For a long time I've noticed (as many have) the disconnect between the seriousness of people's rhetoric (expressed desire for violence etc) and the non-seriousness/flippancy/casualness with which it is expressed (calling for assassinations at the work brunch or whatever.
This seems like a similar phenomenon, but extended from rhetoric to action---still treated like a tribe signaling game. They dont expect to face violent consequences for the same reason they dont expect you to press them on their views at the work brunch.
You're parroting dangerous lies. ICE absolutely has the authority to arrest people interfering with their enforcement efforts. Anybody claiming differently wants more bodies on the ground.
Only in the strict legal sense of “interfere” or “obstruct”.
Beat cops, by contrast, have broad authority to just use the various public nuisance laws to create the result. This is fundamentally why you don’t see ICE doing what, say, LAPD does despite them having plenty of people available.
For example, ICE can arrest me for blocking a street if they have probable cause to believe that I’m targeting them. But a cop can just arrest me for blocking the street simpliciter.
I don't have an opinion on which specific acts of activist interference will be ruled lawful to arrest for, and my best guess is that the actual answer is pending the lawsuits that shake out of this. My claim is just that there exists a level of interference and obstruction which can and will result in a lawful arrest by federal agents. I'm not a lawyer, but my (unstudied) belief is that at least in some cases, deliberately blocking in federal law enforcement vehicles with your car is a crime they have the authority to arrest you for. If that belief is demonstrated to be categorically false I'll issue a correction.
And my broader point has little to do with the legality of ICE's actions, which again I don't have a strong opinion on. My point is that these tactics are tantamount to asking to be shot, in the aggregate, and this is true regardless of the legality of that shooting.
Yes, blocking traffic will result in a lawful arrest. My concern is that you move from that reasonable position to the less reasonable position of insinuating that protestors who are "asking to be shot" can be legally shot (or at least think that the legality of shooting them is debatable).
I bring this point up because the post you linked in the beginning says
> The truth is that the precise angle of the tires and exact positioning of the ICE agent’s body with respect to the left headlight of the Honda Pilot don’t matter very much. A shooting like this was inevitable given the protest tactics at hand, and more shootings will follow.
But if ICE agents are only allowed to shoot people who are credible threats to their lives, the angle of the tires and positioning of the agent are in fact the most crucial facts, along with the fact that Good wasn't screaming obscenities or verbally threatening the officer's life.
Arrest is notably different from execution; I would not be writing this comment if Good was simply arrested. I also don't think that law enforcement can legally shoot people who are asking to be shot, even explicitly, unless they have credible reason to fear for their lives, which is why the DHS explicitly states that agents can only apply a "reasonable amount of force".
This reminds me of the 9-11 operator in the joke saying, "you're being mugged? But that's illegal, tell them to stop!"
Rules are good, and broad compliance of rules by law enforcement is good. But the real world is messy, compliance is never 100%, bad actors will always exist, and mistakes, including fatal ones, are inevitable at scale. Eugyppius's comment is a simple, factual description of the inevitable outcome of large-scale activist actions like this one when spread across thousands of incidents, not an endorsement of this particular outcome. Eventually, somebody is going to get hurt, and all the training and preparation in the world can't change that. The officer in question did not have the benefit of 4 angles of video recording to cooly examine before drawing his weapon to combat what he perceived in the moment to be a threat to his life.
Not sure what you're replying to---by "disconnect" i am referring to dissonance between the external/objective "seriousness" of a persons statements/actions and the persons (apparent) internal perception of those statements/actions as being essentially "casual/playful/etc".
Whether or not ICE abstractly has the legal authority to do any given thing has no bearing on whether or not physical confrontations of the sort discussed in the article are "serious" (in the sense that they are obviously and objectively dangerous etc).
Because their perception of its seriousness comes down to ICE’s ability to arrest them, which is both limited and unlocks the vast majority of police brutality possible.
That’s why this disconnect reflects something real in the world.
Three thing to add: 1) this isn't new, their mothers/grandmothers were putting flower in the barrels of National Guard rifles in the 60s (another reminder that current levels of unrest are a shadow of what used to be) 2) this isn't limited to the left - would it surprise anyone that read this that the only person shot by law enforcement on Jan 6 was a *drumroll* white woman? 3) this is certainly better than the alternative, which is Americans cowering in fear of a vast internal police force.
These are Saul Alinsky tactics, honed and perfected in the 1960s. "The action is in the reaction" "goad and guide your enemy to get the reaction you need" "make me enemy live up to its own set of rules" and so on.
There's an essay to be written here about how Rules for Radicals has shifted in importance in the age of social media. The protests of the 1960s were much more extreme than what we see today with the possible exception of 2020. I think part of that is that the rioters of the 1960s needed to make a much bigger splash to get sympathetic media coverage. You can think of that as a good thing: political violence today is much more ritualized, with a much smaller level of violence and mayhem necessary to accomplish the goals outlined in Rules for Radicals.
But what ICE is doing is exactly how we return to that level of violence. The feds escalating against citizens is far more likely to provoke more violence than it is to produce submission.
OK, but consider the incentives at play here. Any violence that results from ICE operations works against ICE's mission and narrative, plays directly into their opponents' hands. They have every incentive to avoid it whenever possible, just as the activists have every incentive to provoke it.
Ok, but this reasoning run directly into the problem that we have a huge number of reports and videos of ICE deliberately escalating and using a whole lot of unnecessary violence. Do they misunderstand their incentives, or don they disagree with your analysis?
If cops want citizens to respect their orders and follow the law, then the cops can follow the law and not give illegal orders.
If citizens are breaking the law, then arrest them. If they aren't, then the cops do actually have to just put up with it. Killing people instead is just begging for retaliation.
She listened to her gay lover say drive baby drive instead of the law enforcement telling her to get out of the car. She hit the officer with a deadly weapon and was responded with reasonable force. Next time comply and dont listen to your idiot companion. Maybe dont obstruct but who knows.
Your point being that Americans should do whatever government agents with guns tell them to do and should expect to get shot if they are too much trouble.
