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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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Enforcing immigration policy at all is maximally inflammatory to many Blues.

Maybe to a tiny handful but it's not useful to collapse strategy down to the what the most hysterical Blues would think. The majority of normies want immigration laws "enforced" in some nebulous way, they just don't like seeing it done.

The one actually bad shoot from that scenario seemed like more of an accident than "trigger happy"

It was an accident because the ICE agent was trigger happy. To some extent it can be chalked up to bad luck but Trump did a number of things to make the bad luck more likely:

  1. Aggressive, rapid hiring for ICE that let jumpy agents in.
  2. Targeting Minnesota in the first place, which did not have an unusual number of illegals relative to its population, and which had an unfriendly state government.
  3. Trump heavily implying his action against Minnesota had a punitive bent rather than being specifically about immigration enforcement, energizing Blue resistance.

Maybe to a tiny handful but it's not useful to collapse strategy down to the what the most hysterical Blues would think. The majority of normies want immigration laws "enforced" in some nebulous way, they just don't like seeing it done.

Every vaguely politically aware Blue was being bombarded with agitprop about the MN ICE surge. I had random strangers histrionically rant at me about it from nothing. It was protrayed as the Trump Gestapo kicking in doors to kidnaps, exile or just disappear anyone who was brown.

It was an accident because the ICE agent was trigger happy.

I'd really like to see how well you keep your cool when dozens of people are given free reign to be as stress-inducing as possible while continually flirting with and threatening violence against you. Or how well you can distinguish "I've got his gun!" from "He has a gun!" after I spend an hour blowing an alarm whistle in your face.

Aggressive, rapid hiring for ICE that let jumpy agents in.

Absolute nonsense. Pure, empty, bad faith talking point. Available data suggests that ICE is probably our best federal agency in terms of not making overzealous fuckups. You're about a hundred times more likely to have a "jumpy" IRS agent accidentally audit you.

Targeting Minnesota in the first place, which did not have an unusual number of illegals relative to its population, and which had an unfriendly state government.

MN was not a unique target, they went to tons of states. The difference is that most of those other states had some level of cooperation, even if it was quiet so as not to enrage the Blues. What made MN special was Tim Walz and Keith Ellison doing their best George Wallace impersonation, which is exactly why Trump made some comments to drive the point home.

States don't actually get to openly flaut black-letter federal law. This is well established precedent.

Available data suggests that ICE is probably our best federal agency in terms of not making overzealous fuckups.

Citation needed. ICE had an enormous surge of agents to hire to hit Trump's goals in an arbitrarily short amount of time. It'd be almost impossible for any agency to hit targets like that without slackening standards to some degree. And that's exactly what happened, though I wouldn't claim the Pretti shooting was responsible for this, it just generally added gas to a combustible situation.

MN was not a unique target, they went to tons of states.

I never said they didn't go to other states, it's that Minnesota was particularly targeted as defacto retaliation for displeasing Trump. MN wasn't "flaunting federal law", they just weren't actively cooperating, so the George Wallace comparison doesn't work here. Part of Trump's ire against MN was for not cooperating, but it was also a target before that too, and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back. So part of this is potentially understandable (send agents where there's less cooperation), while much of it was tangled in Trump's preexisting grudge with claims that he actually "won the election!" in MN, his personal hatred for Tim Walz, and the Somali welfare fraud stuff.

Seriously, bro? An AP article about (N=40) agents who posted their hiring publicly, where most of the (4) "problems" are that a few of them had declared bankruptcy before? And then a single one where the problem was that one time he was sued by a woman who sounds like a Karen, with no meaningful details?

I think that just buttresses my point. "Deeply motivated investigation by top-level journalist outlet managed to find a single time where a guy was accused once of possibly making a bad arrest."

Which was dismissed with prejudice. Feel free to sign up for the 14 day free trial to read the full details.

In comparison, ICE has arrested 170 citizens in the course of some 582k arrests, which is a 0.0029% bad arrest rate. Compare that to things like the overall rate of false arrests, accidental IRS audits (10%), and wrongful executions. And that number is still an exagerration, because the cases that got enough attention to derive news articles were actually pretty reasonable, like the DISABLED VETERAN CITIZEN who was detained for three days by ICE for, er, working security at a drug farm that was using mass illegal labor include the purported use of migrant children as child slaves.

Or the kid who was technically born in the US, then taken back to Mexico as an infant to be raised in a village so remote he didn't even speak Spanish. When he came back to the US, he had no papers and hopped the border with his other illegal friends. When they were all arrested, it took an entire weekend for ICE to find a translator for the Aztec language he spoke to get his shit straightened out.

Just outrageous.

I never said they didn't go to other states, it's that Minnesota was particularly targeted as defacto retaliation for displeasing Trump.

Doing the same thing they're doing in all the other states, but it's "targeted" because "political experts say", even as they admit that the state is a hotbed for immigrant fraud.

So part of this is potentially understandable (send agents where there's less cooperation)

This is just a surge. They've talked about this as a tactic, and done it in 20+ cities. Minneapolis is just the only one that had Walz staffers and government employees actively coordinating activist harassment and likely using internal government tracking data such as license plate readers to help the activists impede and harass agents.

You are just making up the "trigger happy" accusation.