But the video clearly indicates that they all tackled him to the ground and were wrestling him maybe 4 vs 1, before they all shot him together. I'm not quite sure how a gun can have come out of this. Maybe the guy while struggling on the ground happened to reach in the direction of someone's gun while getting curbstomped, I dunno.
What I'm most worried about is that Pam Bondi / Department of Justice refuses to investigate these or properly prosecute these cases. IE: The Renee Good case has a ton of FBI agents resigning because they've been told to focus on Good's "misbehavior" rather than the ICE Agent's aggression.
It will be up to the Minnesota police and justice system to investigate. We cannot expect anything from the DoJ/FBI here. As such, the prosecution case will be gimped, and I fear we will have nothing resembling justice in this case (or Renee Good's case either).
> O'Hara said the man was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit. Records show that Pretti attended the University of Minnesota. State records show Pretti was issued a nursing license in 2021, and it remains active through March 2026.
Minnesota permit-to-carry requirements: https://dps.mn.gov/divisions/bca/public-services-bca/firearm...
> Q: Do I have to disclose to a peace officer that I am a permit holder and carrying a firearm?
> A: Yes, upon request of a peace officer, a permit holder must disclose to the officer whether or not the permit holder is currently carrying a firearm.
So a U.S. citizen who is a legal, permitted gun owner with no outstanding criminal charges, legally carrying in public, who complies with the law and informs a DHS officer that they are legally carrying, is effectively subject to summary execution without due process. (The penalty for permitted carrying without possessing the physical permit card is $25 for a first offense and forfeiture of the weapon; it would've been his first offense per Minneapolis police.)
If ever there was a 2A violation, it's a federal officer shooting and killing a legal gun owner solely for possessing a gun in their presence.
The most likely situation is that he actually voluntarily told them that he has a firearm because he is a lawful gun owner with a concealed carry permit. Most gun owners know that this is the best way to interact with law-enforcement, for example, when you get pulled over. But we will not know because these agents do not wear body cams on purpose.
To me, this looks very much like testing the waters. Stephen Miller said, "To all ICE officers, you have federal immunity." ICE has blocked state law enforcement from investigations into the killings. ICE has said they're done with their investigation of the last one, and those fuckers are still working.
Aside from scale, what's the difference?
[EDIT:15-minute chunk of] video that lays out the evidence. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rThhm1-g1a8
People have differing opinions, however the opinion most persuasive to me is you only tell them if asked unless the law requires otherwise. Volunteering you have a gun when there is no requirement to do so in my opinion adds unnecessary tension to the situation. IDK about in Minnesota, but in my state there is no duty to inform the police and you can basically only downsides to doing so, since they will be asking before you get into any situation where they're going to be going into your waistband to find out.
In one of the states I lived in, IIRC they changed the law to remove duty to inform because their cops had a history of executing people that informed them.
Cliven Bundy is still grazing his cattle on that BLM land to this day.
What’s it called when you name something the complete opposite of what it is?
Not an oxymoron, because that’s about the concepts in the words.
It seems like a foolish choice for them to reneg on this. They are essentially signaling that you are a trapped rat with no way out.
It makes sense if making you feel like a trapped rat is the goal.
If Trump can incite violence then he can invoke the insurrection act, or perhaps declare some form of martial law to seize more power. Perhaps even parlay this into cancelling the midterm elections.
Which, given the statistic that a decent percentage of ICE applicants can't get a passing score on an open book test [0] doesn't surprise me.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ice-is-reportedly-hiring-p...
But setting all of that aside (which is a big aside), even if he was confronting them with his camera while armed, the whole bullshit shtick of the second amendment is that being armed should not be a crime much less a death sentence. He did not brandish his weapon or threaten law enforcement in any of the half dozen videos that have been released so far. To be even more clear as a citizen you are allegedly supposed to be protected from summary execution/judgement with or without the possession of a firearm, in many legal circles the possession of a firearm grants you more protections under the law not less.
I suspect a partial answer might be that many are not in their right minds, are under trained, and over motivated by bonus payments and past divorces.
What actions are you alleging qualifies as confronting? Be specific. Unless I have a wildly different definition of confronting, everything I've read and every video I've seen from different angles shows the opposite.
(This is setting aside the fact that having a concealed carry permit and carrying a legal firearm is not a death sentence in this country.)
Not related to this situation, but in the city I live in, it's better to keep it on your person than in your car because kids are breaking into cars precisely because they know people from the suburbs visiting downtown might have one in their glove box.
Rights aren't rights if you don't get to actually use them.
Right now Americans are learning the lessons of the black panthers: constitutionally protected "rights" are only rights so long as your flexing of them isn't inconvenient to the State. We've been shouting this at McMilitias for decades now.
Have you considered why? It's telling that you haven't answered my question: How exactly did the victim confront law enforcement?
I can't speak for everyone here but frankly, I find these "Would you do X?" questions irrelevant and I struggle to see a good faith reason for asking them. I can think of many bad faith reasons, for example shifting blame to the victim to remove focus from the border patrol agents' actions. Or a more charitable interpretation is you view this as a simple matter of cause and effect: if he didn't bring a gun he'd still be alive; or perhaps, if he stayed home altogether he'd still be alive. Is that your motivation for asking these questions?
Setting aside the fact that no, we don't know those things to be true, I don't think that interpretation of your intent is much better. But you also haven't been forthcoming with why you're placing so much importance on these questions.
You don’t see a problem with that?
What obstruction?
They walked up to him. You are lying by implication that he was obstructing shit unless you mean in the 30 seconds from being dogpiled to shot.
This completely misrepresents what happened.
Another source (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/man-tackled-by-ice-in-chao...) gives another claim from the same police chief:
> "The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming."
And then, from the DHS:
> ...when a federal agent feared for his life, "an agent fired defensive shots." ... Border Patrol Cmdr. Greg Bovino said that the officer involved in the shooting "has extensive training," and that "the situation is evolving." Bovino added that the incident would be investigated.
(TFA includes the claim of self-defense.)
"Summary execution" and "without due process" is emotionally manipulative phrasing. It falsely implies that LEO use of lethal force is about punishment. It is not about punishment. It is about responding to perceived threat.
All this stuff about permit cards, the victim's lack of criminal history, etc. is irrelevant. It is not connected to the motivation for the shooting. There is nothing to establish that the shooting was "solely for" that possession, and LEO denies that claim. There is no plausible universe in which the officer says "please show me the permit for that weapon", Pretti says "I don't have it", and the officer shoots. But that's the narrative you appear to be trying to push.
>> "The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming."
You've misread your link. The "violently resisted" quote is from a tweet by DHS, not local police: https://xcancel.com/DHSgov/status/2015115351797780500
> The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted on X further details about what led up to the shooting. "DHS law enforcement officers were conducting a targeted operation in Minneapolis against an illegal alien wanted for violent assault, an individual approached US Border Patrol officers with a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun, seen here," the post reads.
> O'Hara said that Pretti was a “lawful gun owner” with a permit.
> "The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. More details on the armed struggle are forthcoming."
> The DHS wrote that when a federal agent feared for his life, "an agent fired defensive shots." The post also noted that the "suspect" had "2 magazines and no ID."
By any ordinary reading of prose, the article is attributing the quote to O'Hara.
Here's the facts as I see them: A protestor who had a gun he was legally allowed to carry got involved in an incident with ICE/Border Patrol. The protestor was interacting with the agents and other protestors, at which point BP or ICE pepper sprayed him and took him down to the ground. At least 4 different federal officers were physically holding him. at this point it appears they disarmed him (unclear) and then shortly after, shot him.
At no point did the protestor hold the gun in a threatening way while approaching, when he was taken down he did not have a gun in his hands, and while down, it's very unlikely he could access the gun and use it in a way that any reasonable officer would feel unsafe and be required to shoot the protestor.
Based on the videos I've watched, the protestor made some ill-advised choices getting physically involved, but there was no reason for him to be shot. I read various online conservative communities (to try to understand their reasoning) and nearly all the posts I see seem to think that ICE/BP truly made an error here, possibly due to poor training.
I understand your point about the use of emotional terms, I try to avoid them and instead focus on facts and known unknowns, but in this particular situation, it's pretty clear that ICE/BP made an egregious error in a way that is clearly obvious to everybody (even those who would normally support the federal officers) and in denying this, the federal leadership is undermining itself. This is a situation where they could de-escalate and not immediately blame the protestor, while focusing on increasing the training of the ICE/BP officers, rather than taking an aggresive posture.
This would imply it was an unintentional mistake which is far from obvious. If they recognized it was an egregious error the perpetrators would be prosecuted and they won’t be.
> training of the ICE/BP officers
What makes you think it’s something they want to avoid repeating in the future? (Not /s)
My wife who is very offline saw a Bovino photo yesterday and asked me point blank “why is he dressed like a Nazi? he looks like that guy from Man In The High Castle”
He knows, he knows we know, he is proud of it
That said, even our (US) military leadership wore outfits like that (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/22/style/gregory-bovino-ice-...)
What I also find extraordinary is that there is no consistent uniform, for example if you watch the video this post refers to, all the agents are wearing random combinations of personal clothing ("tactical" or "hunting") which makes them look more like a militia than federal officers.
not totally random, that black and white velcro American flag-like patch seems to be a common sight, like all the temu/amazon/walmart mallninja stuff.
its easy to obtain, and coupled with masking, makes it easy pickings for imposters.
none of these guys seem to be wearing helmets, and it seems questionable regarding actual ballistic armor in thier carriers.
The language being used by the president to describe immigrants is on par with how the enemy was talked about during the war on terror. ICE has been told they are immune from prosecution, and the recruitment videos are basically white nationalist cosplay.
Now they are being surged, masked, poorly uniformed, poorly trained into US cities, as if they were Fallujah.
All that happens afterwards is inevitable.
No need to read press releases, your own eyes and ears.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross did her research solely on people who were dying: people with terminal illnesses, and she studied how they coped with facing their own mortality. Not how other people did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elisabeth_K%C3%BCbler-Ross
And of course, even for a dying person, this may be total bunk. It is not like some programmed flowchart that people go through five stages of emotional stuff. This is just, like, a framework for further therapy.
I'm actually studying this stuff right now. In the 1980s and 1990s, "The Five Stages of Grief" were basically a household phrase, and everybody talked about them like they were real and true and invariable. But everyone doing the talking had never actually studied the research or even knew who proposed it. They were just parroting headlines.
Just visit the link I posted, this will take you two seconds to verify.
https://abc7ny.com/post/minneapolis-shooting-today-federal-a... attributes the quote to DHS
https://www.tpr.org/news/2026-01-24/man-shot-dead-by-federal... says it came from a DHS statement.
