaurant who are in danger from the jackbooted fascist thug torturer murderers, she'll just take that one little step further into working for The Cause... and we'll see.

EDIT: I don't mean 'they can get her to agree to bomb people' but make it about 'it's only property damage, nobody will get hurt, we're just going to destroy infrastructure, is property more valuable than lives?' and I can see it happening.

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