This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So the US government is dancing with shutdown politics again, this time using funding over the Department of Homeland Security to try and enforce new measures over ICE. The Atlantic has an article covering 10 key demands, pushed forward by a joint press statement by the Democratic House and Senate leaders Jeffries and Schumer.
The 10 demands, which may be higher in the culture war discussion for the near term, are-
1. Targeted Enforcement – DHS officers cannot enter private property without a judicial warrant. End indiscriminate arrests and improve warrant procedures and standards. Require verification that a person is not a U.S. citizen before holding them in immigration detention.
2. No Masks – Prohibit ICE and immigration enforcement agents from wearing face coverings.
3. Require ID – Require DHS officers conducting immigration enforcement to display their agency, unique ID number and last name. Require them to verbalize their ID number and last name if asked.
4. Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
5. Stop Racial Profiling – Prohibit DHS officers from conducting stops, questioning and searches based on an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language and accent or their race and ethnicity.
6. Uphold Use of Force Standards – Place into law a reasonable use of force policy, expand training and require certification of officers. In the case of an incident, the officer must be removed from the field until an investigation is conducted.
7. Ensure State and Local Coordination and Oversight – Preserve the ability of State and local jurisdictions to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidents. Require that evidence is preserved and shared with jurisdictions. Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations outside of targeted immigration enforcement.
8. Build Safeguards into the System – Make clear that all buildings where people are detained must abide by the same basic detention standards that require immediate access to a person’s attorney to prevent citizen arrests or detention. Allow states to sue DHS for violations of all requirements. Prohibit limitations on Member visits to ICE facilities regardless of how those facilities are funded.
9. Body Cameras for Accountability, Not Tracking – Require use of body-worn cameras when interacting with the public and mandate requirements for the storage and access of footage. Prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities.
10. No Paramilitary Police – Regulate and standardize the type of uniforms and equipment DHS officers carry during enforcement operations to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
The Atlantic, as an establishment-Democrat aligned media outlet, adopts the general framing that these are reforms,.
Alternatively, it would be fair to say that some of these are not exactly subtle poison pills in order to prevent DHS from actually conducting immigration enforcement. 'Require the consent of States and localities to conduct large-scale operations' is a notable one, given the sanctuary state policies in many Democratic-dominated states and cities. Others can write to other aspects as well, I am sure.
Does this mean the entire list of demands is dead on arrival? Not necessarily. The brief article briefly notes an area with alleged traction-
Which leads to a slight transition of topic- the role of police body cameras as a part of standard policing equipment.
Different countries, or cultures if you prefer, have different viewpoints on police cameras that are constantly recording. That is, after all, a form of public surveillance, and once you allow the government to do so, or even require the government to do so, that footage can be used in so many different ways.
I've seen a variety of views towards police body cams. I remember arguments opposing it on civil liberty grounds that were concerned about police state tactics of public monitoring. I know plenty of people who believe they provide a tool to prove cop bad behavior. I have lived in the sort of countries where police body cams would not be used precisely because the government does not want records of such cob misbehavior, which is the sort of thing the previous sort of advocates want to curtail.
What has been low-key interesting to observe over the last few decades is how the arguments for and against body cameras has changed over the years, as the expectations versus payoffs of increased body cameras have become clearer. From my perspective, a lot of the predicted effects failed to materialize, or materialized in ways other than expected.
For example, the civil liberty argument died with the advent of known, and accepted, mass surveillance as a matter of course as leads exposed, but did not reverse, domestic security practices across the west. But more police cameras also did not expose a (non-existent) pandemic of police-of-minority killings, which was one of the basis for the American police reform efforts in the BLM period. It did, apparently, reveal an untapped market for police body cam videos on youtube or tiktok, to a degree that there's now a genre of fake police bodycam channels.
