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None of us can directly tell what evil lurks in the hearts of men; we can only judge actions and make inferences from them. I don't know about "communist", but the evidence certainly shows that Pretti was engaged in direct action against federal law enforcement on multiple occasions. Pretti certainly saw himself as morally directed, but so does a spree killer who acts because the voice of God told him so -- that the voice was a real one on a Signal chat in this case makes it worse, not better.
Or, stated another way, you're being far too charitable.
I think you are showing far too little charity, and I write as someone who finds the activities of the anti-ICE protestors to be largely detestable. Allow me to explain.
First, I'm being serious about my feelings about the protesters: in my view, they are—for the most part—smug, shrill, deluded agents of chaos. The gulf between their conceptions of themselves—of their own character, motives, and impact on the world—and the truth of these things, is vast, and not in a direction that is to their credit. I'm as little inclined to violence as it is possible for a rational man to be, but I must confess that even I sometimes wish to see the most insufferable of their number, whilst engaged in some strident, self-righteous tantrum against authority, receive as a reply a salutary spritz of pepper spray straight into their stupid faces.
Second, and critically, these people are not evil, and that extends even to the violent ones for the most part. I think we can establish this pretty reliably in a couple ways. One approach is the one that @StJohnOfPatmos used: look at their backgrounds. Using this lens, we find no indicators whatsoever that Pretti was evil. In fact, he seems to have been generally law abiding and respectable. Beyond his lack of a criminal history, I'd also note that becoming an ICU nurse requires a fairly high degree of consciousness and trustworthiness, and nursing as a whole selects pretty reliably for compassion. Turning to Renee Good, she similarly lacked any criminal history or clear signs of malevolent character. And while I don't think we have the data to firmly generalize about the entire population of anti-ICE protestors, my strong intuition is that they are probably similarly decent.
It is worth taking a moment to point out that the good character of people engaged in "activism" is hardly a given. Recalling the example of Kyle Rittenhouse, he seemed unable to fire his rifle without hitting a child molester, a wife-beater, or a criminal lowlife. Now you might counter that the people Rittenhouse shot were non-representative in the sense that, of all the people present, they showed a particular eagerness to assault a 17 year old boy, and an armed one at that. Indeed, on that basis I think it would be reasonable to conclude they were probably amongst the worst of the "protesters" in Kenosha on that night. But I would respond that Good and Pretti were also selected in a similar sense: they were also amongst the most violent of all the people present at their respective protests. And that is part of where that strong intuition of my mine about the general good character of the protestors comes from. If the most confrontational of the anti-ICE protestors were as clean as Pretti and Good seem to have been, it seems likely to me that the protestors who weren't violently resisting arrest, kicking police cars, etc, are probably at least as good (at least for the most part).
Why do we see bad people acting badly in some protests, and relatively good people acting badly in others? In his comment, @StJohnOfPatmos delivered a very convincing presentation of the social and psychological dynamics at work in the case of Pretti, and I think this goes a long way to explaining the general difference between Kenosha and the current situation in Minnesota. One core insight is that current ideological landscape is particularly warped.
During the height of the BLM madness, their was a widespread belief that the police were racist and bad, but the acceptable remedy was largely to "defund them" rather than direct violence towards them. Sure, elites would equivocate about how understandable it was that people were burning down cities in response (there were a lot of "riots are the language of the unheard" type quotes) but at the same time there were also many elites who were sympathetic to BLM who said, clearly and repeatedly, that violence was unacceptable. Here is an excerpt from a fairly representative Barrack Obama statement from the time:
I'll grant that there were also statements that were less measured, but I don't think they represent the ideological center mass of the left during peak wokeness. Also—and this is crucial—no elites were telling the NPR-listening normies of the world to go out and loot their local Nike outlet. Maybe, in the view of some commentators, we could excuse a Black teen with an "unheard voice" for doing it, but that excuse certainly didn't extend to normie with White privilege. As a consequence, ICU nurses were not typically present at the riots, and certainly they were not the ones doing the burning and looting.
Things are different now. To give you a sense of this, I've excerpted Obama's statement on the Pretti shooting:
According to Obama, the federal agents who have been "deployed" lack even a semblance of discipline and accountability; their tactics are lawless; they are assaulting our core values as a nation; and every American should support the "peaceful" protests to resist them. Notably there is no language in the statement explicitly condemning the violence of the protestors, or urging compliance with law enforcement. This is as close as you are going to get to Obama saying that you should go out and punch an ICE officer in the face. The craziest part is, while I don't have the patience to do an exhaustive survey of elite left sentiment, I expect Obama is, as usual, probably more moderate than many of his peers.