And here I thought we had a bill of rights.
Oh, and btw? Take a look at the new NYT headline picture for an angle on how not-hit ross actually was.
Don't give a shit what your lefty rag says. It is propaganda bullshit paper filled with enemies of america proper. The video evidence shows a defiant law breaker who disobeyed federal agents who have arresting capabilty, listened to her dumbass lover and drove into the agent and was met with reasonable force. Choose your fucking causes and your methods carefully, or don't. But don't cite the new york times like that means jack or shit.
There are a dozen videos. And it's very telling you immediately jump to 'everything that disagrees with me is a lie by a liar who hates America!'. Almost like you know you are an idiot and are attempting to avoid backing down by getting aggressive.
I won't back down to fucking left wingers who lie and spout their propaganda from the nyt or some other dumb institution like it's infallible. The direct video from the officer shows the full story and her lesbo lover said drive baby drive to the fucking officer and she got shot while committing assault with a deadly weapon. She did it at the behest of fucking criminal aliens and yes illegals have already committed a misdemeanor so are criminals. Her and her lovers fault. Babbit received the same fate and your demented president gave the officer a medal.
"Your point being that Americans should do whatever government agents with guns tell them to do and should expect to get shot if they are too much trouble. "
For some reason I'm having flashbacks to the illegal coronavirus lockdowns....
Of course it does, you're a partisan and you still think poor innocent cuddly teddy boy George was heckin' murdered by totally racist KKK nazi white supremacist police for no reason but their seething hatred of brown people. Thus the inherent entertainment in dismissively calling him ''Saint Floyd of Fentanyl'' for instance, to poke a hole in that overinflated luxury belief balloon.
If I had instead made a mocking comment about the ''fat retarded fascist orange cheetoh'' you'd be cackling like a pack of well-fed geese.
TDS makes for shit humor though, no transgressive edge to it. It's just roiling bitterness masquerading as ''comedy''. (I've seen good, biting mockery of the Trumpinator a few times online, but it always comes from the naughty, naughty ''far right'', make of that what you will...)
Clearly you've failed to even provide the merest denial or counterargument. Touched a nerve, have I? And see, as predicted, the response is poor-quality, toothless, imaginationless mockery again. Not even funny, nor clever. Simple concern trolling. The perennial tool of the catty leftist wishing to abort and escape an unfavorable situation without losing face.
White middle-class, middle-aged women live modern lives insulated from any real threat or need or want. Very little directly affects them. So they yearn for meaning. For most of the past two millennia, organized religion offered all of humanity an answer to this universal problem of existential ennui. Now, having destroyed that institution, these women search aimlessly, seeking the next thrill that will flatter or offend their contrived self-images.
ICE isn’t seen as a legitimate law enforcement agency because it kinda isn’t: it’s a special purpose agency with limited authority to enforce the law. Congress set it up that way because Congress has studiously avoided creating a national police force for 200 years. All this is made worse by the fact that, because they’re not a real law enforcement agency, they don’t have real uniforms or anything. They’re plainclothes with identifying markers at best.
It’s not very zeitgeist-y, but I think a huge amount of ICE’s problems comes down to not looking like they enforce laws and instead just looking like a doofus from the local range.
"in both cases participants possessed an uncanny and false belief in their own safety in pursuing such action." That was something that struck me when I first saw the video of the Babbit shooting. The crowd around her seemed dumbstruck, like the possibility of getting shot just never occurred to them. Cf. the "real bullets" comment from Good's wife.
Something I've noted on Twitter (but which probably shouldn't apply for most of the people in J6's case, interestingly) is that women especially don't have an intuition of how posturing can lead to violence (the Joe Mixon assault video is a great example in my mind; most guys probably understand that if you walk up to one of the strongest, most athletic guys in the world and yell at him and push him, "hands getting thrown" is a very likely outcome, and you should be prepared for it).
There's also a phenomenon I like to call the West Wing Effect whereas there is an assumption that you can deploy a clever stratagem and your opponent just has to take and we end the episode and move on. No, it's an iterated game; the opponent can reaction.
I know he's always been a bit controversial (and even has fallen out of favor with his earlier supporters) but I'm reminded of a conversation between Jordan Peterson and Camile Paglia where he discusses this, the idea that men from the time of boyhood know or learn that the ultimate endpoint for 'words' between men is physical violence.
I think part of this is that the administration has been deeply dishonest about the tradeoffs of enforcing what is obviously a deeply unpopular policy. Like, okay, you can kick out all illegal immigrants but you're deluded if you assume there are no costs or collateral to do this. If you support this policy, I really think you need to ask yourself how many deaths you're willing to accept in enforcing it. In blaming the activists you're evading responsibility for your own political commitments.
I realize I asserted ICE is not popular without evidence: I wanted to highlight this recent poll showing a majority of Americans find ICE tactics inappropriate and think ICE makes cities less safe: https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/politics/ice-minnesota-cnn-poll
1) These opinion polls closely track partisan affiliation and Trump approval and have to be discounted a great deal for that reason alone. A majority of democrats supporting defunding police during the summer of 2020 but have since reformed their views. Emotions are high and it's a mistake to over-correct based on moment-to-moment swings in polling data.
2) It's disingenuous to cast violent opposition to law enforcement as a force of nature while calling enforcement of black-and-white immigration law a "political commitment". It's not, by and large, the people being deported who are harassing and impeding ICE officers, it's their radicalized white allies. Surely the decision to violently oppose immigration enforcement is itself also a "political commitment".
(1) OK, fair point. That was literally me and in retrospect feels like a temporary insanity.
(2) While I accept that this framing may have been disingenuous, I do think it is more or less common sense that there's always some discretion on the part of law enforcement in terms of when you do and do not enforce the law. Do drivers running red lights, stop signs or speeding always get pulled over or ticketed? No, even though these actions are quite clearly illegal, and I suspect people would find it to be an abuse of power if they did so (cf the discourse around automated traffic cameras).
