“Even if the investigation proves that the shooting was legally justified, I don’t think that even matters.” —Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara.
Can you imagine any scenario in which those supporting rebellion would not consider law enforcement quelling it excessive force?
Can you imagine any scenario in which those who support the cause of a protester shot and killed by a law enforcement officer would admit that lethal force was justified?
I can’t. We now have two cases—Renée Good and Alex Pretti—where the fact pattern curated from multiple videos clearly shows that officers acting in self-defense, yet those who make martyrs of these two deny what is plainly visible and legal precedent negating mens rea for both. (See Loretta and Richard: The Renee Good Shooting and Correct Attribution of Blame.)
We hear the opposite argument, don’t we? The act of quelling rebellion is excessive force against people protesting an oppressive regime and is, therefore, by definition, illegitimate. The very act of quelling rebellion confirms the thesis that the regime against which the rebels are rebelling is oppressive.
In their 1957 article “Techniques of Socialization,” Gresham Sykes and David Matza argued that people who violate legal and social norms neutralize guilt and social condemnation through rhetorical strategies that build in assumptions and alter perceptions, allowing them to maintain the appearance of a positive self-concept while rejecting dominant moral frameworks. When the corporate state helps them spread assumptions and alter perceptions, the criminal worldview becomes perceived as the normative one.
What the ICE Out protestors and the corporate state have prepared for America is a catch-22; their framing assumptions are tacitly accepted by most observers. To be sure, both rebels and authorities construct narratives that morally immunize their actions; each side frames itself as justified and the other as illegitimate. This is not a disagreement over facts. This is why facts don’t matter to progressives. This is about moral perception as a social process. But only one side is morally righteous.
The protestors deny responsibility for a situation in which people are dying. Consider the assumptions in place and their classification in Sykes and Matza’s system. “They forced us to rebel; the system leaves us no other choice.” Protestors have a priori negated the right of officers to defend themselves. This is a denial of injury. “One officer hurt doesn’t matter compared to systemic oppression.” The officer has no right to self-defense since he is the oppressor. This is a denial of the victim. “Police are agents of oppression; they’re not innocent victims.” This is the technique of condemnation of the condemners: “The state has no moral authority; its laws are illegitimate.” The appeal to higher loyalties is heard in the rhetoric of “marginalized communities,” “social justice,” and so on. Here, the appeal to moral obligation is shifted upward from law to ideology. Nazis do this. (See “The Whole System is Guilty!”)
Under such presumptions, no leader carrying out his duty to defend peace and tranquility escapes the tag of “oppressor.” Kristi Noem, Gregory Bovino, Tom Homan, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump—they’re all authoritarian, fascist, racist, etc. ICE is the modern-day equivalent Brownshirts. It follows that any law enforcement action carried out at their command is illegitimate. The ethics of anarchism (which are no ethics at all but nihilism) have now become the ethics of the American Republic. The anarchists have already won the ideological battle. Now they’re moving to dismantle the state by delegitimizing its monopoly on violence.
In this inverted world, the person killed by the officer is portrayed as a “victim”—a martyr for the righteous cause. The officer’s action confirms the thesis that the government against which the protester is protesting is “oppressive,” that ICE and Border Patrol officers are “murderers.” It doesn’t matter that officers saw an empty holster where a gun just was, and must presume the worst, because if they don’t, lives may be lost, shoot the violent man who is rising from the ground. He was not following lawful commands. He was struggling with the officers. Bad intent was plain. There was a gun. None of this matters.
Americans have to recognize the catch-22 the anarchists have put us in and reject it. We cannot defend a nation or the rule of law if the ugliness of doing so means we stand by idly while the country falls into lawlessness and chaos reigns. That’s textbook suicidal empathy. What do we even have law enforcement for if it is not to do the ugly work of public safety and upholding the rule of law? Anarchists will tell you about a natural order. But it’s not an order founded upon natural law. It’s an order rooted in the law of the jungle. This is why anarchism is the perfect street-level ideology for corporate statism.