But more than fake videos, what police body cam reforms seem to have done is standardize the release of a lot of videos showing police, if not in the right, at least more sympathetically. Ugly arrest narratives which take the innocent victim narrative apart, perspectives (and sometimes audio) that can sell panic, and so on. It can practically be a chinese robbers fallacy published daily. All the more so because traditional media tends to not be interested in publishing ugly arrest dynamics that work against intended coverage theme, but counter-veiling police footage is relatively easy, authoritative, and- thanks to reformers- available.
If anything, at least in the american culture war body cameras seem on net to have... kind of vindicated the pro-law-enforcement side by surprise.
Not validated their arguments- many of the arguments against police body cams simply fell flat. And not disproven reformist fears of bad actors. But the pro-police coalition seem to have largely been happy enough for bad eggs to be subject to the appropriate processes, which is part of how institutions cultivate/sustain popular legitimacy over time. Meanwhile footage of Actual Incidents (TM) can paint a lot of pictures of a lot of other bad eggs on the other sides that polite company, and media, often downplayed or ignored.
On a narrative/framing/symbolism level, it's practically a format made for, well, copaganda. You have the self-insert protagonist dynamic of being 'your' point of vision, you have a nominally just cause of enforcing presumptively legitimate laws, and you have the antagonist of the episode of varying degrees of sympathy... and the selection bias is generally going to select for the unsympathetic.
It can also, and returning back to the culture war, cut down some attempted narrative efforts before it reaches a critical chain reaction. The fact that the police shooting of young black girl Khia Bryant in 2021 didn't erupt into a BLM-derivative mass protest wave has a good deal to do with the fact that she was trying to stab another girl, but also with the fact that police footage was quickly released, which rather dispelled early BLM-associated reporting at the time that didn't think that the stabbing was worth noting.
Rather than police body cams provide the evidence police misbehavior, it may not be as partisanally-useful as believed. And if that were true, you'd expect to be progressively more pushback from partisans who are less good-faith reformers and were advancing policy arguments as soldiers.
Which is why I've been a bit interest in... not a vibe shift, but efforts to push for a vibe shift, on who in the culture war is for and against police body cameras. As the opening article noted, establishment republicans are at least open to the prospect. But what's more interesting is the rise of skepticism, or even levels of hostility, from within the Progressive coalition.
ProPublica, an American left journalist group, has an article from late 2023 about how police have undermined the promise of body cameras, with a general thesis that police departments have too much autonomy / influence / differences across jurisdictions in terms of what gets to be shared.
Jacobin, the American socialist magazine with a deliberate party line, last month condemned police body cameras as a giveaway to weapons makers, claimed that the evidence of cameras efficacy was thin... but spent more words upset that DHS/ICE wasn't being forced to spend its current funding on cameras instead of operations, as opposed to more funding for the cameras.
But I think the characterization that best captures that not-quite-vibe shift I'm gesturing to comes from a November 2025 article from last year by Vox, which tries to establish itself as the US left vibe-setter and explainer, in its critique article "How routine police stops are becoming viral social media fodder: Police body cameras were supposed to ensure justice. They’ve turned into YouTube content."
This is, if the subtext was not a clear, a problem to be resolved. The article then weighs considerations on how to keep the police body camera footage they want, that of potential misconduct to be exposed by traditional media, while reducing/removing the rest of the unflattering-for-captured-on-tape cases that get more public interest.
Or, in other words, in the words of their own special-attention quotation-
Which could open questions of whether it is random civilians, or when shaming is or is not appropriate... not least because shaming the misbehaving cops caught on tape is the intent of these police cameras in the first place.
But to bring it around back to the origin, what the ICE tactics may turn to when they are fiscally able, nay required, to video tape the sort of anti-ICE tactics recently employed in Minnesota.
The Congressional Democrat demand includes caveats to "prohibit tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in First Amendment activities."
Well, there are two ways that an administration could easily work around that.
One would be to use body cameras to track, create, and maintain a database of individuals not participating in First Amendment activities, but obstructing law enforcement activities. This is a legal case that would certainly be litigated through hostile justices, but it could be done.
