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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.
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
((Prince, notably, had this to say about the recent Iran war:
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.
People who are against illegal immigration are against it not because it is against the law, but for some other reason. Joe Biden going and flying in millions of people, immediately giving them humanitarian parole, and then giving them TPS does not actually address any of those reasons those people were concerned about. People can see that Biden used humanitarian parole / TPS in a very novel way, they can see it used as an immigration pathway,
Who here is lying? Do you have any evidence that Trump has ever said this?
From his 2024 platform he did not promise this. CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY is what it promises. I have searched and I have not found DJT promising to just deport criminals, and I have found loads of instances of him saying positions contradictory to that claim.
There is no singular explanation for the dislike of illegal immigration. There are plenty of people who are perfectly fine with legal immigrants and just want them to enter in following the rules. Most immigration restrictionist seem to believe that this is even the mainstream view among them, given the proclivity to focus on illegal immigration in discourse and staying on the down low regarding efforts to restrict legal ones.
The PR you choose to output is reflective of what you believe others want to see of you, and the PR of immigration restriction puts a large emphasis on the illegal part. Therefore they must believe it is an important distinction to the swing voters they are trying to convince.
Trump repeatedly uses the phrase "worst of the worst". They even had a website about this exact phrasing, albeit they even admit it was filled with errors. Just go ask any of the chatbots and they can give you tons of examples.
And like many things involving Trump, he changes what he says based off who is talking to and who is trying to appeal to at the time. You can't point to just one place where he says something and assume he's never contradicted it elsewhere.
The claim was that Trump has called for "JUST" the removal of the "worst of the worst". Those are your words, I even quoted them. You are not alone in making the claim, but that is your claim. That you change the claim instead of defending it with evidence indicates that you cannot defend it.
You are interpreting words to mean what you want them to mean, not what they actually mean. This website is a good example of what is going on. Here is the Trump admin, direct from the website you linked, emphasis mine:
"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is highlighting the worst of worst criminal aliens arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)."
"Under Secretary Noem's leadership, the hardworking men and women of DHS and ICE are fulfilling President Trump's promise and carrying out mass deportations - starting with the worst of the worst - including the illegal aliens you see here."
They say they are starting with the worst of the worst. They never say they will just deport the worst of the worst. They say they are doing the opposite of just going after the worst of the worst, they are carrying out mass deportations.
The slight of hand here is that you are misconstruing "highlighting the worst of the worst" as "just the worst of the worst." Highlighting does not imply exclusivity. Does a highlighter block out everything on a page not highlighted?
ChatGPT says that you are reading framing from media and not Trump's actual words:
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"Temporary actually means permanent" and "Biden's psycho paroling should be permanent" continue to be terrible positions and give away the game that most complaints about immigration from the left are salami-slicing at best.
One president can do what they want and it can never be undone is not a good policy. Everything flip-flopping on a 4 to 8 year basis isn't great policy either, of course.
That more or less Denmark alone has managed this really begs the question of why its so difficult.
I guess Japan just elected what's supposedly their most right-wing government since before The War suggests it's not technically just Denmark, but may also suggest America is past some tipping point where it was possible.
Believe what you want about refugees but people who followed the rules as they were at the time are categorically not "illegal immigrants", and trying to motte and bailey the topic is not a successful PR strategy. The moderate swing voting Americans are not partisan brained enough to turn off their critical thinking like that.
Well one issue that we see with the Biden and Trump admins is that they're often more moderate than the people working under them. The extremists get into positions of power and work for approval from their social media tribes, blinding them to the worsening popularity. A captain isn't liable to remain popular if he can't stop the crew from pillaging, like if Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor while the merry men snuck behind back and beat the children up.
That's not quite what I said, either.
That they followed the rules of the time does not mean the rules of the time made any sense, or that the rules of the time must never be undone.
LOL you were alive in 2020, they absolutely are willing to turn off their critical thinking, or at least stay quiet and in hiding so the outcome is the same.