This is why I don’t really care about “radiant poet mom of three” or “outdoorsy dog-loving ICU nurse man” or any other sappy rhetoric used to describe dead anarchists. Frankly, neither do those using such emotive language. Laken Riley, raped and murdered by José Antonio Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan man who had entered the United States illegally, was a nursing student. Do the ICE Out protestors care about the dreams and aspirations of the real victims of criminal violence? I’m not interested in the progressive martyrs except for their humanity. I want them to stop putting their lives at risk for nothing—worse than that, for corporate state power.
Congress has, over generations, passed many bills regulating immigration. Presidents have signed them into law. Presidents take an oath to faithfully execute the laws of the Republic. What on earth are progressives dying for? I can answer that question. I don’t think they can. Objectively, they are dying for corporate greed and the partisan electoral advantage necessary to perpetuate that greed—elite interests that disorganize neighborhoods and diminish the quality of life for working families. Subjectively, they are dying because it is meaningful to their disordered lives. They seek transcendent meaning, and so, like the fanatically devoted woman in John Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, they step off the ledge at Thulsa Doom’s command. (See Wokedom and the Problem of Lethal Altruism.)
It makes sense neither from a rational standpoint nor from the proclaimed choice of comrades (the proletariat). These people have lost their minds. They hate Donald Trump because they’ve been instructed to. They hate the America Trump represents because they have been taught to. Hatred has disordered them. Now they’re biting off the fingers of law enforcement. It’s jungle law. Those capable of this level of madness are capable of running gas chambers. This is Nazi-level insanity.
I know it is frustrating for a person who believes that he is so very right about something (or everything) to be confused when his fellow citizens go in a different direction. But how it works in democracies, especially in republic form, is that, sometimes, your side loses and you have to do a better job next time of persuading fellow citizens to join your side. America chose differently on November 5, 2024. It’s their turn.
If, instead of honoring the popular will and respecting the authority of public institutions, you run out into the street and disrupt civil society, biting off fingers, blowing whistles, and whatnot, then you’re behaving not like a citizen in a constitutional republic, but instead you’re behaving like a child who didn’t get his way. You’d admit, if you were a reasonable human, that this is a very immature attitude. When this happens in a family situation, the responsible and caring parent asserts his or her authority over the child and explains to him that we cannot always get what we want—that we have to be patient and wait our turn. If the child acts out and strikes the parent, then there is an additional lesson to be learned. The same is true when a citizen lashes out at lawful authority.
Sometimes parents do a bad job of raising children with self-control. In those cases, other authorities have to take up the slack. Obviously, a lot of parents haven’t been doing a good job preparing their children for the rigors of living in a democracy by teaching them to keep their hands to themselves. Who steps into the breech if authority is perceived as illegitimate? It then becomes the exercise of naked power. That’s not the druthers of a civilized society.
Remember Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop? Did you pick up on the world-building in that movie? Verhoeven depicts late capitalism as having turned social collapse into a business model. Public disorder becomes a growth sector. Corporate actors prefer crises because crises justify the expansion of their corrupt schemes. The scenario is less about deep state psy-op, which is one’s first impression, than about disaster capitalism.
In Verhoeven’s world, Omni Consumer Products (OCP) plans to rebuild Detroit as a corporate utopia (“Delta City”). This is the Democrats’ Blue City—Detroit, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, etc. Progressives and the corporate power progressives sublimate with social justice rhetoric have turned social collapse into a business model. The expansion of their corrupt schemes depends on public disorder, crime and violence, and decadence. The Democratic Party is the organized representative of disaster capitalism. Minneapolis is their demonstration project. So is the state of Virginia, the ancestral home of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington.
To ordinary America, my message to you is toughen up. You have a civilization to defend (see Send in the Troops). For the disorderly American, get over yourselves. Your nothingness should dwell in basements, jails, and insane asylums. To progressives still susceptible to reason, if you have any influence over the herd, and if your conscience is still functional, tell the true believers to go home. Don’t fear being excommunicated. Do the right thing. Your politics are killing people. (See Message to the Rank-and-File Progressive.)
freedom and reason 