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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   14086 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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THE OUTCOME OF THE BATTLE OF STANCILGRAD STARTS TO BECOME APPARENT

Jumping back to the pre-war CW topics. There was a lot of debate during Operation Metro Surge about the wisdom of the tactics and choices being made in Minneapolis. We won't be able to really assess the results for years if not decades, but we're getting some early returns. After the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, Greg Bovino was removed from Minneapolis and there was debate over whether this represented a pullback by ICE, or just a shuffling of personnel. Politico reports a decline in immigration cases.

As the Trump administration has scaled back its most aggressive immigration enforcement efforts, the torrent of emergency lawsuits mounted by ICE detainees has also begun to slow. Courts have been flooded for months with petitions for habeas corpus — requests by ICE detainees to be released from custody or at least to have a chance to plead their cases. Habeas petitions are still arriving at astonishing levels, but have noticeably declined since the administration pulled back from its mega-enforcement operation in Minnesota.

A POLITICO analysis found that immigration habeas petitions peaked at about 300 to 400 per day from Jan. 16 to Feb. 17, at the height of Operation Metro Surge. It was in this timeframe — which includes the Jan. 24 shooting death of demonstrator Alex Pretti — when public opinion began to sour on the Trump administration’s mass deportation tactics. Habeas petitions peaked at more than 400 on Feb. 6 but have since steadily declined, dipping below 300 per day late last month and approaching 200 per day by early March. The decline in habeas cases tracks with a similar decline in immigration arrests reported by The New York Times, citing internal DHS data...Meanwhile, habeas cases in Minnesota have dropped sharply since the administration last month announced a drawdown of federal agents. Crackdowns in Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland led to similar surges in habeas cases late last year and into 2026, but they have also abated.

So we're seeing a drop in cases, related to a shift in administration priorities. I noticed less ICE in the news, and local activist networks were talking about ICE less, but they still seemed to be around and there was no declaration that things were cooling off. Trump has periodically made noises about laying off of workers in certain industries, but that’s never been really confirmed as official policy. Statistics and reporting now seem to be confirming a pullback after the deaths in Minneapolis. Obviously, some are not such big fans of this. Elsewhere in Washington

Top allies of President Donald Trump are furious at the White House’s new rhetorical emphasis on deporting violent criminals over all unauthorized immigrants — and they’re launching a lobbying effort to reverse that reversal. A group of longtime Trump allies, immigration restrictionist groups and hawkish policy experts have formed the Mass Deportation Coalition to lobby the Trump administration to refocus its efforts on deporting all eligible migrants. The group has commissioned new polling from one of Trump’s top pollsters to back its thesis that doing so will ensure GOP wins this November, and plans to share that data with White House officials, agency heads and every member of Congress.

“Overwhelmingly, Trump voters expect this from the administration. They don’t just support it, they expect it,” said Chris Chmielenski, president of the Immigration Accountability Project, which advocates for conservative immigration policy. “This is a good way to re-energize the base as we move into the midterms, the same way that Trump was able to do so in the lead up to the 2024 general election.”

The new coalition includes Mark Morgan, the former acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under Trump; Erik Prince, a Trump ally and former Blackwater CEO; as well as a number of conservative think-tanks and lobbying groups close to the Trump administration including the Heritage Foundation, Federation for American Immigration Reform, American Moment, and the Claremont Institute.

((Prince, notably, had this to say about the recent Iran war:

"Look, Steve, I'm not happy about the whole thing," Prince said on Bannon's War Room podcast. "I don't think this was in America's interests. It's going to uncork a significant can of worms and chaos and destruction in Iran now."..."Who takes over?" Prince asked on the podcast. He added: "I don't see how this is in keeping with the president's MAGA commitment. I'm disappointed."))

The campaign comes as other Republican strategists and lawmakers warn Trump’s mass deportation agenda is becoming increasingly unpopular following ICE operations in Minnesota that killed two U.S. citizens, and could hurt the party’s chances of retaining control of Congress. Since then, the administration has pivoted its message on immigration enforcement while overhauling its leadership at DHS. Border czar Tom Homan replaced CBP chief Greg Bovino in Minneapolis and drew down the immigration enforcement presence there; the president ousted DHS Secretary Kristi Noem last week and tapped Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.) to replace her; and even Trump, in his State of the Union address, focused mostly on border security and deporting violent criminals.