But the other way would be to simply use body cameras to publicize, publicize, and publicize non-random individuals who insist they are participating in First Amendment activities, and let their words, and videos, speak for themselves.
Demonstrating that a minority of Democrats can do what a majority of Republicans (plus the President) can't do -- shut down a department of the US government. The Republicans, of course, were utter fools when they allowed DHS funding to be separated, because they lost all their leverage.
Most of these demands are entirely unreasonable under the circumstances.
Uhh, if someone ICE suspects is an illegal alien doesn't have ID, how is ICE to verify they aren't a US citizen without ever detaining them? Just "trust me, bro"?
What, like in the middle of a contested arrest? To every protestor who asks? (and if you think they won't DDOS enforcement that way, you haven't been paying attention)
Learning from the anti-gun people, are they?
Apparently the only way they're allowed to determine someone is illegal is being told by a higher power.
Given the bad faith from Tim Walz, entirely ridiculous.
The second might be reasonable if applied to everything. As a special pleading to protect leftist protestors, it's unreasonable.
Police ARE paramilitary, and making them more uniform wouldn't make them less paramilitary. I'm fairly sure other civil enforcement is at least as varied as ICE, so this is BS anyway.
Several of the things they're objecting (e.g. stopping people who they suspect are aliens) to are authorized by statute, so this is exactly a minority getting to change the law.
Okay I'll bite. Here's my issues with some of your points.
ICE isn't in the business of detaining every person they encounter without identification. This rule presumably wouldn't apply to people detained for e.g. obstructing law enforcement - just to people detained as part of immigration enforcement. In which case ICE should have some idea who they are before detaining them.
Why isn't this a problem for every other type of law enforcement? You're trying to conjure up an absurd situation that in practice would not be an issue. You simply have to have reasonable guidelines for when ICE agents are required to give their badge number and when they aren't.
Or by, I dunno, investigation? Properly legislated, this is simply preventing profiling, which is discrimination and should be illegal.
Great, Republicans should make it apply to everything.
These demands are only unreasonable if you assume the least charitable implementation, rather than treating them as what they are - the first round of negotiations.
I have no idea what this is meant to mean. Is it unreasonable to assume that a Hispanic person who doesn't speak English very well is vastly more likely to be an illegal immigrant than a white person with a pronounced American accent?
It's not unreasonable. But there are laws, and at least previously a societal consensus, that you should not have to deal with random police harassment because of your basic demographic characteristics. One of various things that the right has seemingly decided are less important than deportations.
I think those laws are based on crimes where you are far less likely to throw a stone and hit someone who should be arrested. There are only so many carjackers in the world, and most murders are from people close to the victim.
The percentage of people here who are committing a misdemeanor by illegal entry or by overstaying a visa and changing their address without notifying DHS is between 4 and 8%. These misdemeanors become felonies quickly by repeated offenses or stacking against other crimes often necessary to keep a low profile.
So just taking a random sample of the US, 1 in 12 will be here unlawfully.
However, the people here unlawfully are not randomly distributed. They are mostly not Western Europeans, for instance, while a large portion of the United States population still is Western European. They are mostly Mexican, Venezuelan, and Central American. Though the exact number is difficult to nail down, let's be generous and say 2/3s of the people here unlawfully are Hispanic.
Hispanic people make up approximately 20% of the US population. If 5% of the total US population is Hispanics here unlawfully, and Hispanics are 20% of the population total, the odds of any given Hispanic being here unlawfully is 1 in 4.
Now, most Hispanics are here lawfully. Some have family ties to the land well before the land was American. Of the Hispanics here lawfully, most speak very good English, having been raised in the United States or present for decades. Most have little to no accent.
Of the Hispanics here unlawfully, some actually have really good English! Some are DREAMERs. But people who only arrived recently do tend to keep a strong accent for a while.