On a similar note, while immigration law may be black and white, people pretty obviously feel differently about deporting someone who's already in the system for other crimes vs. raiding the house of an otherwise law abiding illegal immigrant. I don't think it's a good idea to violently oppose law enforcement, but it also seems pretty clear to me that images of masked ICE agents in the street undermine their perceived legitimacy by the public. It's really not a good outcome for the government to be perceived as an occupying force (frankly, I feel this way - ironically as a DC resident - with the National Guard patrolling the streets. It's un-American!)
... Anyways, I think I'm just rambling at this point. Thanks for engaging.
I appreciate that you're engaging on this. I would ask, however, that you consider that a possible solution to literally all of this is for national Dems to crack down hard on candidates at the local level that introduce or support sanctuary city policies. Informing CBP/ICE about some criminal that has a deportation order or is here illegally and letting them pick them up upon arrest by local LEO is a much safer, saner way of doing this. I don't get that Dems broadly don't understand this.
You’re not saying deportation laws are unjust and should be changed through the democratic process. You’re saying it’s reasonable to nullify laws selectively because enforcement feels uncomfortable when it affects people you like. That’s favoritism dressed up as virtue.
A system where communities decide which laws apply based on personal relationships is not humane governance. It’s arbitrary power. The same logic works just as well for ignoring tax laws, gun laws, or environmental laws if the violator happens to be a “friend or neighbor.” You don’t get to keep the rule of law and opt out of enforcement whenever it feels awkward.
More importantly, this posture actively creates the very outcomes you claim to oppose. When local authorities refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, enforcement doesn’t disappear. It gets deferred, meaningfully escalated, and carried out under worse conditions, in public, by officers operating with less coordination and less local context. That’s how you end up with chaotic encounters instead of quiet custodial transfers after lawful arrests.
If your real concern is safety, proportionality, and minimizing harm, sanctuary policies are counterproductive. They replace boring, procedural enforcement with high-risk, ad hoc confrontations. That isn’t protecting “friends and neighbors.” It’s outsourcing risk to everyone involved and then pretending surprise when it goes badly.
You can oppose deportation as a policy. You can advocate for legalization or amnesty. But pretending that selective non-enforcement is morally superior or operationally sane is self-deception. A society that runs on vibes and personal sympathy instead of rules doesn’t become kinder. It becomes unstable.
And instability always hurts the weakest people first.
Immigration law is most certainly not 'black and white'. it is exceedingly complex and open to interpretation.
In any event Trump got elected promising to deport the violent felonious illegals but couldn't find enough, as there aren't that many and actual felons tend to be better at avoiding law enforcement than the general population. So then they switched to rounding up any undocumented immigrant they could find. But they haven't found enough undocumented immigrants, so then they started asking any with brown skin or an accent for their papers which the public seems to think is a bit too Nazi (because it is) and now apparently it's liberal white women's fault that the poor ICE agents have to shoot them.
The more damning critique against the White House is the fact they’ve completely ignored employers who hire illegal immigrants. Go drag the CEO of Tyson Foods into Congress and grill him. Put huge penalties on employers who do not adopt the e-verify system. There are much more effective and less violent tactics at the WH’a disposal yet they do not do this. I think this is quite revealing that there is a thirst for violence on both sides of the aisle here
sorry if I'm missing something basic but I don't see why 1) discounts anything. Sure, they hate ICE largely because it's trump's darling, but their hatred of trump is real and durable. And frankly, Trump's made his bed there imo.
Also I think "force of nature" is actually a pretty good way of thinking about this. (Or Moloch, if you know the reference) The feedback loop of martyr -> outrage -> martyr is exactly the kind of self-reinforcing thing you seen in eg. hurricanes.
Personally, I go back and forth on how much it's a person's fault for falling into Moloch's hands. Is it the death cultists fault for being death cultists, or Moloch's fault for starting up the cycle to begin with? Is it orange man's fault for being orange hitler, or Moloch's fault for picking him in particular to be the story's protagonist?
Anyway, I loved the article. I'll admit I didn't really notice the death cult until you pointed it out. Now we just need to figure out how to get some death-cult resistance into the people
It’s interesting that she says these tactics came out of Palestine encampments- these kinds of direct action tactics are frequently used in Judea and Samaria against the IDF by both Palestinian and foreign activists to try and goad the IDF into either shooting them or ceasing their operation.
It's unlikely that the goal of activists is to get shot. Especially where the shooters tend to have immunity. Usually the goal is to prevent something from happening.
The goal of the tactics described in this post is to prevent ICE from taking people. Provoking violence from armed men is definitely not. The fact that the most recent person shot was in the leg not the face suggests that the armed trained men have dialled down their violent response.
In most democratic countries protesting government policy including confronting or trying to prevent is does not result in protestors getting shot. Not even some of the time. It's not acceptable that people will get shot. It's due to bad training that tells armed officers to empty their clips if they feel under threat while in Europe officers are trained to de-escalate.
I think the Women Are Wonderful effect explains a lot of this. When a group is culturally treated as inherently benign, moral judgment shifts inward. Actions are evaluated based on intent and emotional framing rather than external standards like harm, legality, or consequence.
In that context, behavior is not merely excused by others. It is often not experienced as bad by the actors themselves. If something feels justified or expressive, it is understood as acceptable, even when it is objectively reckless or illegal.
You can see this dynamic clearly in reactions to the Good shooting and the surrounding protests. Conduct that would otherwise trigger restraint or accountability is instead framed as morally validated, while scrutiny is redirected away from the behavior and toward anyone questioning it. The issue is not malice. It is moral solipsism reinforced by asymmetric expectations, which erodes consistent standards and equal application of the law.
The officers in Minnesota did not "empty their clips". And European police officers are for the most part policing an unarmed population, a luxury that American police officers do not enjoy.
Canada has a comparable level of gun ownership to the US I think without the rate of police lethality. The issue seems to be the training. In the US the training is to use lethal force if the officer feels under threat.