It remains to be seen what Mar’Kwayne and his homeboys will do when they are put in charge of DHS. Possibly, given that we are now on a war footing with the largest state sponsor of terrorism, he will have other priorities altogether. I suspect the confirmation hearings will be an opportunity for Democrats to put Mar’Kwayne on tape about ICE policies, and to force Republicans to vote on the record before the midterms.

But if we see a sustained pullback in ICE raids along the lines of Metro Surge, and a net reduction in deportations, we have to call this a victory on the part of the protestors. Renee Good and Alex Pretti will have been successfully, if not exactly willingly, martyred for the cause. The whistles, the Telegram chats, the aggressive policy of confrontation with authorities, will have at least temporarily forced the administration to change course. A sufficiently determined and brave protest movement was not defeated. Love them or hate them, they appear to have succeeded, and others interested in changing American policy should take note. If enough people are willing to put themselves in the gunsights, the government will not be willing to slaughter Americans wholesale.

Does this reflect a fundamentally bad plan in Metro Surge? What adjustments can be made to neutralize this kind of aggressive protest against ICE? Does this reflect an underlying shift in public opinion?

My theory remains as ever that the plurality of Americans would broadly like to see immigration normalized, with illegal immigrants removed or otherwise punished, but that they are unwilling to accept the steps necessary to get there. So we're trapped in a permanent state of exception.

The answer like many topics is that Americans in general are not nearly as retarded as elites seem to think and their lazy attempts at doing and saying extremist unpopular things while denying it with "nuh uh that's not true" doesn't actually work well outside of the far left and far right cultists. The Biden admin forcing through progressive policies while pretending to be moderate lost them the popular vote suddenly, and the Trump administration has decided to take the same approach.

"Illegal immigration" is both a great example of the noncentral fallacy and of a motte and bailey.

When the Trump admin says it's only illegal immigration, and the DHS is talking about deporting a number equal to all non white people in the country, they undermine their claims. They have left this post up for months, it is not a mistake. Americans are not retards, people who are for removing illegal immigrants but not every minority sees this sort of thing too and gets pushed away from supporting his agenda.

Likewise when the Trump admin strips the legal status of people who came here properly, people who are against illegal immigration but for legal immigrants are also pushed away. People who see their friends/coworkers/family/etc have their spouses and children banned not because they're doing anything illegal but because the Trump admin just won't process them are able to look past the lies that it's just the "worst of the worst"

When the Trump admin continues to just straight make shit up all the time even in the Senate, people notice.

The Trump admin has repeatedly decided to appeal to the extremist online right who believes in some grand race war, instead of the independent and centrist Americans who make up the swing vote. And because they know what they're doing is unpopular among that crowd, they just lie instead. But asking the centrists and moderates to disbelieve what you are literally doing and bragging about doing doesn't work! Biden couldn't do it, and Trump can't do it now. The American people are not that stupid, and the progressives and postliberals should learn the lesson that just because you, an extremist partisan, can trick yourself into ignoring the world doesn't mean everyone else will.

Heck even Trump himself is less extremist than many of the people in his admin. He offers asylum to the Iranian woman's soccer team if Australia wouldn't take them, meanwhile the people below have pretty much completely cut off asylum and are even trying to deport people like this gal who was adopted by an American soldier, is Christian and has had her life here for 53 years. She would die in Iran just like the soccer players would, she's a Christian American to them!

When the moderate American hears criminals they're thinking people who do violent things. When they hear about illegal immigration, they want the focus on the antisocial and anti American ones. They don't want the sweet Nona across the street who got a speeding ticket 20 years ago removed to have her legal status revoked, and yet that sort of thing is what the administration is doing.

