The last HWFO article on the last ICE shooting closed like this:
It really is surprising it took this long for a protester to get shot. It was predictable, the markets should have taken bets on when and where, and the Danse Macabre continues because few are smart enough or have the will to ask what the heck is actually happening, and whether it should it be happening, and how to change it if not.
Nineteen days later I’m writing about another ICE shooting, at the specific request of several of my liberal friends. Here’s the shooting:
And so I will write the article, but not to prove a thesis because my thesis hasn’t changed. This article will just be a snapshot of what’s going on in the gun rights discussion space about the second shooting, which is certainly interesting. Herein, I will let my readers and friends write the bulk of the article for me, through anonymized quotes taken from private channels, in the spirit of Scott Alexander’s “highlights from comments” work. You should read these quotes, which are curated for relevance and intelligence, but I’ll summarize the general zeitgeist briefly before we get into them.
The gun rights space is in two camps, and the camps seem to be drawn between folks who regularly carry firearms and folks whose interest is more rights focused and less practically focused.
The “rights” camp says you can protest while armed, you can film cops, and you can do both at the same time without forfeiting your life, and therefore the ICE cops murdered a dude in cold blood on the street for doing things you are allowed to do. People in the “rights” camp tend to bend libertarian or liberal, so they also tend to be less ICE positive.
The “practical” camp carry firearms regularly, and have been to numerous classes where their instructors told them to never under any circumstances get into a scrap with a cop while armed because someone might get shot in the confusion. They have been told that while you’re armed any conflict could turn deadly, so you have a moral and ethical obligation to avoid all conflicts and not provoke them. You also have an obligation to announce that you’re carrying a weapon to any cop you see and keep your hands clear, to be sure everyone in the engagement is calm and sane and nobody gets shot. The practical camp was taught this for their own safety. The practical camp tend to bend conservative, so they also tend to be more ICE positive than the rights camp.
Part of the Second Amendment schism comes from growing pains from 2020, when gun ownership grew and the prior gun owners were quite honestly a little bit worried about how to onboard all these new rights focused owners that didn’t have the same historical enculturation.
The rights camp views Alex Pretti as a hero. The practical camp views Alex Pretti as a dumbass, especially as information starts to come in about how the protests in Minneapolis are not organic, they’re organized opposition to intentionally track and interfere with armed cops that coordinate through secure channels on Signal with a defined command and control structure which are operating off of a known insurgency playbook.
To some, Pretti looks like a sacrificial pawn that the organization behind the protest killed on purpose to move the needle. If I were to engage that conspiratorial thesis at all, I would substitute the woke egregore for the “organization behind the protest,” because a distributed agenda by an egregore would look like a coordinated agenda to a conspiracy theorist.
There are also some folks who skate down the middle, who think that the sort of coordinated soft insurgency ongoing in Minneapolis is potentially legitimate, but doing it over this particular issue is dumb. And there are folks who are detached and looking at it from a larger tribal warfare standpoint, which is far more on-brand for HWFO, so we’ll start there.
I was and am one of the “rights” guys, so most of these quotes are from people arguing with me, as you’ll soon see.
Anon Who Writes Longly
This guy did a lot more than film cops.
Should physically interfering in an arrest come with a death sentence? No. Not even if you’re carrying. But this guy created a chaotic situation where the risks were extremely high.
You seem to perceive all of these shooting incidents through a framing of, “Since cops are able to get away with this, what is stopping them from doing it to me?” That’s a reasonable framing to apply. But you’re doing exactly the thing I described in another post: you’re projecting the actual events onto a different, imagined scenario. Specifically, the scenario that cops will arbitrarily kick down your door and shoot you. This is not a valid comparison because the actual events are not something you would ever do, and the imagined scenario you’re worried about is not one that would actually happen.