Additionally, the difference in police lethality between the US and Canda is perhaps not quite as striking as you're making out. This article (https://carleton.ca/news/story/police-involved-deaths-canada-rise/) claims that Canadian police officers killed 704 people in the period 2000-22. With an average population of 34.8m in the period, that works out at 2.02 killings/100k. In the same period in the US, there were 11,267 police killings (https://airtable.com/appzVzSeINK1S3EVR/shroOenW19l1m3w0H/tblxearKzw8W7ViN8). With an average population of 311.5m, that works out at 3.62 killings/100k. A significant difference, to be sure, but hardly night and day.
A lot of things you do in other countries don’t get you shot but do here. People have itchy trigger fingers and we’re not good at training it out of people.
I don't think much can be inferred from a sample size of two. Especially given that it would have been impossible for the agents in Minnesota to aim for Good's leg.
I have concerns about the ICE officer's actions, and what should happen next for him. But that's another topic for another day. Let's set that aside.
What I find completely bizarro are the following behaviors:
1) These people thinking that their whiteness will protect them, as if the officers operate solely on bigotry and only go after people of color
2) These people thinking that "don't ever hit women, don't punch down, etc." applies to law enforcement in executing their duties. That has NEVER been the case and it doesn't take even a midwit to understand why it will never be the case.
3) These people not putting two and two together that martyrdom means you're dead.
The net-net is a lot of people thinking they have some kind of "get out of reality free" card. It's cultlike. I guess if people feel entitled to their own "truth", well, here we are.
What I am also seeing is an almost masturbatory response to Resistance Porn (to be fair, there's also a lot of Ass-Busting Porn on the Right), a lot of protesters and direct actors getting high on their own supply of beliefs, and the childless trying to channel their maternal instincts in other "productive" directions.
I think the notion of stochastic martyrdom is right on point. And I think it is also possible to hold that state (Federal) power should be wielded judiciously, in line with the threat posed and with an understanding that it requires/benefits from the general consent of the specific community it is applied to. As a thought exercise - CA has for the US relatively strict gun laws. In rural communities there are many owners of guns who are probably afoul of the regulations in some way - yet the local law enforcement doesn’t go house to house enforcing those laws - despite the awareness of potential infractions. This understanding does not appear to be involved in the calculations of the DHS around moving into a community and doing literal door to door sweeps. And as you note - stochastic violence is then inevitable at some point.
You also seem to be weighting your concern and animus towards the protesters involved - when what the stochastic equation should include is variables such as state power applied, relative level of community concurrence with application of said power, etc. It is a provocative notion but I don’t think you are engaging the full equation.
No, and this isn't meant to be a full engagement on the question. This is an examination of the dynamics of stochastic martyrdom specifically. That dynamic only works one way -- it is not in the interests of ICE or their mission to provoke violent conflict with activists, such conflict can only hurt their cause. (You didn't say that here but I have heard this objection frequently).
And it is tragic for all involved - I take care of Veterans every day who were executing orders and have spent literally decades replaying particular events even when the killing was ‘justified’ - the consequences for Renee and family are obvious and the consequences for the ICE officers are also entirely predictable - substance use, ptsd, depression, estrangement, suicide are just a few of the issues that will inevitably materialize down the road…
Very insightful point. Reminds me of the famous "paper bag" speech from The Wire. Civilization can't continue if laws aren't enforced but it also can't continue if every law is enforced to the max. https://youtu.be/0YrWiwUM3FA?si=j51MMJ-gA3YgIuJl&t=43n
At the start of the Trump Administration, the DHS had over 650,000 criminal illegal aliens currently on their Non-Detained Docket (NDD). These are people who have been convicted or charged with crimes such as homicide, sexual assault, regular assault, burglary, larceny, robbery, traffic offenses, weapons offenses, and kidnapping. These are the illegal immigrants that ICE is concentrating on for removal.
IMO there is overwhelming support for deporting these illegals. When that is accomplished and it will be, then we can have a discussion on amnesty for non-violent illegals who have been here for years working, raising families and paying taxes. The two groups are completely different and progressive support for preventing the deportation of the first group is an 80/20 loosing position which the midterms will make obvious.
For a long time I've noticed (as many have) the disconnect between the seriousness of people's rhetoric (expressed desire for violence etc) and the non-seriousness/flippancy/casualness with which it is expressed (calling for assassinations at the work brunch or whatever.
This seems like a similar phenomenon, but extended from rhetoric to action---still treated like a tribe signaling game. They dont expect to face violent consequences for the same reason they dont expect you to press them on their views at the work brunch.
There actually is a disconnect.
ICE’s law enforcement powers really are quite limited, that’s why we don’t have stories about mass arrests of “protesters”.
If you’re an immigrant, however, they have powers far beyond what justice system generally allows.
So there really is a difference between what ICE means in their jurisdiction and what they mean for anyone outside it.
You're parroting dangerous lies. ICE absolutely has the authority to arrest people interfering with their enforcement efforts. Anybody claiming differently wants more bodies on the ground.
Only in the strict legal sense of “interfere” or “obstruct”.
Beat cops, by contrast, have broad authority to just use the various public nuisance laws to create the result. This is fundamentally why you don’t see ICE doing what, say, LAPD does despite them having plenty of people available.
For example, ICE can arrest me for blocking a street if they have probable cause to believe that I’m targeting them. But a cop can just arrest me for blocking the street simpliciter.
Thanks for admitting you were lying before
What do you think about the recent reports of a "legal refresher" that reminds agents of the legality of noncompliance and passively disobeying commands? https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/immigration-agents-terrified-by-ice
I don't have an opinion on which specific acts of activist interference will be ruled lawful to arrest for, and my best guess is that the actual answer is pending the lawsuits that shake out of this. My claim is just that there exists a level of interference and obstruction which can and will result in a lawful arrest by federal agents. I'm not a lawyer, but my (unstudied) belief is that at least in some cases, deliberately blocking in federal law enforcement vehicles with your car is a crime they have the authority to arrest you for. If that belief is demonstrated to be categorically false I'll issue a correction.