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/live-updates/reported-shoo... -minneapolis-federal-agents-protesters/ is, I think, the article you say suggests O'Hara said this, but I believe it was originally incorrect and updated since then
https://x.com/Sec_Noem/status/2015202988923711951 is the tweet from the government using the direct wording
Also, to be obviously, the statement you attributed to O'Hara is inconsistent with what he would say given his role.
While I totally appreciate that you don't like people using emotional verbiage or making false conclusions biased by their own beliefs, the reality here is that basically no objective independent observer would say that the government's statements are true and accurate. And I also think that careful analysis of the videos by that same observer would conclude the agents made an egregious error in the heat of the moment. Constantly doubling down about how you're the rational one, when there is ample evidence otherwise simply weakens your own position and makes people less likely to bother reading what you have to say.
A previous example:
You can watch the video for yourself of an ICE masked thug grabbing a man's carotid artery, when NOT facing a deadly threat, against DOJ rules. You can watch him seize and his eyes roll back. And you can choose to believe your eyes or DHS' lies. What do you think, zahlman?
See full context here: https://www.propublica.org/article/videos-ice-dhs-immigratio...
> In a social media post after the incident and in its statement to ProPublica, DHS did not cite a deadly threat. Instead, it referenced the charges against Zapata Rivera’s wife and suggested he had only pretended to have a medical crisis while refusing help from paramedics. “Imagine FAKING a seizure to help a criminal escape justice,” the post said.
It's exactly what this was, though. He was disarmed before being shoved to the ground and beaten with a gas grenade. There is another video which shows that his hands are on the ground or in front of his face, the entire time he's down, long before he's shot.
Watch the fucking videos.
One video [1] shows someone walking away from the scene with a gun a fraction of a second before the shooting begins. But I can't see that the gun was removed from the protester.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlvpbr/footage_of_the...
I don't mean to diminish the importance of the shooting, which is horrific no matter what one makes of the photos.
It might be clearer if the agents were wearing bodycam videos and that footage was released.
I'm sure you'll still find something in there to quibble with, so have at it. Like, you can't see the guys hands, so maybe he had a second weapon! Could happen!
I don't know if this is your intent or not, but by engaging in this kind of framing you're essentially saying that all violence[1] is excusable by default. We're supposed to live in a society where the opposite is true, I thought.
[1] All violence by your allied authority figures, that is. We both know you wouldn't grant the same grace and charity to the intentions of the protestors.
I have nothing to quibble with the video you linked (which I think must have been released since I made my comment, or I missed it), that makes the order of events a lot clearer, I can see the gun being taken now, and the timing of the shot.
> whether the protestor could possibly have wielded their gun while being restrained by agents, or whether he is disarmed by the gray-jacketed agent, or what caused the agents to fire when they did
Is a list of excuses for the shooting (to wit: "maybe he wielded the gun", "maybe he wasn't disarmed", "maybe they had cause to fire"). It's all things that would have (arguably) made it justified. You'll have to forgive me if I took that for a clear indication of your opinion here.
Like, if you look at something and say "Well, it looks like X happened, but I don't know", it's neutral. If you say "It looks like X happened, but I don't know because it could have been Y or Z instead', you're pretty clearly constructing a sideways argument that "X did not happen". And thus, you'll end up being painted as an X denialist by people on the internet too lazy to find your comment history.
More importantly, when X is phrased in a way that implies intent or motives not in evidence, or plays up the injustice of X in legally irrelevant ways, that's reason to push back in an open Internet discussion.
That's the part that dekhn skipped above, and which I called out. In point of fact "Y and Z" are clearly shown to be false per the evidence, so pontificating about them amounts to pure spin. Creative storytelling in defense of a political point is very bad to begin with, doing it in defense of a killing is horrifying.
To dekhn's credit, he seems shamed enough to be yelling about the implication. I'm not sure that you've made that leap yet.
I disagree that it has that effect. With the assumption of good faith, comments like GP aren't fishing around for an excuse; the point is to highlight what's legally relevant and where there is room to disagree with the interpretation of video.
I don't think it's plausible that defense for the agents would clutch for a straw like "maybe he had a second weapon". That seems sarcastic and not interested in engaging with the argument seriously.
I've seen a couple different videos now (not from any links ITT) and the most commonly shown one seems to have something obscuring the camera at a critical moment. Nevertheless, it seems highly probable that the man is indeed disarmed well before the first shot. But there will still be more that matters:
* Was the first shot fired by an officer who knew that the weapon had already been taken? In particular, could there have been any miscommunication between the officers?
* Did the victim know the weapon had been taken? I don't think it would be likely to succeed in court, but to my understanding the defense could raise the argument that one or more officers perceived that the victim still intended to draw and fire it.
Ultimately, it boils down to establishing whether there was a reasonable perception, on the part of any officer that fired (I can't tell from the video I've seen who fired or how many shots or anything like that), of a threat from the victim meeting the legal standard to respond with lethal force. This is based on "totality of the circumstances" (as in things the officers knew leading up to the moment of shooting), but specifically based on what a reasonable officer would have been able to deduce in the moment (a high-pressure situation), without the benefit of hindsight.
Most analyses I've seen thus far agree that there was not any solid defense here. Certainly it seems much more likely that someone is going to prison for this than in the Renee Good case. The DHS says they will be investigating.
You can’t count the number of gunshots? Huh. And here I thought your handle meant zahl + man.
I did later find video where the gunshots are much more clear.
> [1] All violence by your allied authority figures, that is. We both know you wouldn't grant the same grace and charity to the intentions of the protestors.
This is a disgraceful ad hominem attack. The previous poster's comment is entirely sensible, and it takes a great deal of intellectual dishonesty to portray it as a defense of ICE in any way.
> it takes a great deal of intellectual dishonesty to portray it as a defense of ICE in any way
Regardless of your opinion, I'll portray it as a defense of ICE, anyway.
> > So a U.S. citizen who is a legal, permitted gun owner with no outstanding criminal charges, legally carrying in public, who complies with the law and informs a DHS officer that they are legally carrying, is effectively subject to summary execution without due process.... a federal officer shooting and killing a legal gun owner solely for possessing a gun in their presence.
> This completely misrepresents what happened.
I don't strictly disagree with the idea that "solely for having a gun" is a misrepresentation, either (after all, the ICE agents had guns and they weren't executed), but it's not a "complete" misrepresentation. (The actual misrepresentation is that the victim was helping someone who was being abused by the agents and he had a gun.) Calling it a "complete misrepresentation" is seeking to emotionally prime the reader against the supposed illogic in the parent comment. That is indeed a defense of the ICE agents (and such defenses and excuses can be seen throughout their comment history, hence, I presume, the ad hominem).
Somehow, still, I doubt that's the framing zahlman would accept about the situation, especially given their (obvious) defense of ICE's actions in their initial comment. Yes, the ad hominem statement you refer to should not have been included. But it is surely not intellectually dishonest regardless of how inappropriate it is for this forum. Given the quote from their initial comment, it seems that said dishonesty cuts the other direction.
But also, my defense is not about treating protestors uncharitably. Telling me "We both know you wouldn't grant the same grace and charity to the intentions of the protestors." would still be ad hominem, because my arguments do not rely upon protestors being malicious.
Except for the physical obstruction of justice aspect, which isn't in question. 1A doesn't give people the right to get in an LEO's way when that officer is actively trying to enforce law. Protestors shouldn't physically be in the path of on-duty law enforcement if they expect not to get arrested. Arrest is a natural consequence of "civil disobedience". For a more extreme example, "freedom of assembly" for me and my friends does not extend as far as "assembling" in a tight circle around you that denies your freedom of movement. (Note: I am neither an American citizen nor an American resident, but these principles are not difficult to understand, and not sufficiently different from Canadian law to matter for this discussion.)
But for example in the Good case, I don't believe she intended to run over the officer, but that doesn't matter to the officer's perception of threat. And in point of fact, he was struck (although NYT reported that he wasn't "run over", and then other outlets presented this as if he wasn't struck).
At no point did I claim not to be defending the ICE agents, so let's please not talk about intellectual dishonesty there.
----
Regarding the bit you quoted from me:
I responded prematurely to the situation based on my experience from every single previous discussion of ICE agents I found myself in. I don't see how there's a problem with offering a defense of ICE in general. You can't just say that one side of an argument is barred, if you're going to have a discussion at all. (And the reason HN permits political submissions like this is because they want people in tech to have discussions. The relationship of the story to tech is tangential at best.)
I said "completely misrepresents" because "solely for having a gun" is completely false, and because it should be rejected as absurd a priori. That's just not how entanglements with law enforcement play out, and ignores that probably many lawful gun owners were rightly ignored (given that MN allows concealed carry of handguns). People are seriously now arguing as if they believe that a Republican government is stripping away 2A rights by force. I don't understand how that could possibly pass anyone's sniff test.
But I also said it because it's part of a long string of loaded language — the stuff I went on to dissect. The victim's virtue is played up, seemingly to make the event seem more egregious, even though it's clearly irrelevant to the cause of action. Or else it's being played up to try to bolster the "solely for" case by denying other reasons for the shoot. Regardless of whether it was justified (I agree that it will likely not be found justified), the actual cause of action is clear.
(Having seen multiple videos now, I can't hear the part where Pretti supposedly "informs a DHS officer that he is legally carrying". The part where one of the officers is shouting about he has a gun, would seem to contradict that; because it comes across that the officer first saying it is surprised to see that he has a gun.)
Most importantly, "effectively subject to summary execution without due process" is an unreasonable way to characterize LEO use of lethal force, both in general and I believe in this specific instance. One or more people messed up and this guy shouldn't have gotten shot. But that is miles away from what it would actually take to justify that phrasing. That would require:
* everyone who shot could clearly see, from their own perspectives, that the gun had already been taken away;
* before firing, they took enough time to respond to that change in the situation;
* at the time of firing, they had the mens rea that the victim should die as punishment for what had happened up to that point.
These are simply things that you can't prove with video footage like this. I can't even tell who shot. It's a chaotic scramble recorded from distant third-person perspectives, with important parts of the action obscured from line of sight by other important parts of the action. Yes, there's enough to see the gun being taken away before gunshots (apparently) but that's a lucky break considering everything else. (When I first saw the footage from the angle on the street, I thought it was happening on the sidewalk rather than in front of the parked car; of course the other angle being from the sidewalk disproves that.)
Anyway, I simply can't fathom how you think that the term "complete misrepresentation" is "seeking to emotionally prime the reader". Like, what words could I possibly use instead that aren't supposedly emotionally manipulative, given that I actually did sincerely consider the statement a complete misrepresentation?