There’s consistently been a significant difference between the actual shootings and the hypothetical scenario that concerns you: in all of the actual shootings, the person who was shot was also the person who initiated the altercation. That’s completely different from cops kicking down your door in the middle of the night. But in every case, skilled propagandists use carefully curated videos and photographs to quickly promulgate an initial narrative that somebody was just minding their own business and the cops executed them. This narrative is compelling to you because it aligns to the scenario you’re worried about, where cops kick down your door in the middle of the night and execute you. You accept the narrative as presented, and then it becomes the framing through which you perceive all further evidence. Even as additional evidence starts to trickle out, showing that the initial narrative was a lie, that narrative has such a powerful hold on you that you keep insisting that it’s obviously true, and comparing it to the completely different scenario of cops kicking down your door in the middle of the night to shoot you. With the crazy lady in the car there was eventually enough video evidence from enough angles that you were finally able to see past the narrative to the reality that she deliberately tried to run that cop over with her car and even succeeded in hitting him. This time, you accepted the initial narrative that he was just filming and the cops went after him, which is now obviously false. How many times are you going to let these propagandists brain-fuck you before you realize what they’re doing and stop accepting their first-out-the-gate narrative?
I’m not saying that what happened with the most recent ICE shooting is OK. It’s not OK in all sorts of ways. What I’m saying is that the thing we want, which is a well-functioning society where everybody gets to be both free and safe, is not on the menu. We have a much less appealing set of options available to us. In the best case scenario, we manage to muddle our way through a few years of bad stuff before eventually finding some new equilibrium. Most of the scenarios involve catastrophic failure in some direction or another, and the only question is which of those directions we’ll slide off into.
This isn’t just about deportations, or ICE, or even Trump. This is tribal warfare. All of that other stuff is just the most convenient current excuse for the tribal warfare. If it weren’t ICE, it would be something else. A very important thing to keep in mind is that as tribal warfare escalates, the moderates on both sides lose control. It doesn’t matter that the majority of people on both sides are reasonable human beings who do not want violence in the streets and could reach a peaceful solution if they could sit down with each other and talk it out, because their influence is rapidly waning.
If you’re thinking in terms of laws or the constitution or your rights, you are in for a very rough time. Those things only matter in practice in a healthy society with a properly functioning government. We haven’t had that for years. Our decision-making processes (including our elections) have been hijacked by egregores and our government has been hollowed out. Our government hasn’t functioned on the basis of rule of law for years. That’s always been a marginal thing at best, but it’s been completely untrue at least since 9/11. Each time a faction takes control, they ratchet up the concentration of power, only for those new powers to be handed to their enemies the next time they lose an election. Everybody recognizes that pretty soon, the power will be so concentrated that all further elections will be locked in, and they are responding accordingly, trying to ensure that they will be the ones in the chair when it becomes a throne.
Talking in terms of rights and laws won’t make any difference because the only rights you actually have are the ones that you (and your tribe, if you have one) can demand at gunpoint. To the degree that this could be reversed, the people with the power to do that have no interest in doing so and your words will not sway them. If you’re actually thinking in terms of rights and laws, you are in for a very rude awakening.
I described two errors of thinking, and then BJ very helpfully responded by demonstrating exactly those two errors of thinking; I couldn’t have asked for a better straight man. They are errors of thinking because they are based on an ideal of universal principles. Universal principles are an excellent way to run a society. I would greatly prefer to live in a society based on universal principles, and I think everyone else in this Slack would as well. We frequently repeat the adage about designing a government so that you wouldn’t mind if your worst enemy were placed in charge. When you think in terms of universal principles, it’s natural to apply the general facts of a scenario as a template to other scenarios and think about how they would play out, which is exactly what BJ did. The problem is that a society can only run on universal principles when the overwhelming majority of people in charge cooperate to run it that way, and we have not had such a society in decades.
On more than one occasion, BJ has stated that when the shooting starts, he will look around, figure out which tribe seems to be most likely to win in his area, and hang their flag in front of his house. This is probably the best strategy in a civil war scenario, and many others have expressed similar plans. The thing is, neither of these are discrete events: the shooting does not start all at once, nor does the signaling of tribal affiliation. Even if you don’t yet want to declare allegiance to a tribe, you can’t help constantly sending small signals that both tribes will interpret in their own ways to sort you into their in-group or out-group. The biggest risk is doing something that causes both tribes to sort you into their out-groups.