And my broader point has little to do with the legality of ICE's actions, which again I don't have a strong opinion on. My point is that these tactics are tantamount to asking to be shot, in the aggregate, and this is true regardless of the legality of that shooting.
Yes, blocking traffic will result in a lawful arrest. My concern is that you move from that reasonable position to the less reasonable position of insinuating that protestors who are "asking to be shot" can be legally shot (or at least think that the legality of shooting them is debatable).
I bring this point up because the post you linked in the beginning says
> The truth is that the precise angle of the tires and exact positioning of the ICE agent’s body with respect to the left headlight of the Honda Pilot don’t matter very much. A shooting like this was inevitable given the protest tactics at hand, and more shootings will follow.
But if ICE agents are only allowed to shoot people who are credible threats to their lives, the angle of the tires and positioning of the agent are in fact the most crucial facts, along with the fact that Good wasn't screaming obscenities or verbally threatening the officer's life.
Arrest is notably different from execution; I would not be writing this comment if Good was simply arrested. I also don't think that law enforcement can legally shoot people who are asking to be shot, even explicitly, unless they have credible reason to fear for their lives, which is why the DHS explicitly states that agents can only apply a "reasonable amount of force".
This reminds me of the 9-11 operator in the joke saying, "you're being mugged? But that's illegal, tell them to stop!"
Rules are good, and broad compliance of rules by law enforcement is good. But the real world is messy, compliance is never 100%, bad actors will always exist, and mistakes, including fatal ones, are inevitable at scale. Eugyppius's comment is a simple, factual description of the inevitable outcome of large-scale activist actions like this one when spread across thousands of incidents, not an endorsement of this particular outcome. Eventually, somebody is going to get hurt, and all the training and preparation in the world can't change that. The officer in question did not have the benefit of 4 angles of video recording to cooly examine before drawing his weapon to combat what he perceived in the moment to be a threat to his life.
Not sure what you're replying to---by "disconnect" i am referring to dissonance between the external/objective "seriousness" of a persons statements/actions and the persons (apparent) internal perception of those statements/actions as being essentially "casual/playful/etc".
Whether or not ICE abstractly has the legal authority to do any given thing has no bearing on whether or not physical confrontations of the sort discussed in the article are "serious" (in the sense that they are obviously and objectively dangerous etc).
Because their perception of its seriousness comes down to ICE’s ability to arrest them, which is both limited and unlocks the vast majority of police brutality possible.
That’s why this disconnect reflects something real in the world.
They are weak people who have no idea what they are doing or why
Three thing to add: 1) this isn't new, their mothers/grandmothers were putting flower in the barrels of National Guard rifles in the 60s (another reminder that current levels of unrest are a shadow of what used to be) 2) this isn't limited to the left - would it surprise anyone that read this that the only person shot by law enforcement on Jan 6 was a *drumroll* white woman? 3) this is certainly better than the alternative, which is Americans cowering in fear of a vast internal police force.
It’s not a vast police force, it’s a de facto Freikorps.
Which is fine, I’m RW and support it.
The Left had their fun and the Right shall have theirs but with badges.
Bye 👋🏻
These are Saul Alinsky tactics, honed and perfected in the 1960s. "The action is in the reaction" "goad and guide your enemy to get the reaction you need" "make me enemy live up to its own set of rules" and so on.
There's an essay to be written here about how Rules for Radicals has shifted in importance in the age of social media. The protests of the 1960s were much more extreme than what we see today with the possible exception of 2020. I think part of that is that the rioters of the 1960s needed to make a much bigger splash to get sympathetic media coverage. You can think of that as a good thing: political violence today is much more ritualized, with a much smaller level of violence and mayhem necessary to accomplish the goals outlined in Rules for Radicals.
But what ICE is doing is exactly how we return to that level of violence. The feds escalating against citizens is far more likely to provoke more violence than it is to produce submission.
OK, but consider the incentives at play here. Any violence that results from ICE operations works against ICE's mission and narrative, plays directly into their opponents' hands. They have every incentive to avoid it whenever possible, just as the activists have every incentive to provoke it.
Ok, but this reasoning run directly into the problem that we have a huge number of reports and videos of ICE deliberately escalating and using a whole lot of unnecessary violence. Do they misunderstand their incentives, or don they disagree with your analysis?
If cops want citizens to respect their orders and follow the law, then the cops can follow the law and not give illegal orders.
If citizens are breaking the law, then arrest them. If they aren't, then the cops do actually have to just put up with it. Killing people instead is just begging for retaliation.
She listened to her gay lover say drive baby drive instead of the law enforcement telling her to get out of the car. She hit the officer with a deadly weapon and was responded with reasonable force. Next time comply and dont listen to your idiot companion. Maybe dont obstruct but who knows.
Your point being that Americans should do whatever government agents with guns tell them to do and should expect to get shot if they are too much trouble.
And here I thought we had a bill of rights.
Oh, and btw? Take a look at the new NYT headline picture for an angle on how not-hit ross actually was.
Don't give a shit what your lefty rag says. It is propaganda bullshit paper filled with enemies of america proper. The video evidence shows a defiant law breaker who disobeyed federal agents who have arresting capabilty, listened to her dumbass lover and drove into the agent and was met with reasonable force. Choose your fucking causes and your methods carefully, or don't. But don't cite the new york times like that means jack or shit.
There are a dozen videos. And it's very telling you immediately jump to 'everything that disagrees with me is a lie by a liar who hates America!'. Almost like you know you are an idiot and are attempting to avoid backing down by getting aggressive.
I won't back down to fucking left wingers who lie and spout their propaganda from the nyt or some other dumb institution like it's infallible. The direct video from the officer shows the full story and her lesbo lover said drive baby drive to the fucking officer and she got shot while committing assault with a deadly weapon. She did it at the behest of fucking criminal aliens and yes illegals have already committed a misdemeanor so are criminals. Her and her lovers fault. Babbit received the same fate and your demented president gave the officer a medal.
Hope you enjoy eating crow as much as you enjoy licking boots.
