To be honest, I’m surprised it’s taken this long for an ICE protester to get fatally shot. All the parameters pointed to it happening before now, and there have certainly been some close calls. This moment is the culmination of three decades of immigration and economic absurdity with plenty of blame to spread around.
I’m about to piss you off no matter who you are. By the time we’re done here, we will show that the lady who got shot today is definitely an idiot, the cop that shot her is very likely guilty of manslaughter, the Republicans and Democrats have both been assholes since at least the 1992 election, which by the way was stolen with game theory mathematics, and the dude least responsible for any of this is Paco at the Taco Stand. To make this long, twisted case we’re going to have to go all the way back to a 1990s Texas businessman with big ears. But first let’s get the shooting analysis out of the way.
The January 2026 ICE Situation
There are good cops and bad cops, and the bad ones tend to cluster around other bad ones on an agency-by-agency basis. Some of the worst bad cops, worse even than the ATF, are the Enforcement and Removal cops of ICE, who must be selected for having the sort of personality that is neither friendly nor helpful. Their entire job, which is a legitimate and real and necessary job, is to throw kids in cages and yeet them back to their nation of origin with metaphorical trebuchets. They’re like repo-men, but for humans. We’ll discuss how this is a legitimate and necessary job, if obviously very not-nice, in modern societies later.
We only had a few thousand of these guys a few years ago, but Trump hired twelve thousand more to try and meet a one-million-man deportation quota he imposed on himself which was impossible to meet because he did such a good job of shutting down the border. Biden’s deportation numbers are always going to dwarf Trump’s because Biden’s borders were open and his deportation rate was propped up by a vast catch and release program within fifty miles of Mexico. Trump shut that down, the deportations collapsed, and he couldn’t meet his artificially high quota so he hired a bunch more ICE enforcement and removal guys without time to properly train them. Lots more. And this created a highly dense concentration of the worst of the asshole cop types in the same organization. Assholes seeking employment to do asshole things.
Then Trump sends two thousand of these guys to Minneapolis. Why Minneapolis? Certainly not because it’s a border city overrun with Mexicans, because it’s not. Certainly not because it’s disproportionately a drug smuggling or gang crime focal point, because it’s not. He probably sent them there because Minneapolis is a haven of neoprogressive wokes and he wanted to fuck with them and fuck with Minnesota’s neoprogressive governor who ran against him nationally the last election cycle.
But the neoprogressive wokes love this, because Minneapolis is the beating heart of the Black Lives Matter riots, the largest and most destructive protest movement since Rodney King, responsible for more damage to the country than a category 2 hurricane. And the neoprogressive woke virtue system is all about fighting fascism. Their hobby, panacea, and life goal is to become an Instagram Martyr by getting abused, beaten, or killed by a fascist cop while all their friends film it on their cell phones to try and move the political needle, and then they can carve “almost as cool as MLK” on their gravestone. Who needs Jesus when you can farm virtue from the likes and shares, and ink yourself a corner office in Woke Heaven, or at least a little bit of Blue Hair Strap-on Strange?
So you have this concentration of several thousand poorly trained masked fashy plain clothes S-tier asshole cops and an equal concentration of ideologically monolithic NPR addicted bad-cop-provocateurs in one location like a kind of a Manhattan Project Demon Core, but substituting nuclear fissile material for political anger. There is no universe in which we build that monstrosity and someone doesn’t eventually get shot.
Shooting Controversy
In the obscure and erudite lore of the online rationalist community, there’s a story by Scott Alexander called Sort By Controversial, which tells the fictional tale of an AI named “Shiri’s Scissor” built to generate maximum controversy. If the video of the cop shooting the protester lady showed her obviously trying to ram a cop then the blues would shuffle away from this argument. If the cop walked up to a protester and shot her in the back of the head the reds would say “yeah uhh, we’re out.” This shooting had the exact right mix such that everyone can watch the same video and use it to buttress their own preconceptions about the thing. It’s Shiri’s Police Shooting, the shooting to create maximal controversy. Here’s the best video I’ve been able to find, which has been reposted by both blue and red sources:
This is another angle that’s worse:
There’s a third vantage point I’ve seen which seems to show the cop getting bumped more than either of these, but I can’t find it anymore.
