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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   18123 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Two culture war bombs in the upper midwest this week

In May 2025, a woman in Rochester Minnesota uttered the N-word at a child who tried to steal from her, and then again at an adult who confronted her about it while recording with his phone. Both the child and adult are Somali. The video, uploaded to Youtube, went massively viral.

The woman was charged with three counts of disorderly conduct. One of the charges was dropped, the other two just went to trial. After a four day trial and 10 hours of deliberation, the jury found a guilty verdict for one of the charges.

The defendant's lawyer is claiming misconduct by the court and intends to appeal.

Our nation's few remaining principled free speech advocates do not approve of this. This verdict will likely be appealed and may, at minimum, result in Minnesota's disorderly conduct statute being nullified with regard to offenses that are limited to speech and no other disruptive behavior.

In a somewhat ironic twist, apparently the guy who recorded the viral youtube video at the center of all this, was arrested for gang raping a child in 2022, and had those charges dropped "in the interests of justice" by the same prosecutor's office that this year thought it was in the interests of justice to throw the book at somebody for saying a naughty word. What a funny world we live in.

Bomb number two: Police in Madison, WI, responding to reports that someone was casing vehicles to break into, confronted a suspect, who fled, resisted arrest, and finally attacked one officer with a knife, causing that officer to respond with lethal force.

Activists are very clearly trying to turn this into a reprise of the George Floyd moment, including transporting the raised fist monument from Minneapolis' "George Floyd Square" to Madison. The area around the shooting has been barricaded by activists. Activists stormed a police press conference, seizing the podium to deliver a rant about Zionism.

State representative and gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong has thrown her lot fully in with the activists. Whether this helps or hurts her electoral chances will remain to be seen.

Madison's "Independent Police Monitor", who has also thrown her lot in with the activists, is confused about why the Madison Police Department are not involving her in their investigation of the incident.

Attorney Ben Crump, whose list of cases is a who's who of law-enforcement-related racial grievances, is representing the family of the deceased.

And the deceased? Over 40 arrests, multiple felony convictions, including a history of assaults on police officers. (No way to link directly to this, but go here and search for Corey Ruiz).

It never ceases to amaze me how the left is so consistently able to mobilize itself in the defense of the worst people in the world.

I have been somewhat following the protests around the Madison, WI shooting. There is a lot of disagreement about the protesters tactics. They are doing things like shutting down a free orchestra concert, blocking traffic, getting a local music festival cancelled because they were planning to protest at it, a balloon release.

There are a lot of other democrats/progressives that are raising objections like:

  • The protests are causing collateral damage to the community (impacting local workers/small businesses ability to earn income).
  • Ruining events that provide joy and financial support to the local community when they could be collaborating with them.
  • Damaging the environment with balloons.
  • These tactics won't convert anyone and are just agitating people who were already for a more restrained use of force by the police.
  • Not having clear/viable outcomes that they are trying to achieve as a result of their disruptive actions.
  • Some of the protest leaders are just attention seeking to gain social status.
  • Let's wait for the investigation to find out more about what happened with the knife.
  • The bad optics of the protests and how that will ultimately be detrimental to getting progressives elected.

This feels like a way different vibe than 2020 when it was less social acceptable for people on the left to raise common-sense objections like these.

Is there a bodycam video of the shooting?

A bystander video is available here.

  • Three officers struggle to subdue the kneeling suspect. It looks like they've got his legs and his left arm. From the camera's perspective, his right arm is hidden behind his body, and whether it is restrained is not clear.

  • Multiple officers shout, "He's got a knife" (presumably in his right hand).

  • The first three officers back off, making room for a fourth officer to arrive and use a Taser. The suspect has risen to his feet with the weight of the first three officers removed, but now stumbles back to the ground (lying on his side).

  • Of the first three officers, two get back on top of the suspect, but the third instead pulls out his gun and fires three shots.

So it's not totally unreasonable to question whether the gunshots were necessary when the Taser already seemed effective in taking the suspect to the ground.

I'm not a big fan of this shoot. That being said, if someone is resisting so persistently and they do have a knife then I think the theoretical line to justify the shoot has been crossed.

What makes this look bad is that the guy seemed incapacitated right before the shooting. Almost as if the officer was using the opportunity given by the taser to pull out his gun and shoot. So the officer could plausibly have done something different to save that mans life. But at the same time I think it's a hard sell to tell anyone to get in a wrestling match with someone armed with a knife.