"Your point being that Americans should do whatever government agents with guns tell them to do and should expect to get shot if they are too much trouble. "
For some reason I'm having flashbacks to the illegal coronavirus lockdowns....
Remind me who got shot and who got sent to jail over those. Anyone? No? Didn't think so.
Right? It's (D)ifferent, I guess?
partial to "stochastic floydism" myself
Why
Because it’s hilarious?
It is? Just sounds like standard conservative cant stuff to me.
Of course it does, you're a partisan and you still think poor innocent cuddly teddy boy George was heckin' murdered by totally racist KKK nazi white supremacist police for no reason but their seething hatred of brown people. Thus the inherent entertainment in dismissively calling him ''Saint Floyd of Fentanyl'' for instance, to poke a hole in that overinflated luxury belief balloon.
If I had instead made a mocking comment about the ''fat retarded fascist orange cheetoh'' you'd be cackling like a pack of well-fed geese.
TDS makes for shit humor though, no transgressive edge to it. It's just roiling bitterness masquerading as ''comedy''. (I've seen good, biting mockery of the Trumpinator a few times online, but it always comes from the naughty, naughty ''far right'', make of that what you will...)
Clearly you’ve got some issues you need to work through. May I suggest ChatGPT?
Clearly you've failed to even provide the merest denial or counterargument. Touched a nerve, have I? And see, as predicted, the response is poor-quality, toothless, imaginationless mockery again. Not even funny, nor clever. Simple concern trolling. The perennial tool of the catty leftist wishing to abort and escape an unfavorable situation without losing face.
Touch grass/not a good look/big yikes homie.
White middle-class, middle-aged women live modern lives insulated from any real threat or need or want. Very little directly affects them. So they yearn for meaning. For most of the past two millennia, organized religion offered all of humanity an answer to this universal problem of existential ennui. Now, having destroyed that institution, these women search aimlessly, seeking the next thrill that will flatter or offend their contrived self-images.
Seems like guns are the problem.
Are you an AWFL?
ICE isn’t seen as a legitimate law enforcement agency because it kinda isn’t: it’s a special purpose agency with limited authority to enforce the law. Congress set it up that way because Congress has studiously avoided creating a national police force for 200 years. All this is made worse by the fact that, because they’re not a real law enforcement agency, they don’t have real uniforms or anything. They’re plainclothes with identifying markers at best.
It’s not very zeitgeist-y, but I think a huge amount of ICE’s problems comes down to not looking like they enforce laws and instead just looking like a doofus from the local range.
"in both cases participants possessed an uncanny and false belief in their own safety in pursuing such action." That was something that struck me when I first saw the video of the Babbit shooting. The crowd around her seemed dumbstruck, like the possibility of getting shot just never occurred to them. Cf. the "real bullets" comment from Good's wife.
Something I've noted on Twitter (but which probably shouldn't apply for most of the people in J6's case, interestingly) is that women especially don't have an intuition of how posturing can lead to violence (the Joe Mixon assault video is a great example in my mind; most guys probably understand that if you walk up to one of the strongest, most athletic guys in the world and yell at him and push him, "hands getting thrown" is a very likely outcome, and you should be prepared for it).
There's also a phenomenon I like to call the West Wing Effect whereas there is an assumption that you can deploy a clever stratagem and your opponent just has to take and we end the episode and move on. No, it's an iterated game; the opponent can reaction.
I know he's always been a bit controversial (and even has fallen out of favor with his earlier supporters) but I'm reminded of a conversation between Jordan Peterson and Camile Paglia where he discusses this, the idea that men from the time of boyhood know or learn that the ultimate endpoint for 'words' between men is physical violence.
I think part of this is that the administration has been deeply dishonest about the tradeoffs of enforcing what is obviously a deeply unpopular policy. Like, okay, you can kick out all illegal immigrants but you're deluded if you assume there are no costs or collateral to do this. If you support this policy, I really think you need to ask yourself how many deaths you're willing to accept in enforcing it. In blaming the activists you're evading responsibility for your own political commitments.
I realize I asserted ICE is not popular without evidence: I wanted to highlight this recent poll showing a majority of Americans find ICE tactics inappropriate and think ICE makes cities less safe: https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/14/politics/ice-minnesota-cnn-poll
Two things:
1) These opinion polls closely track partisan affiliation and Trump approval and have to be discounted a great deal for that reason alone. A majority of democrats supporting defunding police during the summer of 2020 but have since reformed their views. Emotions are high and it's a mistake to over-correct based on moment-to-moment swings in polling data.
2) It's disingenuous to cast violent opposition to law enforcement as a force of nature while calling enforcement of black-and-white immigration law a "political commitment". It's not, by and large, the people being deported who are harassing and impeding ICE officers, it's their radicalized white allies. Surely the decision to violently oppose immigration enforcement is itself also a "political commitment".
(1) OK, fair point. That was literally me and in retrospect feels like a temporary insanity.
(2) While I accept that this framing may have been disingenuous, I do think it is more or less common sense that there's always some discretion on the part of law enforcement in terms of when you do and do not enforce the law. Do drivers running red lights, stop signs or speeding always get pulled over or ticketed? No, even though these actions are quite clearly illegal, and I suspect people would find it to be an abuse of power if they did so (cf the discourse around automated traffic cameras).
On a similar note, while immigration law may be black and white, people pretty obviously feel differently about deporting someone who's already in the system for other crimes vs. raiding the house of an otherwise law abiding illegal immigrant. I don't think it's a good idea to violently oppose law enforcement, but it also seems pretty clear to me that images of masked ICE agents in the street undermine their perceived legitimacy by the public. It's really not a good outcome for the government to be perceived as an occupying force (frankly, I feel this way - ironically as a DC resident - with the National Guard patrolling the streets. It's un-American!)
... Anyways, I think I'm just rambling at this point. Thanks for engaging.
