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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31675 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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She had no habit of confrontation and got killed anyhow.

Seemingly she wasn't just "decided to turn up on spur of moment" either, though, see this in The Atlantic:

Instead, what they discovered in the frozen North was something different: a real resistance, broad and organized and overwhelmingly nonviolent, the kind of movement that emerges only under sustained attacks by an oppressive state. Tens of thousands of volunteers—at the very least—are risking their safety to defend their neighbors and their freedom. They aren’t looking for attention or likes on social media. Unless they are killed by federal agents, as Pretti and Renee Good were, other activists do not even necessarily know their names. Many use a handle or code name out of fear of government retaliation. Their concerns are justified: A number of people working as volunteers or observers told me that they had been trailed home by ICE agents, and some of their communications have already been infiltrated, screenshotted, and posted online, forcing them to use new text chains and code names. One urgent question among observers, as the videos of Pretti’s killing spread, was what his handle might have been.

...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.

...Most encounters with ICE end like that. But sometimes situations deteriorate—as with Good, who was killed while doing a version of what Green Bean and Cobalt were now doing. The task is stressful for the observers, who understand that even minor encounters can turn deadly.

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