So all in all, knife accounted for, I'm not sure the cops could have done much to make themselves look good given they seemed incapable of apprehending the suspect without risking their lives to an extent which would, in my view, be hard to justify. Maybe if they had collectively been in better shape?

So it's not totally unreasonable to question whether the gunshots were necessary

It's easy enough to answer: Just consider how the police would have reacted in a bunch of other western countries in similar situation. If they're all "Yeah, there's no fucking way they'd have shot the tasered guy", that's pretty clear answer.

The problem with comparing policing between rich western countries is that the USA is the only rich western country with a substantial population of violent and antisocial people. The raw rate of crime in the USA is multiple times that of the other countries you want to compare us to, and police doctrine must necessarily accommodate this. If you dropped a European police officer into the south side of Chicago they would get eaten alive, because for all the alleged superiority of European policing, they have the outcomes that they have because European police just have to police Europeans. American police have to police Americans.

The US Supreme Court says otherwise.

1989:

The "reasonableness" of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. The Fourth Amendment is not violated by an arrest based on probable cause, even though the wrong person is arrested, nor by the mistaken execution of a valid search warrant on the wrong premises. With respect to a claim of excessive force, the same standard of reasonableness at the moment applies: "Not every push or shove, even if it may later seem unnecessary in the peace of a judge's chambers [or a Redditor's bedroom]", violates the Fourth Amendment. The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.

2025:

That inquiry into the reasonableness of police force requires analyzing the “totality of the circumstances”. There is no “easy-to-apply legal test” or “on/off switch” in this context. Rather, the Fourth Amendment requires, as we once put it, that a court “slosh [its] way through” a “factbound morass”. Or said more prosaically, deciding whether a use of force was objectively reasonable demands “careful attention to the facts and circumstances” relating to the incident, as then known to the officer. For example, the “severity of the crime” prompting the stop can carry weight in the analysis. So too can actions the officer took during the stop, such as giving warnings or otherwise trying to control the encounter. And the stopped person’s conduct is always relevant because it indicates the nature and level of the threat he poses, either to the officer or to others.

It is well known that drugged-up suspects sometimes shrug off Taser applications and continue to pose a threat to officers. It seems from this Redditor's bedroom that this particular suspect did not shrug off the Taser application, so the officer was overzealous in shooting. But the prosecutor or the jury may think otherwise.

Unsure of the provenance but here's an angle that shows control of the kitchen knife at the time of or right after the taser. The officer who had partial control of the suspect's hand with the knife is the one who shoots him. Plausibly, the taser rips zapzapzap, and officer loses his hold on the knife as suspect falls. Only one officer has hands on the suspect as he hits the ground and previous knife restrainer now-shooter cop draws and fires in, seemingly, one motion. Could be he couldn't go back in on the knife hand safely at that point-- the remaining officer on the camera side looks like he's about to try as shots are fired in your video. Could be he had the best intention to prepare for escalation to lethal force since he lost control of the weapon and it just so happened that knife looked stabbier as he decided to draw. Could be he was frustrated, tired, and made a bad decision.

Based on the video alone, I tend to agree with you. It doesn't look very clean or justifiable. Given that the additional context provided in that thread is true, like this individual having 34 prior incidents, this is yet another example of a repeat offender remaining on the street until something catastrophic happens. If it technically wasn't a good shoot we'll watch them create more racial bias workshops or additional training mandates and/or everything else that goes with kneecapping law enforcement and enabling career criminals. Meanwhile, the legal and ideological failures that repeatedly allowed this turd to run around committing crimes will get brushed under the rug.

I think fumbling melees with multiple officers and multiple implements (gun, knife, taser) have a high chance of tragic results.

Also, I thought all black people have gotten The Talk. My ex-friend who always talked about The Labor of his Oppressed Black Body had a performative fear of the cops even when they were in line at the taco truck, like he was going to get popped for Walking while Black.

Cops shoot people who keep holding knives after being told to drop them, this is well-known to everyone, no matter what color they are.

Even if this specific shoot doesn't look technically pretty, I have zero sympathy for the felon who could have just dropped the stupid knife.

I think fumbling melees with multiple officers and multiple implements (gun, knife, taser) have a high chance of tragic results.

This seems so blindingly obvious to me that my only explanation for people not understanding it is because they are too ideologically committed to hating cops to acknowledge when the use of force is reasonable.

Exactly. It's like the ICE situation where having belligerent protestors deliberately walking up as close to the line of 'peaceful protest' as they can en-masse is going to produce occasional flash points.

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