I appreciate that you're engaging on this. I would ask, however, that you consider that a possible solution to literally all of this is for national Dems to crack down hard on candidates at the local level that introduce or support sanctuary city policies. Informing CBP/ICE about some criminal that has a deportation order or is here illegally and letting them pick them up upon arrest by local LEO is a much safer, saner way of doing this. I don't get that Dems broadly don't understand this.
It's perfectly reasonable for folks to vote in a way that prevents the deportation of their friends and neighbors
You’re not saying deportation laws are unjust and should be changed through the democratic process. You’re saying it’s reasonable to nullify laws selectively because enforcement feels uncomfortable when it affects people you like. That’s favoritism dressed up as virtue.
A system where communities decide which laws apply based on personal relationships is not humane governance. It’s arbitrary power. The same logic works just as well for ignoring tax laws, gun laws, or environmental laws if the violator happens to be a “friend or neighbor.” You don’t get to keep the rule of law and opt out of enforcement whenever it feels awkward.
More importantly, this posture actively creates the very outcomes you claim to oppose. When local authorities refuse to cooperate with federal immigration enforcement, enforcement doesn’t disappear. It gets deferred, meaningfully escalated, and carried out under worse conditions, in public, by officers operating with less coordination and less local context. That’s how you end up with chaotic encounters instead of quiet custodial transfers after lawful arrests.
If your real concern is safety, proportionality, and minimizing harm, sanctuary policies are counterproductive. They replace boring, procedural enforcement with high-risk, ad hoc confrontations. That isn’t protecting “friends and neighbors.” It’s outsourcing risk to everyone involved and then pretending surprise when it goes badly.
You can oppose deportation as a policy. You can advocate for legalization or amnesty. But pretending that selective non-enforcement is morally superior or operationally sane is self-deception. A society that runs on vibes and personal sympathy instead of rules doesn’t become kinder. It becomes unstable.
And instability always hurts the weakest people first.
Immigration law is most certainly not 'black and white'. it is exceedingly complex and open to interpretation.
In any event Trump got elected promising to deport the violent felonious illegals but couldn't find enough, as there aren't that many and actual felons tend to be better at avoiding law enforcement than the general population. So then they switched to rounding up any undocumented immigrant they could find. But they haven't found enough undocumented immigrants, so then they started asking any with brown skin or an accent for their papers which the public seems to think is a bit too Nazi (because it is) and now apparently it's liberal white women's fault that the poor ICE agents have to shoot them.
The more damning critique against the White House is the fact they’ve completely ignored employers who hire illegal immigrants. Go drag the CEO of Tyson Foods into Congress and grill him. Put huge penalties on employers who do not adopt the e-verify system. There are much more effective and less violent tactics at the WH’a disposal yet they do not do this. I think this is quite revealing that there is a thirst for violence on both sides of the aisle here
Yes, agree. I often wonder exactly what goes on behind closed doors to prevent this obvious move from happening.
sorry if I'm missing something basic but I don't see why 1) discounts anything. Sure, they hate ICE largely because it's trump's darling, but their hatred of trump is real and durable. And frankly, Trump's made his bed there imo.
Also I think "force of nature" is actually a pretty good way of thinking about this. (Or Moloch, if you know the reference) The feedback loop of martyr -> outrage -> martyr is exactly the kind of self-reinforcing thing you seen in eg. hurricanes.
Personally, I go back and forth on how much it's a person's fault for falling into Moloch's hands. Is it the death cultists fault for being death cultists, or Moloch's fault for starting up the cycle to begin with? Is it orange man's fault for being orange hitler, or Moloch's fault for picking him in particular to be the story's protagonist?
Anyway, I loved the article. I'll admit I didn't really notice the death cult until you pointed it out. Now we just need to figure out how to get some death-cult resistance into the people
Actually come to think, How dangerous *is* the death cult?
If there's 3000 ICE agents in Minnesota, and about 1 instance of ICE chicken per ICE agent, that's 3000 instances of ICE chicken
then that's 1 death and 2 major injuries per 3000?
Or maybe we should count all instances of ICE chicken nationwide? So maybe like 3 times that? About 1 in 10,000 chance of death???
I dunno. This whole calculation feels gross anyway
Worrying about popularity is how we got 10M people crossing the border from 2020-2024.
It’s interesting that she says these tactics came out of Palestine encampments- these kinds of direct action tactics are frequently used in Judea and Samaria against the IDF by both Palestinian and foreign activists to try and goad the IDF into either shooting them or ceasing their operation.
It's unlikely that the goal of activists is to get shot. Especially where the shooters tend to have immunity. Usually the goal is to prevent something from happening.
Those people are organized terrorists, not protestors.
"This is fourth generational warfare!" No, it's 1st century Christianity.
Well then, time to go full Diocletionus on the protesters!
The goal of the tactics described in this post is to prevent ICE from taking people. Provoking violence from armed men is definitely not. The fact that the most recent person shot was in the leg not the face suggests that the armed trained men have dialled down their violent response.
It doesn’t suggest anything at all.
If you constantly create confrontations, a minority of them will go badly and a minority of those will go so badly someone dies.
No behavior needs to change for the situation to revert to the mean, which is no one died today.
In most democratic countries protesting government policy including confronting or trying to prevent is does not result in protestors getting shot. Not even some of the time. It's not acceptable that people will get shot. It's due to bad training that tells armed officers to empty their clips if they feel under threat while in Europe officers are trained to de-escalate.
They were not merely protesting
I think the Women Are Wonderful effect explains a lot of this. When a group is culturally treated as inherently benign, moral judgment shifts inward. Actions are evaluated based on intent and emotional framing rather than external standards like harm, legality, or consequence.
In that context, behavior is not merely excused by others. It is often not experienced as bad by the actors themselves. If something feels justified or expressive, it is understood as acceptable, even when it is objectively reckless or illegal.
You can see this dynamic clearly in reactions to the Good shooting and the surrounding protests. Conduct that would otherwise trigger restraint or accountability is instead framed as morally validated, while scrutiny is redirected away from the behavior and toward anyone questioning it. The issue is not malice. It is moral solipsism reinforced by asymmetric expectations, which erodes consistent standards and equal application of the law.