As some of my regular readers may know, I’m a writer focused heavily on gun rights, and pursuant to that I’ve absorbed a fair bit of knowledge about the nuances of gun self-defense law from my time sitting around with John Correia of Active Self Protection in the media room at SHOT Show. I won’t claim to be an expert, but I’m more expert than many of this blog’s readers, and this is my take, which for the record may very well end up exactly the opposite of John Correia’s in which case you can presume I’m wrong.
While the car was technically “accelerating,” it was basically unmoving when the cop drew and shot. We know that the cop was never in danger of being run over because he could easily step aside the car. We know this because he literally did exactly that. Then after he fired his first shot through the windshield he followed that up with two additional shots into the window of the car when he was not even in the car’s travel path, both from a distance of only several feet, at a lady strapped into her vehicle with a seatbelt. It is incredibly likely that shot two or shot three blew bits of her vascular system into the passenger seat and that’s what killed her.
There is a very marginal case, but admittedly possible, that the first shot was justified because he was in the travel path of the car. That marginal case will be difficult because the car was going slowly and he was obviously able to step out of the way, but even that case may not matter. A talented prosecutor might kneecap that case by pointing out that shot two and shot three were taken when the cop was completely safe from harm, and that those are the kill shots, and that those were bad shots. There’s no argument that it’s okay for cops to shoot civilians through the open window of a moving car from the side at point blank range where a miss could end up plugging a bystander. The defense will then say that once you start shooting you just kinda sorta keep shooting because that’s your training, and then people will argue about how long it takes to change your mind about whether you should keep shooting, and so forth.
For me, it’s open and shut. If you feel strongly in the opposite I don’t hold that against you. That’s just more evidence that this is indeed Shiri’s Police Shooting, a shooting so obviously correct or incorrect that it tears social groups apart. I think if Trump were smart he’d throw that guy under the bus as fast as possible, but he’s not smart, so he won’t, and we’re going to tear ourselves apart for a few months over this until we move on to something else.
But it is worth pointing out that the dead lady is dumber than Trump is. Did she deserve to get shot? Probably not, in as much as most people don’t deserve to be shot, but that doesn’t necessarily demand sympathy. Nobody deserves to get mugged but if you wear ten thousand dollars worth of gold chains and a thong and prance down the Bluffs in West Atlanta and get your shit stolen I don’t have any sympathy for you. Trying to cut off a bunch of asshole ICE cops with your car in protest is only a few clicks less stupid than protesting AMTRAK by Snidely Whiplashing yourself to the train tracks.
Running around trying to interfere with dudes with guns who we all know are assholes while your spouse films you getting shot is the dumbest hobby I can imagine. It’s much more dangerous than model trains or Warhammer 40k or reviewing lip gloss on Tiktok, and while it might be slightly less dangerous than base jumping wingsuits in the Alps to farm social media clicks from your adrenaline antics, it’s obviously far less cool or interesting.
It seems like a clear indication of egregores in action to me, but that’s a story for another day.
In the last 12 hours I’ve plumbed all my contacts in the blue and red camps for their impressions of the shooting, and it’s not necessarily blue/red that causes people to interpret these videos differently, nor is it affiliation with guns or gun culture, nor whether you like immigrants, nor even knowledge about self defense law. The differentiating factor for whether you think the cop murdered the lady or not seems to be purely whether you like cops and whether you are fed up with protest wokery.
And the whole reason we’re in this predicament as a society is because we made fun of Ross Perot’s ears. Let’s follow the chain of events backwards to the 1992 presidential election.
The Long Chain
There is no country on all of planet Earth, as far as my research has been able to glean, which simply allows illegal immigrants to stay indefinitely once they’ve been identified. Not one. Some are just better at enforcing immigration law and border patrol than others. Deportation is a fundamental feature of all modern nation states, and anyone who says that “deportation is fascism” is saying “every nation on Earth is fascist” by proxy.
The illegal immigrants here are almost entirely here to work, make money, and take it home to central and south America to feed themselves and their families. If the line to get in moved, they’d deport themselves and go stand in the functional line, but the line to get in is either nonexistent or it takes a million dollars and a Major League Baseball contract. Illegal immigration is caused by immigration law being too strict and government bureaucracies being too slow and too stupid.
Immigration law is too strict because of the “They Took Our Jobs” crowd, by which I mean American labor. They don’t want to have to compete with poor folks who want to work, so they do their best to keep them out so they can keep the cushier job.