This messaging shapes participation in the "protests". This is how you get generally decent, well-adjusted people doing crazy shit en-masse. You have the authority figures they respect tell them repeatedly that they should be doing crazy shit, because freedom is on the line. In this media environment, I've seen people whom I generally respect (individuals whom I know to be highly intelligent, rational, kind and free-thinking in most contexts) basically baying for ICE blood. If they are vulnerable, what chance is there for left-orientied normies?
This also represents the second way I can tell that the anti-ICE protestors are not evil. If there are a bunch of people I know to be generally kind and well-calibrated who think ICE is a modern incarnation of the SS, it tells me the problem with the anti-ICE protestors is not their fundamental decency. People often find these kind of statements difficult because there is such strong urge to attach moral sanction to people who hold views we find repugnant, but I really mean it. I'm Jewish, but I'd say the same thing about the actual SS. The problem with the SS was not that the people in the SS were all evil. I expect they were less good, on average, than people like Hans and Sophie Scholl, but also probably better character-wise (kinder, less impulsive, more loyal) than even your run-of-the-mill wife-beater. The scary part of all this is that people who are not monsters can do things that are far more monstrous than most criminals will ever manage.
None of this is to say Pretti was without fault. I agree with @StJohnOfPatmos that he probably felt more inner rage than most, and once he had his socially sanctioned outlet for that rage, he was all too eager to use it. But the fact that he needed that the social sanctioning is key. He was decent enough that he could hold it together all his life until an authority figure came along and told him it was okay to let go. In this way, he was, ironically, probably a lot like many cops. Law enforcement has a reputation for attracting bullies who want permission to go out and hurt people, and while I think this stereotype is over-applied, it is not groundless. I've been on police ride-alongs were I've heard cops cheerfully regaling each other with stories of how they got to "beat the shit of a prisoner who was resisting".
At the start of this long comment, I said you showed too little charity, and now I will clarify. The charity you ought to show is in recognizing that a Pretti, or violence-enjoying cop for that matter, for all their flaws, are still possessed of the requisite self-control and pro-social impulses to do good and to not knowingly do bad. And this counts. There are plenty of people who have bad impulses and who can't control themselves under any circumstances, or who don't even care to try. Our prisons are full of them. Some of them need only the barest pretext to do bad: I looted the Nike store to protest white supremacy; I raped that girl because she secretly wanted it; et cetera. Many others don't need any pretext at all—their value function is to do whatever is good for them personally, and damn the consequences. In comparison, someone like Pretti was responding to extremely concerted messaging from many authority figures, and was engaged in actions that were plausibly proportionate and plausibly served the cause, all at risk to himself. Like I said, I still think Pretti is an agent of chaos, and I'd even agree his actions were far more damaging to society than most crimes (though this was not entirely for reasons he could have controlled). But there is a real moral difference between Pretti and his ilk and most criminals, and I think it is one we should be careful not to lose sight of lest we work ourselves up into a fit of righteousness where we start doing evil ourselves.
Excellent comment here. I think the core of this is that essentially Good and Pretti were some variety of normies. When the criminal underclass acts out, it is easy to write it off as them being low-agency and their acting out is part of their general dysfunction. Normies however have the necessary degree of self-control and agency to respond to incentives, social status rewards and authority messaging. So when normies act out you can't dismiss it as a symptom of their general dysfunction, it tells you something about what incentives and societal messaging are directing them towards. By definition, normies are ones who "go with the flow." If you have normies in Minneapolis violently engaging ICE that tells us we have a messaging problem that is much bigger than whatever personal failings or bad judgments these people may have had.
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I'm sure we could both hypothesise many situations in which direct action against federal law enforcement wouldn't suffice to call someone a bad person or might even be the morally good decision depending on the circumstance. That alone isn't sufficient: the actual decisions he made, damaging an ICE vehicle lightly and needlessly stepping between an ICE officer and a woman said officer was pepperspraying for blocking their vehicle, are not particularly "evil" taken by themselves. They're more petulant and foolish - which is not to say I think they should be legal or that there shouldn't be consequences for that behaviour.
I do agree with you that I'm probably being a bit more charitable than I should - consider it as an avocatus diaboli response to your take, which maybe was a bit too lacking in charity.
Again, too much charity. By several orders of magnitude.
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