I’m going to apply the tribal warfare framing to the most recent ICE shooting and BJ’s hypothetical counter-examples, keeping in mind the principle that “when the shooting starts, I’ll pick a tribe and fly their flag.” First, we see that the shooting has already started. It actually started a long time ago, but this is clearly a significant indicator of acceleration. The “flags” in this situation are behaviors like carrying a concealed weapon (used to be a solid indicator of red tribe affiliation, no longer) filming cops as they make arrests (used to be a fringe libertarian thing, now mostly associated with the blue tribe), and doing so in the context that they are surrounded by an angry mob (solid blue indicator). But the most important indicator of all is which cops you’re filming. If you film ICE agents arresting illegal immigrants, that codes solid blue. If you film ATF agents trying to arrest gun owners, that codes solid red.
If cops started randomly demanding Papiere Bitte at the Richmond 2A protest, and someone filmed them, and they disarmed the camera man and then shot him in the street, it would be the fucking OK Corral in about 5 seconds.
Yes, and this is exactly why the red tribe has gun rights. Not because of the 2nd Amendment, but because nobody else is willing to pay the price to take away their guns, and even if somebody were stupid enough to try, it wouldn’t work.
The blue tribe has other rights that the red tribe does not, including the right to riot with near impunity. They have secured that right by building up an infrastructure of material and legal support to rioters, propaganda engines, and loyal DAs who prosecute selectively. In 2020, the red tribe watched all summer as rioters shut down cities, caused billions of dollars in property damage, and even murdered multiple law enforcement officers, all without consequence. The red tribe interpreted this through a framing of universal principles, concluded that all of these behaviors were generally permissible to all Americans, and acted accordingly on January 6th of 2021, where they learned the hard way that the blue tribe has rights which they do not.
The blue tribe has long predicted that the red tribe would flip on gun rights as soon as black people started buying guns in large quantities. That prediction proved false, but if the blue tribe had applied a tribal rather than racial framing, they might have made a more accurate prediction which is playing out now: the red tribe does not support gun rights for the blue tribe, at least not in practice. The red tribe knows that they can carry in public and film police officers and get away with it, which are real gun rights. The blue tribe can buy guns, but are currently learning that they can’t actually use them in practice the way the red tribe does.
The red tribe is also now contesting the blue tribe’s right to riot with impunity, which is why we’re seeing so many dead anti-ICE protestors, charges against guys like Don Lemmon, threatened charges against state and local officials, etc. If the Democrats ever win another presidential election, and if they try to tit-for-tat by contesting the red tribe’s gun rights in a serious way, then we will have a full-blown civil war.
The reds already priced in full radicalization of the other side. There had been a gradual build-up through the “mostly peaceful” summer, cancel culture, attempted political assassinations, and other events, but the Charlie Kirk shooting put them over the top. The red tribe concluded that no matter what they do, they will have to deal with the consequences of the other side being fully radicalized. Since that’s already priced in, they might as well do as they please.
This is a reality to which the blue tribe has not yet caught up. Many decades of experience have taught them that they can exercise strong influence over the red tribe by modulating their radical behavior up and down. That will never work again because the red tribe will no longer let it work on them. That was a one-way switch flip. But the blue tribe has yet to realize that the radicalism knob is no longer connected to red tribe behavior, so they keep trying to twist it to 11 because they think it’s not working because they haven’t cranked it up far enough.
My prediction for most likely outcome:
The same machine that ran the summer of 2020 mobilizes and attempts a repeat. There will be riots, but it won’t be nearly as destructive as in 2020. This will give Trump the excuse he needs for a massive crackdown, possibly invoking the Insurrection Act.
In retrospect, seems obvious and I’m a little embarrassed that I was too caught up in the details to see this sooner. It seems like this was the plan all along: pick a deep blue city in a blue state and run an ICE blitz there in an attempt to goad them into rioting; if they don’t take the bait, move to the next deep blue city and try again.
All of the rising conflict we’re seeing is a direct result of forcing people with fundamentally incompatible value structures to agree on a common set of rules.
There are only two ways to resolve such conflict:
Let people split off and live in discrete political units composed of mostly like-minded people.
One group of people enforces their value structure on the other(s) by force (or eliminates those who won’t submit).
I know that some people will respond to this with #3: get the people to sit down, talk it out, and agree on a value structure that is acceptable to all. This is, indeed, the most preferable approach. In the current context, it is an unrealistic fantasy. The value structures in play are fundamentally incompatible, which limits us to #1 and #2.
If #1 is not implemented deliberately, then the default is #2. Sometimes, in the process of implementing #2, the losing side decides that #3 is preferable and makes terms.