For decades, the Democrats played multiple sides of this. They told the unions they were on their side against the mean old corporations, and then they told the voters they were going to raise the minimum wage, and then they also fought against deportation because they felt bad for the illegal immigrants. They took all three of these positions because they practice “Vibe Governance,” where they just choose whichever policy signals the most virtue and call everyone else meanies.
But those policies don’t mix. You can’t claim to help the working class by raising the minimum wage while simultaneously facilitating the importation of an entire group of subjugated second class citizens explicitly to work for less than the very same minimum wage you’re trying to raise. It’s nonsensical, and the folks at the butt end of the nonsense are American Labor. So eventually they revolted, left the Democrats permanently, and the election maps did this:
Every time Trump won, he won the rust belt. Immigration turned into the current shit show because this is what the rust belt wants, because their jobs got offshored, because of free trade.
I like free trade. I think it’s cool. I get a warm feeling in my belly every time I buy a Mexican zucchini or a pair of Chinese ice silk underwear on Amazon for a tenth the American made price. But I realize my predilections kill jobs an hour northwest of me in Dalton Georgia as their textile plants get offshored.
GIANT SUCKING SOUND
In the salad days of 1992, when intellectuals were still in charge of political discourse instead of it being a social media shitpost war between twelve year old boys and twelve year old girls, there lived a man named Ross Perot. Perot was a curious Texas businessman who attempted to buy an election by representing an underrepresented group of traditional conservatives who he identified had been abandoned by the party system. He was campaigning primarily against the North American Free Trade Agreement. (NAFTA) Ross Perot saw all this coming, and warned us, and he was the first guy to really grab the “they took our jobs” vote.
For some people, the purpose of the economy is to provide jobs so they can work and earn a living and provide for their families. Their job is their “way of life.” For other people, the purpose of the economy is NUMBER GO UP. The NUMBER GO UP people like to say that the rising tide raises all ships, and when the number goes up there will be other better jobs for the people who lost their jobs from the bad jobs being shipped overseas for poorer people to do them more cheaply. But in practice the jobs it creates aren’t the same as the jobs it kills, so it exacerbates rural poverty, and so forth, and all these trends we’re experiencing now were kicked off initially by NAFTA.
But Ross Perot had big ears so nobody listened to him, and he split the Republican vote which gave the election undeservedly to Bill Clinton, and the Democrats laughed about it, and third parties were permanently booted from the system because everyone saw how game theory worked. And then over the thirty years that followed, Democrats abandoned the unions entirely, becoming the new NUMBER GO UP party, which allowed Trump to win the unions and the rust belt.
Viola.
Shitshow.
And the whole thing comes to a head in Minneapolis, where an ICE agent is the tip of the spear for the Rust Belt Revolution’s counterattack, and the Vibes Governance white women offer their bodies in ritual sacrifice as the first line of defense for the NUMBER GO UP coastal banking elite’s offshoring operations, and someone gets shot.
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.
The fact that she was there to cause trouble is very relevant to the politics but irrelevant to the legality of the shooting. She deserves extraordinary condemnation for creating the situation, in part because of the other bad behavior inspired, but we should set that aside in evaluating her fate.
All of the parsing of the video is also overwhelmingly irrelevant, for the same reason that it is irrelevant whether the guy who reaches into his jacket after being told to put his hands in the air actually has a gun in there. Law enforcement can't exist if it takes that chance, because cops would die too often. Their threshold for lethal force has to be very different than a civilian's, and it is. That an officer had the option of declining to shoot or not being in front of the vehicle doesn't create an obligation, any more than a fat, female DEI officer clumsily getting her gun stolen by a perp means that other officers can't then shoot that perp before he fires the gun. For all the rhetoric about her "not deserving to die", officers don't deserve to die over slight missteps, either.
A good point that I saw today: If no shots were fired and she drove away, her actions easily met the standard for an "assault with a deadly weapon" charge, which can be levied over vehicular offenses even when nobody is actually hit. It's hard to argue that one can be guilty of "assault with a deadly weapon" but not have met the threshold for police to fire.
Sometimes I think we'd solve a lot of issues if we allowed for a gray zone of "Being a cop is a tough job, so we're not sending you to jail, but you're permanently banned from being a cop anywhere in this country"