For that matter, I think your characterization "helping someone who was being abused by the agents and he had a gun." is still misrepresentative. He was obstructing and resisting. And, yes, he had a gun, which is dangerous any time one gets in a physical altercation with any kind of LEO. People with CC permits should understand that.
An ad hominem argument is an argument constructed around characteristics of a person outside the bounds of what is being discussed. Inferring someone's opinion[1] about the subject under discussion from their text, and explicitly marking so in my text when doing so, is just "debate". Am I wrong? Say I'm wrong and cite why.
Don't call me "disgraceful". Why? Because THAT is an ad hominem attack. In fact the clear offense being taken makes it pretty clear to me that my point landed closer than maybe you're prepared to admit.
[1] You cleverly skipped the point where I even admitted I might be wrong!
You're right about that. I'm sorry.
No further comment from me in this thread.
This has already been proven to be a lie thanks to the five different videos of the incident in question. They shot him after removing his legal weapon for concealed carry that he was permitted to have on his person.
Here is a stabilized version: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlyj9h/i_did_...
After that agent takes the gun, the agent standing immediately to the left draws and fires into Pretti's back.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlt6s2/video_showing_...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlvpbr/footage_of_the...
It is, in fact, possible for shootings by LEO to be justified. And the federal ICE agents are, in fact, law enforcement. Walz and/or Frey are factually incorrect when they assert otherwise, it's trivially looked up, relevant legal statues like 8 U.S. Code § 1357 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357) are quite clear about the agents' powers (which as an objective matter of fact do include situations where they may arrest US citizens without a warrant), and Walz and Frey have no real excuse for their false assertions.
You don't have to like laws that entitle law enforcement to use lethal force in limited circumstances (which seem to be only slightly broader than those extended to ordinary citizens), but the US does in fact have such laws, at both state and federal level. And the consequence of not having them, practically speaking, is that criminals kill officers and/or go free.
And as it happens, there's a clear defense in the Good case. I've already pointed at actual lawyers saying the same and explaining it in detail. And my submission of that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46596055) got flagged for no good reason.
I am not watching your videos just because you said this. I approached the situation with a respectful disagreeing opinion and the information available to me. Everyone else here is being unreasonable and completely in violation of commenting guidelines.
Oooph. Just watch it.
My patience level is now in the negatives with these kinds of posts, especially the ones that are more upset about people being mean to them than the execution of citizens using their constitutional rights.
Is that right?
Prediction: no answer
I’m not sure how you can possibly make that assertion. They disarmed him and then they shot him.
So you're saying you can show me a video where it's clear that the gun is in an LEO's physical possession, everyone involved clearly has time to update on this information, and someone makes an evidently conscious decision to shoot him anyway, despite him clearly no longer posing a physical threat?
Really?
Because otherwise, it is not about punishment.
Depends on how you define the word. But yes?
Their decision to escalate the situation in the first place is a clear indication of that.
> no longer posing a physical threat?
Can you show a video of the gun leaving its holster before that then? Or are you saying that merely possessing a firearm regardless of circumstances is grounds for an immediate execution?
These investigators are not amateurs, and that’s putting it lightly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat
You know you can watch the videos yourself
The DHS public statement that the victim was going to “do maximize damage and massacre law enforcement” is outrageous…
Even people just driving through their neighborhood have been dragged out of their vehicles and apprehended. Citizen or otherwise doesn’t seem to matter.
They aren’t professionals and operate with neither the training, nor the will to obey the law.
Much of the time they seem to believe trying to bait folks into an encounter
https://www.reddit.com/r/ICE_Raids/comments/1q7u4kz/ice_agen...
https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1q7y43s/cbp_poin...
In my area all the non white folks don’t come to the bus stop anymore to pickup their kids. Their kids are instructed to race home after school. The schools now have lockdown protocols for ICE. Family businesses opened for decades closed because employees are afraid to come to work.
Many of them are experienced and trained. The man who shot Renee Good served in Iraq, worked for Border Patrol for two decades and was literally a firearms instructor[1].
This is just what cops, reactionaries and psychopaths will do when they know that they have carte blanche to do anything they want, including murder.
No amount of "training" will fix this. It isn't an accident, it isn't incompetence, it is deliberate and wanton.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Ren%C3%A9e_Good#Jon...
So assuming it's random lack of training when he does it again seem far too charitable.
He also has a history of doing exactly this before. It's the second time he was "struck" by a moving vehicle after purposely putting himself in his purported harms way. Who knows how many times he's practiced for this murder before.
If the video somehow didn't do it, the "fucking bitch" not even seconds after pulling the trigger would put any one of us away for murder.
[1] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/us-border-agents-i...
Those are kids playing to be cops. If the PS5 was affordable to people with such a low level of education they'd be playing CoD at home.
Local cops dealing with protesters are organized, rarely trying to bait anyone into anything.
if the day ever came for ICE to breach a locked down school, and extract minors, that could be a tipping point.
> Even people just driving through their neighborhood have been dragged out of their vehicles and apprehended. Citizen or otherwise doesn’t seem to matter.
I have seen many claims of this sort, but every single time there's been video available of the incident, it's become clear to me that nothing of the sort is going on. The people "being dragged out of vehicles" have been refusing lawful orders and then being arrested for it. The people "simply recording" are physically interfering with ICE going where they need to go to do what they're there to do. "Walking away" doesn't remotely describe anything I've seen.
As for the race issue, the ICE officers I've seen have been considerably more racially diverse than the protesters.
But no, being a citizen does not, in fact, matter if you are breaking federal law in the presence of a federal agent, and that law includes obstruction of federal justice. All of this is extremely clear in law. Please have a look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NosECXHMGFU.
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This comment, like many others I've made on the topic, has been completely illegitimately flagged. I'm getting rather tired of that. There's nothing objectionable or counter to guidelines in the above, and all of it reflects my true thoughts based on my actual experience of the discourse, the evidence available to me, the legal code I've researched, etc.
It perhaps just doesn't agree with your point of view.
You refuse to watch the videos, but you're still defending the regime. Why?
I question the moral integrity of anyone who would defend this administration without all the available info.
I'm glad you're being flagged, because I've been disappointed with how folks here have been surprisingly flaccid when it comes to condemning this regime. The day that I come here and find posts like yours in the majority will be the last day I visit.
Can you please explain to me how it violates HN guidelines in any way? Or how any of it is untrue? For example, do you disagree that 8 U.S. Code § 1357, as cited, empowers ICE to arrest US citizens without a warrant in specific circumstances, specifically relating to obstructing them from doing their original job? Do you disagree that ICE are, contra the public claims of Walz and Frey, LEO? Did you see my submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46596055, and can you articulate a problem with it?
Including https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46749406 , in which I explicitly acknowledged that I do not think this particular shooting was justified?
I already explained repeatedly: I responded hastily based on priors, and then responded poorly to someone who insulted me.
When I initially said:
> All this stuff about permit cards, the victim's lack of criminal history, etc. is irrelevant. It is not connected to the motivation for the shooting. There is nothing to establish that the shooting was "solely for" that possession, and LEO denies that claim. There is no plausible universe in which the officer says "please show me the permit for that weapon", Pretti says "I don't have it", and the officer shoots. But that's the narrative you appear to be trying to push.
Do you think any of that is incorrect? Which part specifically, and why?
And, to be clear, you were okay with me being called a "nazi sympathizer" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754655)?
I just vouched for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46748563 , which was flagged and killed. Do you think it violates HN guidelines? How exactly? Because I legitimately don't understand.
"Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all.'" — Martin Luther King Jr.
> But no, being a citizen does not, in fact, matter if you are breaking federal law in the presence of a federal agent, and that law includes obstruction of federal justice.
“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.” — Henry David Thoreau
> All of this is extremely clear in law.
“Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice.” — Henry David Thoreau
Have you considered the potential bias that people are dragged out of their cars before they can start recording video? Perhaps the dragging out of the car happens while nobody is recording them, then people see and start recording for posterity. That seems an obvious assumption. Do you have reason to think otherwise such that you can dismiss others' reports with intellectual honesty rather than motivated reasoning?
> This comment, like many others I've made on the topic, has been completely illegitimately flagged. I'm getting rather tired of that.
> It perhaps just doesn't agree with your point of view.
I don't really agree with the flags but this casual dismissal of "you just don't like it" is not helping you to understand the actual reasons others may have to flag (and downvote, which I do agree with). For example, maybe others watched the videos and think there is no way to justify what they saw. To such an individual, seeing someone try to justify it might look like trolling regardless of said someone's self-perception of their commentary. You will get nowhere merely complaining about the flags and downvotes; they will keep coming (on this topic) until you start to comment more thoughtfully (on this topic), or not at all.
All such video has been third-person perspective, so no.
> Perhaps the dragging out of the car happens while nobody is recording them, then people see and start recording for posterity.
In the cases where video shows events prior to the arrest, it shows justification for the arrest. Activists have a clear incentive to hide that justification. So why would I take claims at face value about the existence of unjustified arrests where nobody started recording before the arrest?
> Do you have reason to think otherwise such that you can dismiss others' reports with intellectual honesty rather than motivated reasoning?
The repeated prior experience of seeing people make reports, look them up, and find that they've been misrepresented, yes.
> For example, maybe others watched the videos and think there is no way to justify what they saw. To such an individual, seeing someone try to justify it might look like trolling
I disagree that this is a legitimate reason to flag a comment, according to my reading of the guidelines.
"The videos" doesn't refer to a specific set of videos. I'm talking here about cases where people claimed that something (not the incident that OP is about) had happened in a specific way, and I had already seen video that disproved the narrative. If they saw a different video, or a clip of the video, or a social media rumour, and their emotions are running high because they can't imagine a justification, that isn't my fault.
(For example, a sibling comment is pushing the "kidnapping and arresting" narrative for the child taken directly back to his home. We already saw during Trump's first term that the activists will raise hue and cry about "families being separated" by ICE; now they can't put the family together either.)
And I'm talking about cases where people bring up some other random thing that they totally know happened, that I haven't heard of at all, and they don't proactively bring evidence but how dare I not know about it. Always described with a flurry of emotionally charged language. My priors are that all of this will evaporate under scrutiny, because of what I have experienced before when trying to look into things. This extends generally to protests of this nature before the current administration's use of ICE, too.
And I'm talking about cases where people seem to have entirely wrong ideas about what the law actually permits. I get flagged, for example, when I make posts that consist of nothing but the evidenced truth about ICE's legal powers and what is or isn't a legitimate protest action. See e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750452.