Here's some advice for the Biden and Trump admins and any future presidents to come. Instead of telling Americans you're doing popular thing Y and then doing unpopular things X, just do the Y thing! Tell your extremists to settle instead of trying to appeal to them.

and the DHS is talking about deporting a number equal to all non white people

This was an interesting claim, so I clicked. The post says "America after 100 million deportations" which is a bit shy of the 150 million nonwhites in the States. It's also a bit more than the estimated 10ish illegal immigrants. One must imagine the white supremacist DHS poster to be mathematically challenged.

Per the Census, if you exclude multiracial people who identify as both white and another race from "non-white" it goes down from 144 million to 113 million. Note that people who identify as both white and hispanic are already included in "white alone", counting all hispanics as non-white raises it to 160 million. So we're hypothesizing a DHS white-supremacist who thinks Barack Obama is white and then rounds from 113 to 100. I'm guessing the "dogwhistle for number of non-whites" claim was from someone who looked at a "whites in U.S." statistic that included multiracial people, falsely assumed it could be subtracted from the U.S. population to get the number of non-whites, and then thought 113 million was close enough.

Presumably the actual explanation is that "100 million" is a big round number chosen without any reference to actual statistics as a hyperbolic way of saying "more deportations good". It could say "1 Billion Deportations" and the meaning would be the same. Also I very much doubt that accusations of twitter dogwhistles are having much impact on people's opinions on the Trump administration at this point.

This has me wondering, does the average protestor realize their goal is to get one of their own shot? You can blow whistles and hold signs and scream all day, but if ICE doesn’t shoot anyone nobody will care. The whole thing only works if somebody dies on camera. Do they understand that? Or is this just a sort of spontaneously evolved Darwinian thing, where this protest strategy reproduces because it is successful, even if the participants don’t comprehend it?

A little of column A, a little of column B. Back during the Civil Rights Movement, organizers and protestors absolutely knew the goal was to get the shit kicked out of you - the point was to quite literally say "come and see the violence inherent in the system." This time around, there's a noticeable mix of people who understand this and cargo cultists who are just aping the form of the CRM (tbh, there were probably similar people back in the day).

I imagine much like a gang or an army or an extreme sport, proclaiming your courage and willingness to die, and the risk of death you have already faced, is so socially valuable that everyone is willing to put themselves in a position to die even if they would all prefer not to draw the short straw.

Why are you using the ghetto spelling of his name?

You'll notice this chaos happened in Minnesota, and only in Minnesota. So the formula for successful immigration surges is clear- get the local authorities to cooperate. The immigration surge has to end in a particular location eventually, for allotment of resources reasons, so temporary cooperation is the fastest way for local authorities to go back to whatever mismanagement and petty corruption they were doing before. Obviously Minneapolis and Minnesota more broadly had ideological reasons for not wanting to go this route, but so did LA and Chicago- one has to wonder if the bigger factor was looming federal investigations into Minnesota fraud was a bigger factor. I wonder if Trump could have gotten cooperation by using these investigations as leverage, or by waiting a minute until the investigations had some results.

The ironic thing was that while Minnesota got into the news due to the Somali fraud cases, the immigration surge paralyzed the US Attorney's office and didn't affect the Somalis one bit, as 90% of them are US citizens and almost all of the remainder are here legally. I remember reading some Minnesota Democrats complaining that the fraud wasn't being investigated properly because everything was tied up in immigration.

Well yeah, a more competent regime would have focused on the fraud first, then followed up with immigration enforcement after using it to take down local political machine structures- or simply avoided the high-profile immigration surge, because it's Minneapolis and you just don't need that many boots on the ground.

If a motivated administration could actually take down corrupt urban political machines, the deportations thing would be a footnote afterwards. But at that point you might as well ask for a new flag.

If I martyred myself for a right-wing cause it would be a waste of time.

but that they are unwilling to accept the steps necessary to get there. So we're trapped in a permanent state of exception.

Are they even, or are they insufficiently critical of media reporting yet?

That's it. That's everything. In a parallel universe, crimes committed by illegal immigrants or other left-sympathetic figures would move from local news to a national roundtable discussion. But it consistently fails to be escalated to such. It stays local (and even there is massaged, see affiliate reporting on BART crimes, purely locally). Unlike Ferguson, Missouri, a local crime that made the big time.

"14 heartbreaking photos that will make you say fuck having borders and law and shit” undefeated.

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