I will try to give generous estimates. Let's say 50% of Hispanics with strong accents are also here unlawfully.
So if you have someone in the country who is Hispanic and has a strong accent, there is a 1 in 2 chance of them being here unlawfully.
There are ways to make the odds even better. For example, there are certain places someone here unlawfully is likely to be. Using this knowledge, the odds are greater than half that a given Hispanic with an accent is here unlawfully.
If a police officer has located someone who has a more-than-half likelihood of having committed a specific crime, wouldn't you want that officer to at least question that person? Especially if you already have a database of many of the people who have committed that crime, and it's just a matter of checking if that person is on the database.
It's not at all like questioning every black man for a murder, when the majority of black men are not murderers. The only reason to compare them is because the magnitude of the problem is left out in these conversations.
I could quibble with your numbers but that's besides the point, it doesn't fundamentally change anything if the real ratio is 1 in 4 or whatever.
As I said in another reply, there are certainly situations where you might want to change laws and norms to deal with problems that are too bad and too intractable to address otherwise. Everything is mutable if you have enough societal consensus.
But the difference between illegal immigration and many other crimes is that some substantial fraction of the population is not in favor of deportation regardless of how the person is found. You could probably find various different numbers, but first one I found from before ICE was in the news is this: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2025/03/26/americans-views-of-deportations/, which implies that some 40% of Americans think that illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes shouldn't be deported.
So to answer this:
If that crime is illegal immigration, with no other crimes alleged, no I don't want them questioned. The police don't have any right to know who I am while walking down the street, and the immigration hawks don't get to just run roughshod over established practice because they decided that their specific cause is soooo important.
32% of US Adults believe that EVERY illegal immigrant should be deported.
51% believe some should be deported. I'm in this group myself. Of the people in this group:
44% of this 51% believe that all illegal immigrants who arrived in the last four years should be deported. This most cleanly describes my views as well - I really didn't care too much about the situation until the Biden Administration began drawing people in by the millions and stopped deporting people with final orders of removal. Before then, I would have said the biggest change that needed to be made is expanding the immigration court system until every case can be processed within a year.
.44*.51 = 22% of US Adults. Plus 32% gets to 54% of Americans who think that at least criminal immigrants and those who arrived since Biden took office should be deported.
So if anything you were selling your position short. Or there might be some other data point you were looking at?
What percentage of support would you need to see before you would agree my point that, if you have a reasonable suspicion that someone committed a crime, (and a 1:4 or 1:2 likelihood should count as reasonable suspicion) it's perfectly fine and legal (as was recently confirmed by the SCOTUS in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo) to take five minutes out of someone's day to ask some basic questions?
This is leaving aside the fact that most Americans answering this survey have no clue that pretty much all Illegal Immigrants, whether they came over the border or overstayed a visa, have committed criminal acts. Conduct related to “unlawful presence,” like eluding inspection, is a criminal misdemeanor on the first offense and a felony on the second offense, and the two often go hand in hand. People who overstay visas are often committing crimes. For example: anyone who is here on a visa is required to notify DHS within 10 days of a change of address; failure to do so is a criminal misdemeanor. Those who stay in the country and work here without a visa are also usually committing crimes like document fraud, identity theft, or tax fraud to obtain employment and/or be paid under the table.
Overwhelming support. You can relax other priorities in desperate situations. But I think the fact that ~50% of the population supports a party that does not support much more restrictions on illegal immigration is strong evidence that this is not a desperate situation where we need to start giving up civil rights.
I just want the administration to chill out. Pass some laws to change the asylum system. Make it harder for employers to use illegal labor. Ramp up ICE staffing in sustainable ways. Whatever. None of those are big issues even if I wouldn't actual agree with those policies. But stop pretending we are in some crisis where where the world is going to end if you can't deport millions of people immediately. If it was actually such a crisis people would not be taking to the streets to defend their own neighbors who are supposedly having such a negative effect on them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link