The officers in Minnesota did not "empty their clips". And European police officers are for the most part policing an unarmed population, a luxury that American police officers do not enjoy.
Also fair to say far less gun ownership in Europe. Police face knives more than guns.
Canada has a comparable level of gun ownership to the US I think without the rate of police lethality. The issue seems to be the training. In the US the training is to use lethal force if the officer feels under threat.
I believe that the US also has a vastly higher rate of police officers getting shot than Canada, which is bound to affect how police officers interact with members of the public. In the US, four police officers get shot every five days (https://www.thetrace.org/2020/07/guns-policing-how-many-deaths-data-statistics/), whereas in Canada about 2-3 officers get shot every year (https://rcmp.ca/en/corporate-information/publications-and-manuals/2010-2019-police-intervention-options-report?utm_source=chatgpt.com). Per capita (roughly 800k police officers in the US vs. 70k in Canada), that works out at 36/100k a year in the US vs. 3.5/100k a year in Canada.
Additionally, the difference in police lethality between the US and Canda is perhaps not quite as striking as you're making out. This article (https://carleton.ca/news/story/police-involved-deaths-canada-rise/) claims that Canadian police officers killed 704 people in the period 2000-22. With an average population of 34.8m in the period, that works out at 2.02 killings/100k. In the same period in the US, there were 11,267 police killings (https://airtable.com/appzVzSeINK1S3EVR/shroOenW19l1m3w0H/tblxearKzw8W7ViN8). With an average population of 311.5m, that works out at 3.62 killings/100k. A significant difference, to be sure, but hardly night and day.
Fair point about the number of police shot in the US. Bad cycle.
Canada also allows more physical force for police. Look at, oh say, the demonization of Tasers here as why the police shoot more people.
Non-lethal force is obviously preferable and also should only be used when necessary.
A lot of things you do in other countries don’t get you shot but do here. People have itchy trigger fingers and we’re not good at training it out of people.
The STATED goal is to prevent ICE from arresting people.
LEOs are not taught to disabled a suspect by shooting them in the legs. Any use of a firearm is considered deadly force.
A 9mm nicking the femoral artery will wreck someone's day and possibly cure them of their oxygen addiction.
More likely the perp got hit in the leg because it's hard to shoot straight when people are whacking you with a shovel.
Right? I am so distressed that we have to point this out in virtually every LEO-involved shooting.
Something tells me that you also didn't know they use real bullets until a week or so ago.
I don't think much can be inferred from a sample size of two. Especially given that it would have been impossible for the agents in Minnesota to aim for Good's leg.
I have concerns about the ICE officer's actions, and what should happen next for him. But that's another topic for another day. Let's set that aside.
What I find completely bizarro are the following behaviors:
1) These people thinking that their whiteness will protect them, as if the officers operate solely on bigotry and only go after people of color
2) These people thinking that "don't ever hit women, don't punch down, etc." applies to law enforcement in executing their duties. That has NEVER been the case and it doesn't take even a midwit to understand why it will never be the case.
3) These people not putting two and two together that martyrdom means you're dead.
The net-net is a lot of people thinking they have some kind of "get out of reality free" card. It's cultlike. I guess if people feel entitled to their own "truth", well, here we are.
What I am also seeing is an almost masturbatory response to Resistance Porn (to be fair, there's also a lot of Ass-Busting Porn on the Right), a lot of protesters and direct actors getting high on their own supply of beliefs, and the childless trying to channel their maternal instincts in other "productive" directions.
The left conrinuing to advocate for violently breaking laws
I think the notion of stochastic martyrdom is right on point. And I think it is also possible to hold that state (Federal) power should be wielded judiciously, in line with the threat posed and with an understanding that it requires/benefits from the general consent of the specific community it is applied to. As a thought exercise - CA has for the US relatively strict gun laws. In rural communities there are many owners of guns who are probably afoul of the regulations in some way - yet the local law enforcement doesn’t go house to house enforcing those laws - despite the awareness of potential infractions. This understanding does not appear to be involved in the calculations of the DHS around moving into a community and doing literal door to door sweeps. And as you note - stochastic violence is then inevitable at some point.
You also seem to be weighting your concern and animus towards the protesters involved - when what the stochastic equation should include is variables such as state power applied, relative level of community concurrence with application of said power, etc. It is a provocative notion but I don’t think you are engaging the full equation.
No, and this isn't meant to be a full engagement on the question. This is an examination of the dynamics of stochastic martyrdom specifically. That dynamic only works one way -- it is not in the interests of ICE or their mission to provoke violent conflict with activists, such conflict can only hurt their cause. (You didn't say that here but I have heard this objection frequently).
And it is tragic for all involved - I take care of Veterans every day who were executing orders and have spent literally decades replaying particular events even when the killing was ‘justified’ - the consequences for Renee and family are obvious and the consequences for the ICE officers are also entirely predictable - substance use, ptsd, depression, estrangement, suicide are just a few of the issues that will inevitably materialize down the road…
You have a lot of confidence in the leadership of ICE and DHS … something I don’t share, sadly.
Very insightful point. Reminds me of the famous "paper bag" speech from The Wire. Civilization can't continue if laws aren't enforced but it also can't continue if every law is enforced to the max. https://youtu.be/0YrWiwUM3FA?si=j51MMJ-gA3YgIuJl&t=43n
At the start of the Trump Administration, the DHS had over 650,000 criminal illegal aliens currently on their Non-Detained Docket (NDD). These are people who have been convicted or charged with crimes such as homicide, sexual assault, regular assault, burglary, larceny, robbery, traffic offenses, weapons offenses, and kidnapping. These are the illegal immigrants that ICE is concentrating on for removal.
IMO there is overwhelming support for deporting these illegals. When that is accomplished and it will be, then we can have a discussion on amnesty for non-violent illegals who have been here for years working, raising families and paying taxes. The two groups are completely different and progressive support for preventing the deportation of the first group is an 80/20 loosing position which the midterms will make obvious.
Dick Minnis
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