It's hard for me not to perceive that I get flagged for no reason other than being on "the wrong side" of a contentious political issue, because people can't fathom that an honest person who tries to research claims could possibly disagree with them so starkly in good faith.
But I do research these claims (although there's only so much time I'm willing to put into them).
I did research this story.
And I already previously reported back (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750401) that I now generally agree that this specific shooting looks unjustified (certainly it at least requires an investigation, which I would have said anyway, like for any high-profile LEO use of lethal force).
I'm just not going to continue a direct chain of replies with people who openly insult me. I'm still human.
Meanwhile, comments where people just openly go "Nazi, Nazi, Nazi", "fascist, fascist, fascist", spewing outrage without substance, stay visible incognito.
> You will get nowhere merely complaining about the flags and downvotes; they will keep coming (on this topic) until you start to comment more thoughtfully (on this topic), or not at all.
This is effectively intimidation.
Do you think it is not worth considering?
> This is effectively intimidation.
I'd suggest reading it again more carefully; it is a call to be more thoughtful (I literally use that word). Again, you're not going to get anywhere with complaints about the responses to your comments.
Because it is third-person video, "dragged out of their cars before they can start recording video?" is moot. There is nothing preventing the third person from starting the recording earlier, and indeed they have done so in many cases.
> I'd suggest reading it again more carefully; it is a call to be more thoughtful (I literally use that word).
I read it just fine. You speak of more "thoughtful" posting, but I can find no charitable way to interpret this, because I am not violating HN guidelines but I am getting flagged anyway. I notice that you ignored the point about other people flagrantly violating guidelines without consequence because they have the approved opinions. I also notice that you did not try to defend the flagging of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750452 . Instead, you argue that it is my responsibility to not let other people perceive my strong disagreement as inherently trolling, or else not post at all.
The net effect of this is to suppress strongly dissenting opinions, under threat of further community action ("flags and downvotes... will keep coming (on this topic) until..."). Hence, intimidation.
I think it's unfortunate you call it suppression instead of rejection but I am otherwise more than okay with these thoughtless opinions (thanks for admitting this is your opinion instead of trying to hide behind things you call factual analyses) being rejected by the community. Though, not rejected so much that the opinions can't be addressed (hence not flagging them) because others should have a chance to weigh in. Ironically, I've been foiled by comments being flagged when posting comments; the result was actually my speech being prevented from responding to someone else's.
Regardless, a threat of a downvote is hardly "intimidation" and calling it such is emotional rhetoric. Especially calling it a threat of "community action"; it's not like I'm speaking for anyone but myself. Nobody's out to get you personally, they just don't like America's gestapo being normalized and excused, which your posts happen to do regardless of being within the guidelines.
> You speak of more "thoughtful" posting
Think about the effects of posting something which seems to normalize or excuse the actions being taken by ICE, especially their needless escalations which have twice resulted in something that is reasonably called murder. I suspect you will arrive at the conclusion that these aren't murders (or that their actions are already normal and/or excusable) and therefore you are simply cannot be normalizing and/or excusing their actions. Of course, such thoughtless posts will be flagged and downvoted; that is still not intimidation to suppress opinions but an obvious conclusion based on simple observation. One might consider, with an open mind, whether a community-rejected post is legitimately in bad taste. That is what I mean.
> but I can find no charitable way to interpret this
Your reading comprehension was, and appears to still be, lacking. Being unable to find the meaning is not evidence that the meaning doesn't exist. It's possible you just gave up too soon when searching for it. Such is the nature of learning.
> Regardless, a threat of a downvote is hardly "intimidation" and calling it such is emotional rhetoric.
is blatantly misrepresentative. I said the word "flag" over and over and over again and did not talk about downvotes; and I referred to the effects of flagging (a comment in my history that is [flagged] in the view presented to me cannot be seen even with a direct link in a private browsing tab; a comment that is downvoted, even to -4 but without flags, can be).
You scold me for lack of reading comprehension, and then condescend to me about the "learning" process, but you overlook a central point that I made abundantly clear and attack a strawman.
And you completely disregard everything I've shown you about how I've been treated unfairly in this situation.
> I suspect you will arrive at the conclusion that these aren't murders (or that their actions are already normal and/or excusable) and therefore you are simply cannot be normalizing and/or excusing their actions. Of course, such thoughtless posts will be flagged
Again setting aside downvotes because I did not complain about downvotes:
That is unfair treatment. It does not violate HN commenting guidelines to express that conclusion. My conclusion is justified by extensive research and by prior general awareness of how LEO operates and what happens at protests. It is not at all "thoughtless" to say so; I put considerable thought into this, and have brought forward large amounts of evidence and reasoning. It is frankly offensive to tell me otherwise.
I am simply not "thinking" about the specific matter of whether other people will have a strong emotional reaction to being told that the thing they consider murder might in fact be legally justified. Because I care about truth; and because HN (in principle, to my understanding) only tolerates these submissions because of the potential for actual discussion, which involves people disagreeing about things.
You've made it abundantly clear, by this, that no matter how I actually went about it, you would consider it inappropriate to make comments that suppose that ICE agents (citizens with due process rights, BTW) might not have committed murder, and would consider that it's inappropriate that comments making any argument of that form are permitted to remain publicly visible (again: flagging, not downvoting); only concurrence is okay.
And many recent political threads have made it abundantly clear to me where that leads: an environment where people chant "Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, fascist, fascist, fascist" — despite the admonitions "Be kind." and "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." Maybe you're okay with that, but I'm not. The solution to divisiveness is not to exclude one side of the divide.
This isn't ambiguous: yes, any behavior which normalizes and/or excuses these actions is not appropriate, no matter how said normalization and/or excuse is delivered. That is surely not against this site's ethics because...
> And many recent political threads have made it abundantly clear to me where that leads: an environment where people chant "Nazi, Nazi, Nazi, fascist, fascist, fascist" — despite the admonitions "Be kind." and "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." Maybe you're okay with that, but I'm not. The solution to divisiveness is not to exclude one side of the divide.
When one side of the divide is driven almost exclusively by their hatred of others, it is of course reasonable to reject them as hateful. At this point, calling something "fascist" is primarily intended as a description; it's not an insult except to the fascists who aren't brave enough to wear it on their sleeve. It's rather thoughtless to disregard that simple observation.
Sure, maybe you don't see that ICE are murdering citizens who are doing nothing wrong but that doesn't mean your opinion is unequivocally right or even needs to be given any consideration by others. Sure, maybe you can say you observe things differently but that doesn't mean others' observations are invalid, nor that people need be respectful to your behavior which has the effect of normalizing and excusing what they observe to be terrible things.
That is the thoughtfulness I am suggesting; the thought you might consider is that others are rejecting your comments because said comments ignore these observable facts of community. These comments which have people chanting "fascist" can objectively meet all of the site guidelines and they will be rejected simply for being in extremely bad taste. For an example, consider that Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal meets this site's guidelines. Of course a post genuinely suggesting that we eat poor children is going to be rejected, regardless of the sugar coating with which it's delivered.
> And you completely disregard everything I've shown you about how I've been treated unfairly in this situation.
Something you have also missed is that you completely disregard everything others show you about how the protesters have been treated unfairly by ICE in their situations (your complaint is that your opinion is disregarded, yet you disregard others' opinions); I am entitled to my opinion as you are yours and my opinion is that your supposed unfair treatment is something that can be disregarded as such. To say otherwise would be to deny others their opinions to reject your thoughtless commentary as such. In other words, your perception of such rejection as unfair treatment is a personal problem which has no place affecting the opinions others choose to express (say, by flagging your comment).
People are telling you to stop carrying water for fascists; complaining about how they do that (flagging your comments), rather than considering why they do it is, indeed, thoughtless.
I see why your post was flagged. You argued that the Good shooting was justified by referencing a video in which "laywer" (who has links to paypal and patreon, I guess his law career is going great) among other things called her in his words "motorist who was blocking traffic" (ignoring that some other SUV easily drove past Good's car in the same video a few seconds before) and where he said the officer was "trying to get from in front of the car" while the officer clearly was trying to block the car's path while approaching the car. If the officer was trying to unblock the road he would not block the car. If the officer was trying to stop the car he could shoot the tires. It's clear he wanted to kill the driver. And that's not a justification
> Activists have a clear incentive to hide that justification.
Don't forget ANY video you see on social media has incentives for something or something else.
Your objection to this boils down to a simple disagreement with the findings, and unjustified ad hominem. (There is no good reason to doubt that Nate the Lawyer is in fact a lawyer: he asserts so and makes appropriate disclaimers on his channel, he clearly shows reasoned legal arguments, he's been interviewed by others who accept the claim, he is accepted by all the other well-known lawyers on Youtube, etc.) I could have posted different analyses by other lawyers; most of what I've seen has been rather more strident and more at risk of offending those who think the shooting unjustified. In fact, as far as I can tell, LegalEagle is the only prominent lawyer on Youtube who disagrees that the Good shooting was justified, repeating a common pattern. Whereas many other Youtube lawyers concur that the Pretti shooting is at least problematic.
I hope you'll pardon me for not hiring a lawyer and paying just to get an opinion and copy-paste it to HN.
Flags cause posts to be hidden from logged-out public view. They warrant, therefore, that a comment violates guidelines and needs to be censored rather than simply being disputed.
Consequently, "you argued [something I disagree with]" doesn't become a reason to flag a post in itself.
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As for the substance of your disagreement: I'm not going to get into my disagreements on things I've already repeatedly rehashed, but this argument is new to me:
> If the officer was trying to unblock the road he would not block the car. If the officer was trying to stop the car he could shoot the tires.
First off, no, the point is that he was responding to a reasonably perceived threat of death or serious injury. It has nothing to do with either of those things.
Second, now that she has blocked the road and repeatedly refused to leave (including the interaction with Ross before the other officers arrive), she is being detained, and probably under arrest. That is a response to the obstruction, which is a federal crime (because they are LEO being obstructed) committed in the federal officers' presence, giving them the right (as LEO) to perform an arrest under https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/1357 (a)(5). That's what was going on before she initiated the 2-point turn. The agents' presumed desire to have a clear road does not obligate them to take actions that would lead to a clear road; and it especially does not obligate them to let someone go free after committing a crime.
Third, it would have been quite impossible from his vantage point as the car starts moving forward, because the hood of the car would be in the way. He could only possibly shoot at the tires once he is will clear of the vehicle to its side; even then, he was struck and knocked off balance which would have made it quite difficult to aim with that intent.