(redacted) has described the endgame pretty well: Reconstruction 2.0. That would be the endgame that the MAGA egregore has in mind.
Cynic Anon
Watching these videos makes me feel like I’m watching a 2yr old playing with a loaded gun while dad and the uncles sit around watching and laughing. There are no adults in the room. Nobody understands violence or responsibility. It’s just a city-wide version of the Stanford Prison Study. One team was told to dress up like federal agents, and the other team was told to dress up like protestors.
My read is that Trump’s forcing the issue in the way he is to make Walz and Frey either order their troops to fire on federal agents, in which case he’ll definitely have the support to go arrest them, or to back down. He’s forcing the crisis point.
Withdrawing would be pretty unacceptable; the networks would just have time to regroup, retrain, rearm... Strategically it would be weak, operationally it would be painful, tactically there’s no benefit I can see unless they move in with more force after.
There’s some things you can let the states do their thing on. 10th amendment and the commerce clause is pretty shaky legal ground; nobody in their right mind would invade CO over weed based on a SCOTUS opinion that everyone hates. Immigration enforcement though? The federal government has like, three duties and that’s one of them. If they don’t do that job then they have no reason to be, and if they let states flout them on that then they don’t have any legitimacy.
Anon who Lives in Minneapolis
Today is my first time setting foot in Minneapolis since mid-December, I am downtown working (redacted).
I have literally seen zero ICE agents ever, but mostly because I only go to downtown Minneapolis for work, and I never go to Minneapolis for any other reason, and ICE seems to be mostly operating in the South Minneapolis area where I definitely do not go because that place sucks. Like you can totally avoid ever encountering ICE by just not following them around.
There’s a trend during riotous times for blues to post pictures of random parks or whatever away from the action and pretend that because that particular area is peaceful that it must mean the idea that there are serious riots going on must be a right wing fabrication. I could very very easily do that in Minneapolis. Again I have literally not seen a single ICE agent, though again this is mostly because I have no business in the parts of town where they are operating, and only even enter Minneapolis city limits maybe once a month on average. If I did not have access to the news I would literally have no idea that I’m in the middle of civil war 2.0.
During the 2020 riots the sky at night was orange from fires.
I wonder how much of the Rorschach test of this thing is swung by being someone who personally carries a firearm in public. IIRC, I seem to remember BJ saying at some point that he doesn’t carry (correct me if I’m wrong). As someone who does carry, I think there is something about strapping on a firearm and sincerely hoping you don’t have to use it today that affects your mindset toward conflict, in a way that people who don’t carry, or are not mindful of the full implications of carrying, don’t experience.
One year I went to the local Pride festival and hung out with some of the people I knew there from the local Pink Pistols chapter. They were stuck in a corner of the park with all the other conservative-coded groups. While I was there, someone saw the Log Cabin Republicans’ Trump poster. It was the photo from his first campaign where someone brought a rainbow flag to a rally that said “LGBT for Trump” and Donny saw it and proudly held it up.
Anyway, this person took offense to this poster and started trying to tear it down. There was a big scuffle. And meanwhile across the path from them was easily the most heavily armed section of the entire park. Probably two dozen of us. All of us looked at each other and just started packing up the tents to get out of there. I don’t think any of us gave more than a moment’s thought to going over to help or otherwise participate in the scuffle, because again when you carry a firearm, every fight is a gunfight.
The person who sincerely doesn’t want to use their firearm behaves like a massive fucking pussy, because that’s how you avoid using your firearm. And that’s why when we see a Rorschach test consisting of a guy carrying a firearm who decides to put himself in the middle of somebody else’s fight with the cops, we lack sympathy because we understand how monumentally stupid it is to do that, and simply can’t see ourselves in that position. But somebody who has never carried a firearm, and has never experienced the shift in perspective about conflict that comes from carrying a firearm, their takeaway from the Rorschach test is that they don’t see the issue with the moment the guy decides to involve himself with somebody else’s fight with the cops, because they have never experienced that voice in their head saying “don’t get yourself into a fight that you are not okay with escalating to lethal force “
The Anon on the HWFO T Shirt
Anyone emphasizing amplification is in the wrong. Pretti carried a gun into a “situation” which has few positive outcomes. I do not know if his death can be “justified” in any moral sense - I don’t know what his intentions were, but as a carrier, even if he was defending someone, he should have respected the rules of engagement - his carrying did nothing but amplify risk to himself and he was not legitimately a threat to the action he was protesting. He may have been a threat to an agent but realistically he was outgunned and outprepared and undertook risk that ended up with him dead with a VERY short leap from “bad choice” to “he dead.”