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Non of the asylum seekers followed the law. It was being abused by the Biden administration. Non of them were ever true asylum seekers. It’s a word cell game they played.
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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.
Yeah this is what I get from ChatGPT at least to double check it
However including white Hispanics does bump it up to around 140 million apparently. It's impossible to say that it means this implication, but it's still an example of how extremist rhetoric is put out by the admin underlings. It's not just "the libs" you get with the Epic Trolling, tons of normies and moderates will see it too and update a little away from supporting you. Likewise with Laura Loomer's statement of feeding all the Hispanics in the country to crocodiles
The left wing extremists often push the moderates back with their own nonsense, but the ones in power tend to be the people most in danger if they can't control their rhetoric and behavior. Biden never learned this lesson, and it doesn't look like Trump intends to learn anytime soon. Even now while they are attempting to moderate out a little, it's only after all this extremist content already got pumped out and it still is upsetting the partisan fringes who are trying to lobby for more extremism.
The issue is that an administration that tries to be popular with the normies and moderates is an admin that the partisans don't really like that much. You have to be willing to upset your own group some knowing that they'll be loyal for you anyway and appeal to the centrists.
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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.
Damn it, I'll bite.
Is he not? He's the son of a black (absent) Nigerian father and a white mother. He was raised by her, his grandparents, and for a time an Indonesian stepfather. He has not, so far as I can make out, any experience at all of his father's culture or homeland. He was not raised 'typically' black as the majority of African-Americans were (Michelle was very important to him as being authentically African-American background and able to introduce him to that).
If you can be black with one white parent, why can't you be white with one black parent, if your upbringing was functionally white as a white child?
(The above is not seriously meant).
Because despite both political sides complaining that it's stupid (with different reasoning), the One Drop Rule seems as powerful as ever.
By that rule, we already had a black President: Warren Harding.
Warren "O.G." Harding
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I joked in 2012 that we hadn't really had a black president until Obama got reelected, as the first term only gave us half of one.
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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?
I mean, I knew for previous protests; I just figured it was a numbers game. I'm more likely to get mulched during a march by some chudmobile 5 foot lifted dodge ram doing 60 in a 45 zone as the dude driving throws his third empty buzzball out the window than get got by the feds, so the math works out in favor of the protestors when the government is even a bit accountable to the populace/not completely psychotic.
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My feeling is that the organizers fully understand that but the average protester does not.
Their lived experience is protests with a friendly city government where the police will get in trouble for actually trying to control the situation. They've been fed falsehoods about how ICE agents aren't real federal agents.
How does this explain the increase in protests following the shootings, which were largely reported in the leftist press as "fascist cops are just shooting protestors completely at random," if they thought it was risk free wouldn't they have stayed home after that?
They needn't believe that it's risk-free; they simply think that the point of protests is to intimidate and shame the bad guys into retreating by showing how many people stand against them. This can involve knowing there's a risk of being shot, and still be a very different mindset of "the point of protests is to create martyrs".
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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).
That said, I doubt there were a lot of people specifically anticipating someone getting shot.
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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.
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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.
As a protest against the degradation being imposed on me by the decline of our culture.
...huh? "Mostly peaceful" ICE protests occurred in every city that ICE launched major surges into. Minneapolis ultimately became the flashpoint for a variety of reasons, but the same protests occurred in metros across the country. Moreover, post Metro Surge, arrests are down across the country, not just in Minneapolis. So after Metro Surge, Trump's team has pulled back on these tactics across the country.
Trump got his way in LA and Chicago. He lost in Minneapolis. Yes there were all sorts of protestors in these places but it was all page five stories and professional activists getting arrested.
Yet detentions are down nationwide. We're not seeing the same tactics used nationwide.
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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.
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If I martyred myself for a right-wing cause it would be a waste of time.
Just ask Ashli Babbitt.
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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.
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"14 heartbreaking photos that will make you say fuck having borders and law and shit” undefeated.
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