Fourth, the law admits the possibility (which I agree with Nate is likely to hold up in court) of justifying shooting at Good specifically because of a self-defense argument. That argument could not apply if Ross managed to get out of the way and then started firing after that point. (It does cover shooting multiple times, including from the side, because human reflexes and police training to fire multiple shots come into play; the shots can easily be argued, with abundant precedent, to represent a single decision to fire the weapon.) And it certainly could not apply to shooting the tires of the vehicle. In general, LEO don't shoot at tires, for many good reasons that are easily looked up (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=can+officers+shoot+tires).
But yeah, it's just not happening, you couldn't possibly just be unaware
Edit: you literally said "i will not watch the videos" - you are admittedly willfully ignorant on the subject, your posts are therefore irrelevant
Interesting the conflicting orders she received were not "lawful".
Her vehicle was across a single lane, prior to the shooting incident vehicles were freely passing, so traffic was not blocked by a common occurrence of a vehicle across a single lane of an icy road.
She was not stopping ICE or DHS from apprehending an immigrant, and the Federal Immigration agents had no authority to deal with traffic matters in MN.
> the conflicting orders she received were not "lawful".
They do not become "not lawful" at your say-so. And she was not "given conflicting orders". That is a propaganda narrative ignorant of basic law. Good was repeatedly told to move (in the initial encounter with Ross, before he begins circling the car, repeatedly refused, then significant time passed. Then she was told to get out of the car, presumably because she was under arrest for refusing to move.
It is the same as how an ordinary local police officer who tells you to leave a property because you're trespassing, is entitled to arrest you (which entails you not leaving) if you repeatedly refuse to leave.
> Her vehicle was across a single lane
It was perpendicular to the road, and parked. That's obstruction. The fact that cars could get around does not mean they "were freely passing". And as you point out, the road was icy; that makes this situation more dangerous, and the blocked lane a more serious obstruction.
> She was not stopping ICE or DHS from apprehending an immigrant
She was significantly impeding them, in a manner that can very easily be argued to meet the necessary standards in the relevant legal code.
> and the Federal Immigration agents had no authority to deal with traffic matters in MN.
8 USC 1357 makes it clear that they can make arrests for federal crimes committed in their presence. This includes obstructing them, which is by definition done in their presence and is a federal crime by virtue of the fact that they are federal officers. And as LEO they can generally issue lawful orders. The fact that she's in a car doesn't somehow deny them jurisdiction. They aren't "dealing with traffic matters"; they're dealing with obstruction of justice.
Tell me the legal rationale for ICE abducting an employee from a Target beating him up and dropping him off bruised and covered in blood at Walmart at miles away.
ICE has been turned into a paramilitary political mafia to harass and harm the administrations political opponents and racial outgroups.
They've repeatedly been found in federal court to have violated the constitutional rights of citizens and non-citizens alike but Congress has shown no spine to reign in the executive which has willfully spurned these rulings.
Turn the blind eye to this at your own peril. History has shown that fascism does not stop acting only against people that you disagree with
The appropriate reaction to being admittedly ignorant about a topic is looking it up or requesting a source. When you a priori decide who was right before knowing the facts, you reveal yourself to be a shill.
What you quoted implies a request for a source. It is not unreasonable to state my priors. That is not "a priori deciding". Your insult is uncalled for and contrary to HN guidelines.
The checks and balances at the federal level are all captured. Support Minnesota in this troubling time.
If anyone views the current situation as a problem, there is no viable solution that doesn’t involve removing MAGA from power.
Oh boy the hand waving away at the time. Now the other shoe is dropping.
There’s a lot to be worried here, but I’m surprised that’s what you are more worried about
There is no doubt in my mind that the the current DOJ won’t lift a finger against any of the agents involved
Because Pam Bondi/DoJ refuses to prosecute these cases, this will _keep happening_ for the foreseeable future. There's no reason for ICE to stop this behavior.
Its not today's crime that scares me most. Its the easily predicted future where this gets worse by next month.
The converse is the rise of the far-left. We're already seeing Black Panther patrol with long-guns rise up in these times in response to this. I expect more guns and more deadly force, and no one is doing anything to put a stop to it.
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The left is losing faith in strictly peaceful protest. At least some of them (ie: the Black Panthers forming patrol militia).
The right refuses to prosecute murders. This is the worse problem.
Where does this lead? Is it too late to stop? Its easily stopped if Pam Bondi simply did an investigation into the use of deadly force. That's the saddest part of all of this.
We don't live in the time of Ghandi anymore.
And the worst part is, I don't even know what I'm supposed to say to them anymore. The shooting today 100% proves the Black Panthers correct.
They tackled him. Beat him. And executed him in the street.
Fuck you for victim blaming. You’re wrong an uninformed at best. Complicit at worst
Don't bother replying, youre going to make some argument about how that was a non peaceful protest because of the politics, but this was a peaceful protest despite the government violence.
It's not just that the DOJ won't investigate. It's actively preventing the state from investigating either.
if this continues, it's going to explode, and I think that's part of the plan, to provide cover for invoking the Insurrection Act and imposing martial law
Law enforcement above accountability is a hallmark sign of “too far gone”.
The greater the force and amount of armament, the worse it can end up becoming.
It wasn't good when it happened in the 19th century either.
What I see is that some of them seem to display even more of a killer attitude than professional soldiers, and bring a whole additional supply of firepower to each scene when they arrive that was not in the equation before.
With that level of highly-armed government-initiated risk introduced, it looks like in almost any neighborhood where there is normally about zero yearly risk of someone being killed, when the "troops" are sent in the risk skyrockets.
On a daily basis too which is too frequent to ignore and a virtually incalculable increase, but you don't need numbers to see how bad it is.
“You all saw him, he had a gun”.
Oh, wait, you meant the victim.
(To borrow a meme.)
So we might as well stop arguing that the government should have a monopoly on tools of violence. These people should be afraid of us, and not the other way around.
When those people are ICE it definitely is. I think those motherfuckers should be wearing straightjackets
The 2nd amendment was more about suppressing slave revolts than liberating slaves.
When it's over, and it will be, Americans need to start from scratch, iterate and write a new constitution, create new institutions and build a new system.
It's almost as if those laws are mostly just performative bullshit that doesn't actually prevent the spread of violent ideologies when the environment is conductive to them.
The Whiskey Rebellion, was bearing arms.
Look at the gray agent taking the victim weapon, that had just been pepper sprayed. He was disarmed before being killed.
"Footage of the grey coat officer retrieving the gun" - https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlvpbr/footage_of_the...
The top people in govt all the way down will completely lie about the victim and situation, despite plenty of video evidence that shows them as liars. Absolutely nothing will happen to these scumbag murderers, and another murder just like this will happen again soon.
Many people will be horrified but conservatives will continue cheering this on. This is the country we live in now.
All the blathering about "freedom", "democracy", and "constitutional rights" is just propaganda you've been spoon-fed since you were a child. The USA has spent the last 80 years riding the wave of contributing to the victory in WWII and therefore being the "Good Guys", and most of the Western world happily played along as their political goals aligned with it.
Meanwhile the USA hasn't addressed its deeply-rooted internal issues which have been festering for well over a century, and the results are now obvious to everyone. It only took Trump a year to make the US an international laughing stock, start a bunch of wars, get rid of the free press, and begin rounding up people he doesn't like.
If the USA you were taught to believe in truly existed, the current situation would not have been possible.
I was 'taught' through experiencing something good becoming more good. Get out of here with your doomerism toxicity. You talk like the non-political Russians talk about their country. The USA is not irredeemable.
I have the same response to people who ask me why I don’t leave the country since things are going so bad: fuck that, this is my home. I will always love this country. It is never beyond saving. We have been through worse (the civil war at the very most obvious, but there are plenty of other low points.) We can get through this. We can make it better, we can learn to love our neighbor again, we can learn to trust each other again. We can learn to avoid these tendencies towards hatred. We can’t give up.
1. Only had parking tickets on his criminal record. No other criminal activity.
2. Owned a gun with firearms permit.
3. 36 Years Old, male. EDIT: I misremembered. Its apparently 37 year old male.
Minnesota Police only have jurisdiction inside of Minnesota however. So those four+ ICE shooters just need to leave the state and they're safe. The FBI is required to pursue across state lines.
None of that should really matter here. He didn't have his gun when he was shot the first time. He wasn't moving after the first shot and the 5 shots later were completely unnecessary and dangerous to the general public.
This sort of hair splitting is gross. Even if he illegally possessed the gun, the execution wasn't justified. He was not brandishing and nobody was in danger because of his possession of the gun.
Don’t “apparently” this crowd when you are obviously JAQing off.
I'm pretty sure you're the same guy I told I'm for completely open borders, but somehow you got it in your head I'm trying to make excuses for ICE. I'm also of the opinion that the second amendment also applies to illegal immigrants, though the courts generally don't agree with this. But you decided I said some things you consider "right wing" earlier so I must agree with whatever Trump's Gestapo is doing.
The truth is, I couldn't even wrap my head around why they were even arresting the guy, because I couldn't understand why they were going after someone with a permit, which usually requires legal status. My interest relates to the fact that if the federal courts in his jurisdiction didn't agree out of status had 2A rights, and he had a valid permit and legally owned a gun, it should establish he shouldn't be of interest to ICE.
Nope.
You're asking about the immigration status of a guy we all watched get executed.
JAQ off harder.
Him being in-status is damning to ICE, not the victim.
JAQ off harder.
Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara had a press briefing a few hours ago.
https://xcancel.com/adamscochran/status/2015119306086900170
They had him pinned on the ground, then someone takes a gun away from him, and AFTER THAT they put him on his knees and executed him.
Additionally, there are many other videos of the agents, taking phones away from the nearby witnesses who recorded all of this.
But the most disturbing thing is that the claims made by DHS, Trump, and Noem about what happened were completely made up. They are simply inventing a story and getting it out there as quickly as possible to refute any other competing story. It does not matter to them that this is a lie. The idea is to muddy the waters.
If the Right does end up defending this, I don't see how they are compatible with the USA that I was taught to believe in my whole life.
This guy is in full support of the recent ICE murders. Moderation still hasn't banned the guy, of course.
Of course they would be suicidal to go into that situation unarmed, as well. But carrying a weapon would be double-plus-ungood and guaranteed to make them a target for unaliving, sticking out from amongst the crowd bearing rocks and sticks or even Molotov cocktails.
The right will tell you that an awful/chaotic world is one where a male ICU nurses helps a woman pushed to the ground and sprayed in the face with less lethal weapons by government jackboots wearing masks.
The right will tell you that a sane/reasonable world is one where that man is extra-judicially murdered and the woman taken into government custody.