I do not know how they can actually de-escalate properly at this point. I think I’d prefer ICE take a moratorium on deportations in MN for a period of time - like, a few days, a week - just to give people a chance to reset and think, because continuing engagement gives the irrational no opportunity to think, only act. And that’s going to end up with dead people, for nothing, because the people being targeted for deportation need to be deported.
But with that said, the process is broken: MN is not cooperating, which only amplifies risk for everyone, including Minnesotans, should they choose to be involved. And they are choosing to be involved; they’re touching the stove and bitching that it’s hot, why is it hot just because it’s on and labeled as hot and cherry-red. But this commitment to enforcement is counter-productive…
Unless that’s the goal, and if it is, well, there’s a reason we should elect better people all the way up and down the slope. This saber-rattling on all sides is stupid. I think honestly that Walz and Trump and Bondi and these other goons need to be on the ground themselves: Let Walz, who is a gun-owner himself, he says, and a member of the National Guard (”Almost good enough to serve in the Army reserve!,” as my brother says), lead the protests on the ground himself, if he’s going to advocate for others. Why is the risk only to ordinary citizens? Similarly, if Trump’s all “see how big my penis is, no, it’s right THERE, it’s the hog, why you using a telescope bro, I’m sure it’s there somewhere” then let HIM go in with ICE, instead of relying on others’ service.
Intelligent Rights Anon
I’m seeing a lot of “isolated demand for rigor” around the “you need to avoid all conflict when carrying a gun” point.
No argument there, but people are not applying that rigor to the officers involved here. just gross incompetence and oafish escalation all around, but a lot of people are only pointing out the ways that Pretti failed, not the ways the officers failed. In fact a lot of people’s incentives are to deny that the officers failed in any way at all.
My biggest concern is I see zero interest on the part of the federal government in thinking about how they might have performed this arrest without killing the guy. Quite the opposite, all the messaging from the government was about how he was intending a massacre, kind of had it coming, was definitely a shitlib so who cares anyway, etc. And “we don’t particularly care if we kill you while arresting you” is not an attitude I am comfortable with the government having, and even if they have that attitude, I’m definitely not comfortable with them feeling secure to express that publicly. As gun carriers we can also take ownership of how to keep ourselves safe and out of trouble/danger. But I don’t want the government to get away with not taking ownership of their own need to become more competent too.
The good news is that this is the biggest step change in normalization of concealed carry since Bruen.
There are certain cliches that I regard as an instant forfeit in an argument, and "He didn't deserve to be executed!" is one of them.
The speaker is conceding that his person did something wrong, but selfishly demanding that the interaction be litigated solely in terms of the perspective and interests of his person, and "execution" is always a very dishonest description of the outcome.
One doesn't utter that cliche if he has a defensible case.
By the description I'd be in both camps. Rights and practicality are far from mutually exclusive, but Anon Longly basically has all this down in the same way I would.
You can protest while armed. You can film cops while armed. You probably even should.
I certainly wouldn't step foot outside in Minnesota in today's political climate without extra ammo, because I never know if I might get mistaken for ICE because I'm white and have short hair and harassed/assaulted by a mob of 30 useful idiots.
As a responsible armed citizen the best thing you can do when a peaceful protest (There's another argument here that is for another discussion) looks like it's about to get less peaceful is to GTFO.
You can't go hands with any armed law enforcement while also armed and be surprised if you come out of it without all your vital fluids.
Pretti made a fundamental, basic mistake of conduct while armed and the predictable thing happened.
Did the immigration/customs officers also make mistakes? Sure. Shoving that woman so hard she ended up on the ground on the sidewalk looks good exactly nowhere. I get it, I understand it, but you can't be doing that now. That, plus Pretti getting similarly shoved off the street (though not so that he ended up on the ground) probably ticked him over from "Intelligent human" to "raging sacrifice" because he couldn't leave his ego at home. (another thing they drum into you at concealed carry license classes)
I've been called a bootlicker for pointing out this simple fact about a dozen times so far.