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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 16, 2026

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I don’t believe the Trump admin could frame the shootings as a mistake. That would imply incompetence. That makes them look weak.

One issue with social media these days is now everyone understands the tactics of protestors and thus know also the counter tactics to deploy. The media can not just control one narrative. The alt narratives gets promoted just as much. The counter to the counter movements is out there.

Furthermore, in the age of social media we now have video so protestors can’t just push until something happens. Good won’t just be lost soccer mom who happened to get in ICE way. Pretti won’t be “just directing tactic”. Someone will have video of him kicking ICE vehicles in a prior encounter. In the ‘60s. Goode would be a civil rights icon who was just dropping the kids off at school who the nazis shot.

The entire school segregation move and the evil parents yelling back in the day may have fizzled out after a few viral videos of white kids getting their ass kicked by black kids during segregation.

The two narrative world is what we live in today. The old protest movements do not work as well when it’s become trivial for dual narratives to be maintained.

I don’t believe the Trump admin could frame the shootings as a mistake. That would imply incompetence. That makes them look weak.

At least in private, I don't think even the most based Trump supporters will claim that the rank and file ICE are some fit and well-trained force with high tactical acumen. You can't hire and train that many people that quickly and expect to get great results. Indeed, they probably know this much more keenly than everyone else.

Of course, that's part of the whole game of chicken.

The entire school segregation move and the evil parents yelling back in the day may have fizzled out after a few viral videos of white kids getting their ass kicked by black kids during segregation.

Might have gone even harder if it was viral videos of white parents beating up a 15 year old black kid in a newly integrated school.

At least in private, I don't think even the most based Trump supporters will claim that the rank and file ICE are some fit and well-trained force with high tactical acumen.

With the exception of the Pretti shooting, all the atrocity videos I've seen with them have been very much less atrocious than the kind of normal police arrest videos you can find all over the Internet. Which is probably why some of the ICE atrocity videos are actually other police forces doing some actual beatings that are then attributed to ICE.

Yeah but there are far fewer ICE agents.

So if the outrage-sampled videos are about the same; it tells you something about the base prevalence.

How is this supposed to make sense? He said that that the outraged-sampled videos of ICE aren't actually that outrageous compared to the non-outraged-sampled videos of other police forces. In other words, they are not the same.

Also even if they were the same, it tells you nothing about the prevalence. You have no idea how many actually outrageous videos there are available for either group.

They are both outrage-sampled. No videos that aren't good scroll bait material are passing through the filter.

And in any case you can make some inference about the underlying distribution. There are 20K ICE agents and 750K sworn law enforcement, about a 35x ratio. Even accounting for sampling bias, if you find comparable (even if more for LEOs) behavior at the margin, it's pretty damning.

We have all the video in every direction. The propaganda works anyway; the left-wing "ICE IS EVIL" message gets across to normies, the right-wing "The protestors are violent and obstructive and ICE is arresting people they are supposed to arrest" does not, it's dismissed as Fox News (which, even if it were reported as such, doesn't count, because the other side controls the credibility of any given media organ) propaganda.

gets across to normies

Are there any "normies" as undecided voters willing to be persuaded by red or blue side by facts, logic and reason?

How many such people are left (if they ever existed). Everything looks that polarization is complete, there is blue and red side hardened in their camps (and equally hardened grey non voting, non caring mass that refuses to participate).

I imagine plenty of normal, average people are undecided voters, so that certainly is plausible. However, as humans are only rarely persuaded by facts, logic and reason in a real sense, I'd say such normies exist, but are a small minority. A normie is, by definition, someone not exposed to anything outside the mainstream, be that anything of political nature or not.

Normies are all over the place, but they're not undecided voters. They're Democrats-by-default.

Plenty, I routinely voted democrat or libertarian, 2024, I voted for Trump. I live in one of the top 10 most contested/important counties in the country. I was persuaded by facts, logic, and reason. And I will be again in 2026 and 2028. Considering Trump won the popular vote in 2024, something that hasn't happened in forever and sure as hell didn't happen in 2016 or 2020, I think screeching that there aren't independent swing voters left is just an excuse to engage in accelerationism.

I've beaten this drum before, and I'll beat it again. If you post political content online in anyway, you are not normal. You are not the average voter. And there is a good chance you exist in a bubble. You can either be unaware of it, or acknowledge it.