Alex Pretti was a good man, who cared about our nation's veterans, who was murdered for defending a woman while exercising his lawful rights as an American (the Second Amendment and First Amendment). I didn't want to leave your statement slandering the murdered man un-contested as to the situation.
Alex was doing what we are taught being an American means, and he was killed by masked government thugs because of it. And bootlickers now justify murdering people because they dared exercise their first and second amendment rights and challenged masked government agents. Bootlickers that want us to live in fear of our own government. We have the right to exercise our Constitutional rights free of risk from our own government's masked thugs.
How do you know how he got there? How do you know he wasn't already there when ICE arrived? You are making assumptions in order to cast a non-evidence supported judgement.
I didn't realize the second amendment limited magazine amount.
Yes, a man tried to help up a woman who was pushed to the ground by ICE and stopped further (illegal) excessive assault/battery by ICE. That was the extent he 'imposed' himself.
The man videoed on his camera, first amendmendment protected activity that is not considered impeding ICE.
ICE are not in fact allowed to use lethal force against impediment.
His character matters when you try to paint a picture that is completely untrue and portray him as doing something he didn't and make him out to be some agitator like the government did the last person ICE murdered or the bombastic and unsupported emotionally charged language you choose to use. You calling out/policing language use while using the emotionally charged (and unsupported) language you do is classic internet cry-bully bullshit.
I understand your position is that people can hide at home from the government thugs wearing masks. I understand your position this man should die because he tried to help a woman up. I understand your position this man should die because he videoed government agents (or in your words impeded) wearing masks. I understand your position that law enforcement can murder people when they are impeded (even though legally they can't do that). I understand that you support an absolute garbage position that is based on and backed by nothing and is the opposite of American.
Continue to disparage a man murdered by our government. Continue to point out he was murdered for exercising his constitutional rights. Maybe at some point you will piece it together instead of saying it was justified because he dared exercise his rights. Probably not, you seem pretty set in your ways. But maybe, just maybe you will understand that no American is justified to be murdered by their government for exercising their constitutional rights. And that down the path you lay out lies only bondage and government oppression.
You keep trying to point to magazine capacities as if a Veterans Administration ICU nurse that cared for our veterans, whose malicious act sparking his death was helping a woman up, was somehow nafarrious/justified murdered because he was 'second amendmenting too hard'. Again goes back to why I highlighted who this man Alex was. You want to imply something but not outright say it. Like you want to hide at home instead of exercise scary constitutional rights.
The video clearly shows the grey-masked (EDIT: Grey-hat, green mask) ICE Agent taking the gun and running away with it before everyone else shoots him.
Also, I'm inclined to believe the "arrest" was an illegal arrest to begin with. I had a big post about how police procedure and due process is supposed to work but I know no one gives a crap about due process anymore, so forget it.
The ICE agent does an almost comical shove to that woman, then the shot guy and her are pepper sprayed, and he tries to help them up.
You are actively lying or schizophrenic. If anyone disagrees with that assesment watch the video he linked.
Tell me the EXACT time in the video you see this happen.
In the video, there are 4 ICE agents on him and there's not ONE frame where the tackled protester reaches for ANYTHING with his arm/hand. There is, however, a gray-masked ICE agent consistently reaching for what appears to be the protestor's sidearm. And at 0:17, the ICE agent that shoots first reached for his own sidearm, and the ICE agent next to him retrieves what appears to be the protestor's concealed firearm at the same time, and walks away from the pile with it BEFORE shots are even fired. The "threat" - the protestor's right to bear arms - was eliminated before a shot.
There is not a single indication that ICE agents were in danger from anyone besides each other. If he was shot dead for possession, there's your answer for 2A, right there. They're shooting people like dogs in broad daylight for recording police interactions (1A) and possessing a firearm (2A), the tree of liberty needs replenishment.
You know, long before everyone else executed the guy.
2. This regime likes to post deepfakes (even president himself).
Why do you have urge to defend these pedophiles?
"Comply and you might get lucky and survive" is not a life safety strategy. I'm unsure where this idea to not resist someone who is very likely to kill you without cause (based on all of the evidence and observations to date) is coming from to be frank.
Why ICE Can Kill With Impunity - https://www.wired.com/story/why-ice-can-kill-with-impunity/ | https://archive.today/gMFRS - January 15th, 2026 ("Over the past decade, US immigration agents have shot and killed more than two dozen people. Not a single agent appears to have faced criminal charges.")
(own firearms, have taken firearm training, still aware never to trust law enforcement)
Kinda deflates things a bit, don’t you think? Seems like cancer and COVID are the real killers over the last two decades.
Resisting an ICE agent is not a lawful use of lethal force. If you believe it is, you are mistaken and you are free to speak with a legal professional to update your mental model on the topic. Again, we are likely at an impasse based on your belief system (as your statements make it clear you are not speaking from a place of factual evidence based on recent incidents ie "fighting ICE agents or hitting them with a car").
The video in this example shows a citizen being held down and executed by ICE agents. The video also shows he was disarmed before the first shot was fired. Multiple angles are available for review. I am unwilling to argue facts.
It clearly shows that Alex Pretti never drew a weapon, and his (legally owned and carried) CCW was removed by one of the agents from its holster seconds prior to other agents shooting Alex in the back. Agents are visibly using pepper spray, pistol whipping his head, and even though it’s 5+ vs one, don’t even appear to be attempting to handcuff or properly restrain.
Another video from a VFX editor showing position of hands during the incident: https://www.reddit.com/user/AriFeblowitzVFX/comments/1qmf89x...
The more quickly Americans come to terms with this reality, the better. I’m not in Minneapolis, but from what I’ve been reading and hearing, people there already understand that their city is being occupied by a hostile force and that this is indeed a civil conflict. Everyone else needs to catch up now.
Some of trumps big donors have been caught hiring large number of illegal folks by design and they don’t care.
She didn't try to run over anyone, you can watch multiple videos of this. It's also my understanding that they had no basis for detaining her, as there was no reason to believe she was illegally in the United States.
Even if that wasn't so the use of lethal force is far beyond what would have been necessary.
Are you suggesting that him filming was obstructing ICE?
He wasn't obstructing, he was filming them. That's a literal fact, not a fallacy.
Does it really matter what rhetorical mechanism someone tries to use for this defence?
NSFW
https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlux63/altern...
Edit mirror
This is truly unreal. Even more unreal that we know nobody will get prosecuted for this murder and we'll see another one just like it within a few days.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/border-patrol-involved-shooting-r...
After reading the thread, pretty sure it’s “less”. The most common and fervent “disagreement” in that thread is “this should be investigated”. People who believe there’s any chance of that happening (without a regime change), have to be so embarrassingly naive that they could be tortured themselves and would still defend the torturers.
The narrative has officially shifted to, "ICE subdued an armed supremest with gang ties."
I'm divided on if the r/Conservative mods are deliberate foreign agitprop actors, Trump admin employees, or MAGA true believers.
This podcast gave me more insight than I wanted into the Trump cult being well and truly a cult: https://open.spotify.com/show/3hkMl04iMcdayIhxFbL9WT
It's two libbed up people talking with their fully steeped Trumpian parents, trying and failing to find common ground. Horrifyingly the parents recently said they would support Trump even if he ordered federal agents to kill everyone indiscriminately in a random mall in LA, and their adult kids were murdered as a result.
[mirror](https://imgur.com/a/bohAwpX)
[reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlpzu8/anothe...)
[pink coat ladys video](https://files.catbox.moe/v3iwkl.mp4)
[Mirror](https://imgur.com/a/XiY904L)
https://eyesupapp.com/video/89d854e9-424c-47ea-a585-f3c72351...
At the same time, a fifth agent pats him down. He finds a gun (legally purchased and the MN police have said he was permitted to carry). They remove the firearm and walk away.
Then one of the officers yells "he has a gun" and shoots him point blank. Then another officer fires, which looks to kill him and he drops face-down and the officers back away. Finally, one more pulls out his firearm and puts 9 into the back of the victim's corpse - guaranteeing he can't be saved
That is their job.
Could you provide a reference for them not being federal law enforcement officers (specifically immigration law)?
I've seen this mentioned several times, but can only find evidence that they are. For example Cornel Law [1]:
> The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is a federal law enforcement agency under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
> CE’s primary mission is to promote homeland security and public safety through criminal and civil enforcement of federal laws governing border control, customs, trade, and immigration.
Even PBS is reporting them as such [2]:
> Federal law gives immigration agents the authority to arrest and detain people believed to have violated immigration law.
> "All law enforcement officers, including ICE, are bound by the Constitution," said Alexandra Lopez, managing partner of a Chicago-based law firm specializing in immigration cases.
And USC 1357 seems to make this indisputable [3], but IANAL.
All the sources I could find that say they aren't law enforcement are questionable, and aren't related to interpreting law.
[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/immigration_and_customs_enfo...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-legal-rights-do-you...
[3] https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:8%20section:1...
(1) “Federal law enforcement officer” means any officer, agent, or employee of the United States authorized by law or by a Government agency to engage in or supervise the prevention, detection, investigation, or prosecution of any violation of Federal criminal law;
HSI special agents have authority to investigate violations across multiple federal statutes including immigration law (Title 8), customs law (Title 19), general federal crimes (Title 18), and the Controlled Substances Act (Title 21). But who we think of as ICE aren't HSI special agents.
Enforcement and Removal Operations (normal ICE agents) do not have this authority and are not Law Enforcement under 18 because they are enforcing administrative removal or civil immigration status violations which are civil proceedings, not Federal Criminal Law violations. Someone whose role is limited to civil or administrative enforcement of immigration status (without authority to enforce federal criminal law) would not, on the face of the statutory language alone, qualify under § 115(c)(1).
--------------------------------------------------------
Separately, when you fly at an airport, TSA are enforcing a subsection of travel laws (just like ICE enforces a subsection of immigration and customs law), but they are not 'law enforcement' as shown here:
https://jobs.tsa.gov/law-enforcement
Actual law enforcement is a seperate arm, the Federal Air Marshal Service. You can carry out targeted subsections of the law without being actual law enforcement.
ICE training has been reduced from 5 months to eight weeks. Law enforcement training was 16 weeks on it's own previously. There is zero possibility they are receiving law enforcement training in 8 weeks. There are now rumors training has been reduced to six weeks (ICE fails to update what their current training program is). I would note that training does not mean they are law enforcement (many Prosecutors and others attend Law Enforcement training) that type of training just means that they understand the system. You would not be able to cut ACTUAL law enforcement training in half (or more in this case) if someone is an ACTUAL law enforcement officer. Complete Law Enforcement training would be a REQUIREMENT of an ACTUAL Law Enforcement job, not something optional that can just be cut out.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/new-ice-recruit...
https://www.govexec.com/workforce/2026/01/ice-more-doubled-i...
