ICE Raids and Bad Faith
On This Piece
An unscripted reaction to a specific moment: the use of lethal force against protesters and the willingness of ordinary citizens to defend it publicly with narratives that don't hold up to basic scrutiny. The piece isn't primarily about the policy. It's about the phenomenon of people who clearly know better choosing to run with fiction anyway — and the question of who they think that protects.
Hey. So I usually try to avoid the rage machine. There's always breaking news. The type of content I typically try to upload are things that I've had time to contemplate and organize my thoughts. I typically try to avoid reacting to every bit of breaking news — there's plenty of people doing that already, and they do great breakdowns and get interesting hot takes. I only feel inspired to do that occasionally. And this is one of those moments, in light of these recent shootings by ICE.
The thing I probably find most disturbing about all of it — apart from the obvious stuff. Why is ICE in the interior of the country terrorizing American citizens? Issues of jurisdiction and due process. These clear cases where it's basically state sanctioned executions that we're witnessing here. There's just really no way to sugarcoat it.
I guess, as I started to say, what disturbs me the most about the whole thing is the amount of people out there running with this distorted view of reality. I have no reason to believe that they actually believe what they're saying. In their heart of hearts — assuming they have one — they have to know what they're saying is a lie. And that's more disturbing than getting it wrong. These situations are pretty clear. The level of force being used is absolutely unacceptable. What justifies that? Protest is an enshrined right. The right to protest. We've seen acts of civil disobedience for a long time. So what are we talking about here? This is a big fat ego trip on the part of these officers.
What's the motivation? These people — and I'm not talking about people in the administration, I'm just talking about regular citizens like myself — who get on these platforms and either in comments to videos or in somebody's live stream, go to great lengths to run with either the narrative being put out by the Department of Homeland Security, or Trump's narrative, or some other variation that is utter fiction. And they have to know it's fiction. Because when you listen to these people, they're not crazy. But some of them, with a straight face, with just no empathy, no humanity whatsoever, will say these outrageous things — their version of events that are patently false, that you can prove. You can run a tape right in front of them and they still want to hold to some unbelievable story.
What is the agenda there? And why would they think that it's going to stop with the lunatic left, or criminal illegal aliens, or everybody that they think is the problem out there? All the scapegoats they have named. How long will it take before you're doing something that the state has a problem with — and their only way to deal with it, because they only have a hammer so everything looks like a nail — and if you think getting up onto these platforms and cheering this stuff on is somehow not going to come back to haunt you and blow up in your face, you're sadly mistaken.