--------------------------
In addition, 8 CFR § 287.8 - Standards for enforcement activities requires " The following immigration officers who have successfully completed basic immigration law enforcement training are hereby authorized and designated to exercise the power conferred". It can be argued current ICE training does not meet this requirement of Federal law to qualify and they are only authorized for not law enforcement civil immigration enforcement.
18 is for "general federal law". Are you trying to say they're not federal law enforcement because it's specific federal law and not general? Do you have a reference that supports this?
From the Cornell link:
> Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), which enforces U.S. immigration law at, within, and beyond U.S. borders;
Are you saying the immigration/deportation enforcement (enforcement) is not federal? It seems it can only be enforced at the federal level [1].
Is this semantics? They're federal agents (this isn't up for interpretation, as case law exists). They enforce federal law [1]. What am I missing? You write as if there's an accepted legal definition. Please provide the reference! Help!
I don't know if it's intentional, but your formatting makes it very unclear where law ends and opinion begins.
[1] https://www.findlaw.com/immigration/immigration-laws-and-res...
But nah, I'm not spending more time after your uncalled for 'AI website' dig. No need to be an ass or imply I'm using AI or take passive aggressive jabs. I looked but don't have that site in my history. I do have: https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2024-title6/USCOD... https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/8/287.8 https://www.govinfo.gov/app/details/USCODE-2024-title6/USCOD... https://www.ice.gov/about-ice/ero along with others.
We all know what's happening here. And sincere application of relevant visa and trade laws is not it.
ICE are brown shirts. Their job is to terrorize the Designated Enemies of the State.
Can you run through the rest of your script and get past the Soros bucks part, it's boring at this point.
When that talks about "lawless behaviour", it shows citizens standing on public sidewalks speaking freely (not illegal), when it asserts that citizens of MN are "funded by shadowy networks" it offers no proof to that assertion, etc.
Facts don’t care about _your_ feelings.
That doesn’t mean facts don’t care about _their_ feelings.
Ah, you don’t have any. GTFO green account bot spreading discord.
For example: https://www.statista.com/statistics/788056/us-oil-and-gas-lo...
It is separate from law enforcement with different rules, training, and authority. They enforcement a subset of rules/law. They are not law enforcement in the general sense law enforcement is thought of, no more than Parking Enforcement. For example they can't pull someone over for breaking the law. They don't have authority to enforce all laws, only immigration and customs, and they have much more limited authority to carrying out their duties than REAL law enforcement.
They are immigrations and customs enforcement, not law enforcement. Their minimal training period and requirements indicates as such. The delegated authority of what they are allowed to do indicates as much. But keep building them up to be something more to justify murder of Americans on the streets.
Sorry you don't understand American civics.
I trust my eyes over billionare-funded Fox News and authority figures, which is your perspective I could get anywhere.
If someone were talking disprovable nonsense about fairies, it would be totally fair to bring up counter-evidence. This comment of yours is substanceless.
The Last Jew in Vinnitsa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Jew_in_Vinnitsa https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/84/Th...
The videos from this are numerous and very clear about what happened. And yet, all the officials are telling that a guy is a domestic terrorist and approached ICE officers with a gun, with intent to kill them. How crazy is that ? And if they do this in cases where everything is filmed, you can only imagine what's happening behind the scenes.
If you want out-of-band change in the U.S. it will at minimum take some combination of three things:
- sustained weeks or months long protests in D.C.
- extreme social pressure on congress representatives no matter where they may be.
- state governments in rebellion or threatening it against the federal government.
I don't think we're particular close on any of these.
Otherwise tough luck, wait for the probably manipulated elections.
The kind of protest that is needed is the kind that is actually disruptive. Nationwide strikes, for instance.
Money is the most important thing the corrupt establishment and its masters care about. (Rich people hedged their bets, so both D and R have their shares of corruption.)
Yeah, it feels to me that our actions have had zero effect but I am at a loss as to what else to do that is legal.
Look at history when other fascist regimes moved in and ask yourself what a single, ordinary person at the time could have done to have prevented it.
I suspect (like history has shown), it's going to take as long as it takes until enough of us can collectively shut the shit down. In the mean time my gestures will, sadly, have nearly zero impact.
See this from 2024 "Trump explains his militaristic plan to deport 15-20 million people" https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/01/politics/trump-immigratio...
They have a YouTube channel too. If the charts in isolation don't make sense to you (they don't to me), watch any of their interviews on the channel to get a walk-through of the charts and their meanings.
Their findings for Minnesota: https://electiontruthalliance.org/analysis/minnesota-hand-ve...
We MUST find our power and our power is NOT violence. But our power is MORE POWERFUL THAN VIOLENCE.
And when as you find it I hope you will see it in you and your people and realize that you too had it all along.
The lead up also does NOT show the victim threatening these agents in any way, with the gun or otherwise. Instead, they pushed a woman down and this guy tries to shield her and that's when they target him.
EDIT: another angle showing the run up: https://www.reddit.com/r/Leakednews/comments/1qlvt7t/video_f...
This has happened before. Once one shot goes off they all shoot at the suspect.
Umm, are you just being purposefully blind? Every angle is being pushed across social media and everyone has seen them. They're all bad. There isn't some large conspiracy to make these agents look bad, what they did is bad and disgusting. I've edited my comment with another angle to make you feel better.
> But somehow resisting arrest while having a gun on you isn't threatening?
Reaching for a gun is threatening, brandishing a gun is threatening, resisting while possessing a gun is not, no. Regardless, the video shows he was disarmed so why did they mag dump him?
> Or did the ICE agents disarm him without having seen the gun first?
What? That sentence doesn't make sense. I believe they saw it holstered on his waistband after they had tackled him and the one agent came in and took it.
The fact that you're even trying to find a shred of justification after what everyone just watched is also disgusting.
Also, it's known you can't physically assault someone or pepper spray someone without expecting them to become physically protective of their bodies and resistive to physical force. It's an involuntary reaction for most people, and bad police knowingly use this to escalate violence against people while shouting "stop resisting".
I am hoping against hope that people regardless of political association, will demand accountability. America, our democracy and the rule of the law will be on trial in the coming days. Let's see how we fare.
Instead there’s DHS funding going through Congress which could give Congress leverage to restrict ICE. To be clear ICE will still operate past the funding deadline. But Congress can create limits like mandating allowing states to investigate these crimes. Restrict who can carry firearms.
Write your senators and ask them to block DHS funding
America is a failed nation.
I always understood that the USA is built on a delicate balance of power between the federal and state governments. But here the federal government is sending thugs who, masked or unmasked, are brazenly killing people in bizzare circumstances. And the best the state can do is PTFO?
What makes you believe ICE is going to follow a judge's orders? They are already routinely violating it when it comes to deporting people.
Or, if you want to be even more pessimistic: what makes you believe the current Supreme Court is going to rule based on law, instead of based on political affiliation?
The USA's balance of power is horribly broken. To give just one simple example related to the previous: having the Supreme Court be nominated by the President and confirmed by a simple majority in the Senate? That's just asking for trouble. It'd be far better to have judges nominated by a politically-independent organisation (like the currently-sitting judges, or a national bar association) and confirmed by a two-thirds majority in the House/Senate (preventing anyone controversial, so you get boring, professional, and by-the-book judges - like they are supposed to be).
The individual state governments aren't meaningfully resisting. Their law enforcement isn't arresting "federal agents" to put them through state legal system. These perps should be jailed and forced to appeal before a judge for a bail hearing, possibly held without bail as they are clearly threats, and then put on trial in a state court.
Without this, where is the enforcement?
The classic question: who watches the watchmen? Right now, no one.
Of course they can, but the governor and mayor know that ordering the police to do this means they completely lose what little control they have over the police, since the police support ICE and will believe it to be their patriotic duty to refuse the order.
For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us. For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury
In state economic deplatforming.
In state economic deplatforming.
You're gonna prosecute Minnesotans for accepting cash?
That sounds like maybe not entirely the best idea.
I guess I should have spelled it out in the initial comment.
You've truly found a loophole.
If they removed their mask before getting to the restaurant, and the restaurant owner had no other reason to suspect them, then the restaurant owner is in the clear. But hopefully someone took a picture of their face so they can be on the early admission list for Nuremberg 2.
Without going into a diatribe about how governments necessitate coercion and violence, enforcing such a "law" would indeed be counterproductive and hard to enforce, like you're indicating.
That said, mutual agreement by businesses and citizenry to make efforts to identify federal agents, then refuse to conduct business seems like it should already be entering discussions (if it isn't). Additional coercion by the local government doesn't need to enter the equation of civil disobedience.
If supporting domestic terrorism for economic gains, yes. How you provide the support is irrelevant. State charges cannot be pardoned. Based on the general strike this week, good luck finding a favorable jury for aiding and abetting.
"You can just do things." If the federal government files suit, ignore them and keep going while you tie it up in court and run out the clock on this administration. It is easy to forget that supporters of this admin and these actions are in a minority.
Litigation Tracker: Legal Challenges to Trump Administration Actions - https://www.justsecurity.org/107087/tracker-litigation-legal...
I get it, your mental model differs, and that’s fine. The tools exist and can be used. They could start by blacklisting the BIN of any federal government payment card, and tighten further iteratively based on continuous monitoring and ground truth acquisition. If aggressors have to start carrying large quantities of cash around to operate, sounds like that’s going to be an operational risk.
Federal supremacy is based on respect of their authority and providing them material support in state through economic exchange. Revoke both and they are powerless on the ground, and are at the mercy of the locals.
"Stop their payment cards" just makes things a little inconvenient for the bad guys. What you are proposing makes everything very inconvenient for everyone. Mental models differ indeed.
I encourage the federal government to try to support itself off of red states.
https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-contribute-the-mo...
If your point is that states should essentially secede to prevent federal agents from doing anything within, that's possible, but I don't think most citizens of even the bluest state want to secede.
Honest question: what territory do you think we are in now that is better than “secession territory?”
Honest to god question. Federal agents are executing citizens in the streets!
> The major power lever that could be used in soft secession is if a state normally giving more in taxes to the federal government than it receives back would cease to send tax revenue to the federal government. These states, which generally are blue states governed by a Democratic Party majority, could leverage finances to exert influence over the federal administration, i.e. a Republican administration seen as hostile to their interests.
Interestingly, if done strategically, you could cause the US government to default on treasuries through a loss of federal revenue (a component of which is used to service US debt), forcing a debt spiral. This would enable the states with economic power to "wag the dog" in partnership with the bond market, because the federal government cannot operate if they lose the power of funding via issuing debt while also losing revenue from these states. Net contributor states could issue muni debt directly into the bond market, avoiding the need for federal dollars.
Blue states can force the federal government into default, if they have the will.
If ICE weren't acting like brown shirts, not much. It'd be Federal tasking happening according to due process;probably after the State informed the Feds they would not delegate local LEO to their task.
Now, seeing as ICE are acting like brown shirts; things are kinda complicated. Technically, charges can be brought against specific agents breaking the laws of the State. If those agents happen to be Minnesotan, it may be something that stays internal to the States courts. However, if they are from out-of-state, things get complicated, because then you start dealing with nasty things like Federal jurisdiction, and the fact the Federal government isn't going to be terribly motivated to do anything other than paper over things in the most convenient way they can.
Now as to whether Minnesota could just outright expel ICE; it'd be something that hasn't been tested since the Civil War. Typically, when you start doing things like that, the Feds escalate quickly. This type of thing has previously been avoided through attempts at maintaining some degree of professional conduct amongst Federal agents, and getting buy-in from the locals.
We are now firmly in interesting times.
Yes, and the complicated part is federal supremacy[0]. The federal government can "convert" the case against the agent into a federal one and essentially just turn a blind eye which means no justice. No doubt that this administration would protect agents executing citizens by saying it was "part of their duty" to be there and doing that.
Best indicator I've seen is if comments/points ~> 0.9 or so.
It's my understanding mods can undo this "controversial" flag, so that select threads get back onto the main page.
They are hyper online, and threaten any companies business deals if they feel slighted.
Its why you can get banned on reddit now for quoting the president.
I even attributed it.
The idea we have to treat arguments in good faith like the other user in this story excusing fascist death squads show how well this moderation approach aligns with the Thiel-ite sympathies.
This will be one for the history books.
/Slimy euro scum
Personally, the political threads on HN are the ones in which I learn the most by and large. There simply isn't another community on the web that elicits such thought provoking discussion around these types of issues—reddit doesn't even come close. I hope the policy will change in the future; especially during these tumultuous times, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
Funny how it doesn’t work in reality.
The present federal government has co-opted the militia strategy and filled its ranks with the 2A absolutists, and given them a budget that rivals most countries' militaries.
I'd submit it's a violation of the 2A to allow the Nat Guard (essentially the continuation of those militias) to be forcibly nationalized (it took quite a bit of negotiating to get them all to join the fledgling continental army)
Anyhoo, tl;dr, for sure, 2A is an anachronism
This execution has more significant implications than the combined heft of the chipper clip, or of EARN IT, SOPA, or the myriad of other bad bills introduced to the US Congress over the years.
Tech libertarianism was a frontier for the means to the ends of our personal liberties, and not a goal in itself. I refuse to believe the people on this site don't see that it's all connected.
(edit: clarification; "this" refers to the execution, not the Bitlocker thing.)
It's a statistical game. Arm people, don't train them well enough, give them a mission. Given enough altercations, some will turn out like this.
Question is, now that the most dangerous apparatus in the world has been coopted, what are people feeling like doing about it?
That's all I'll say.
> The peace of a nation no longer besieged by the third world.
featuring an illustration of an oldsmobile at a tropical sunny beach with the text "America After 100 Million Deportations".
The implication is that a white ethnostate will be paradise.
Notably, 100M is not the number of non-citizens in the United States, it's roughly the number of non-White people (90M, per https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045224)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/15/trump-immigr...
47 million of the United States’ 340 million population is foreign-born, the majority of those being legal immigrants. To do 100 million deportations they’d have to deport citizens. "
The other day, the official DHS presser had them prominently displaying a direct Nazi slogan: "One of ours, All of yours".
This, of course, referenced how that day one of their ICE agents murdered an innocent US citizen.
Cops are doing what they were doing in the jim crow era: enforcing a strict caste system with violence.
Let's stop the bleeding before bike shedding over who done it.
However, it is the case that American culture is and historically has been built upon white supremacist principles and that the default identity in the US politically and culturally is white, and that therefore white people generally enjoy a status of privilege and political power that other groups do not, and thus a responsibility that others do not. And the links between the Trump administration, alt-right movements and white supremacist groups in the US are well known and documented, even though minority groups voted for him as well.
So it would be just as wrong to dismiss the premise that "white people" are to blame due to pedantry as it would be to blame all white people. "White people" do carry the lion's share of the blame as a community and culture even if not literally every white person does. That's the nature of systemic racism.
This is from 8 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc.
Extreme violence has been normalized among American LEOs for a long time now.
Look up "killology" for some more on this. If you're in US, check if your local PD or sheriff's office signed up its agents for a Dave Grossman seminar or training course; you might be unpleasantly surprised.
And now that ICE job ads are essentially an open invitation to come be violent for a "righteous cause", it's exactly those types of people that end up there in even larger concentrations. But make no mistake, none of this is new in any way other than the sheer scale of it.
>what’s happening in Minnesota is method, not madness. Trump wants violence, to radicalize & divide, to create pretext for crackdowns.
>...Having lived through a similar, nationwide version of this in Trump's model, Putin's Russia, it’s not easy to fight against (https://x.com/Kasparov63/status/2015126502845587957)
I'm not American and not saying it's right or wrong but maybe?
The other case he may think of is May 2012 protest, where a bottleneck created stampede, and a fight with police ensued. Random protesters got persecuted for whatever reasons. But the crackdown was already under way with the new state Duma passing ever tougher law amendments.
Sociologically, it's nonsense to make a pretext by attacking the other side, because you don't know what how they react: maybe the opponents just hide, or go around. To make a crackdown, you stage the attack on yourself, and then react, and crack down. E.g. Hitler staged the opposition putting Reichstag on fire, and then reacted. In Trumps case, brutal attacks are a step too far, because people may react differently -- what if nothing happens? or if republicans change their mind and impeach him?
Putin made a crackdown on media and civic liberties in a soft and gradual way: the media was taken down by stakeholders loyal to him, or maybe by a made-up bankruptcy case. Mass protests were made very hard to do, and needed a permission. But if any happened, the police wouldn't start a street fight, but would instead arrest and charge the organizers next day.
What Kasparov usually writes is a big exaggeration. In 2015 he wrote a comment on social media, that Russia needs a pro-democratic dictatorship to fix it. I think this is exactly what technocrats and oligarchs thought when they supported Putin coming in 1999 -- that he was authoritarian, but would lead Russia away from communistic revenge.
I lived in Moscow in the '10s, and was at some meetings of liberal crowd, saw where these political activists were formed. By the time many of them already couldn't be in real politics, i.e. be elected, so many were just in these salon meetings (because youtube wasn't yet the default place to present), competing in cool and juicy takes.
At the same time, the Wikipedia page for ICE itself sounds a lot like a propaganda piece, with criticism as a footnote.
The thugs created the situation, escalated the situation, and then showed their true colors. Nothing in this can be explained away by a mere misunderstanding.
And I recommend watching the videos, not just "reading the evidence". The statements made are blatant lies and you should put no stock in them.
America has checks and balances, and they have failed. There’s no “wait 3 years”, that’s over, as America will always be one election away from anarchy or worse.
The only way out is the Republican Party impeaching him and spending the next 10 years undoing the damage at the top and next 40 year rebuilding civil society.
America pretended to have checks and balances. Everyone just turned a blind eye to the massive holes in them and pretended things were going to be fiiiiine.
"The dignity and stability of government in all its branches, the morals of the people, and every blessing of society depend so much upon an upright and skillful administration of justice, that the judicial power ought to be distinct from both the legislative and executive, and independent upon both, that so it may be a check upon both, as both..."
— John Adams
And our government doesn't have that necessary firebreak. Justice is part of the Executive.
Source: https://www.mass.gov/guides/john-adams-architect-of-american...
I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.
(elipsis mine)
It’s not about Trump, it’s the 85m that voted for Trump.
A different party, in that case the Democrats, if it is elected, will immediately deactivate the core of the current governing billionaires, starting from Musk and Thiel, and replace them with new ones, most probably from Wall Street and Academia. Do you think Jamie Dimon will do the same?
They won the election though? And enough other elections to control the other wings of government as well.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/us/minneapolis-shooting-ic...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlpzu8/anothe...
edit: Additional video [2] of the victim prior to the shooting. They were a lawful observer confronted by ICE due to observing and recording them.
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1qlt6s2/video_showing_...
They must have been at extreme danger of some harsh words before killing them
Again.
Anyway, the video shows that we've unequivocally entered open-air brownshirt executions.
This person was pinned to the ground by three people while another was just wailing against their head from above. Hard to tell what object they're using as a cudgel to their face.
Then the subsequent mag dumping just to be extra sure they're dead.
We really need that lady in the back to release her video.
- There are tech companies and workers in companies outside California,
- A government deploying a militarized police force to execute people in the streets is bad for the economy,
- That government is the United States, and so this is bad for the world economy,
- A lot of the people in our industry are immigrants from outside the United States,
- If you're a HackerNews user in the United States, you can be shot and killed just like this.
Is there proof of lethal self-defence being required? Then show the proof of that, nothing has come out in support of that.
Your hypothetical is big, if true... but it's not.
In revolutionary France.
They're just thugs who gang up on people and use the violence they themselves are committing as proof of "resisting arrest" to justify escalating violence. There are now numerous videos of them using excessive force, like spraying a from inches away while while am agent has them pinned down, hands behind back. Or a subdued person in cuffs getting a knee to the back of their neck.
https://www.startribune.com/border-patrol-greg-bovino-smoke-... ("A federal agent sprays a man being pinned to the ground by other agents following the detention of at least two teenagers in south Minneapolis on Jan. 21. (Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star Tribune)")
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1q9p1dp/man_kn...
Status coup: https://www.youtube.com/live/ASr1zVuQlX4?si=jZzKn8DSGcIuKZ2N
BG: https://www.youtube.com/live/xYPGiIt4dDY?si=gx-kqx8jgavIsMBI
Despite all the outraged rhetoric on here, it does not seem reasonable to assume that the officer simply decided to murder the man out of anger, spite, bloodlust, and perceived immunity.
Rather, a dispassionate analysis of the scenario might suggest that the shooter only saw the weapon be drawn by an unknown hand, and not discerning that it was one of his fellow officers disarming the struggling man, instead believed that the struggling man had managed to draw his own weapon and was preparing to fire.
Given the facing of the struggling man and the shooting officer, it seems unlikely that his first fear was for his own life but rather for the lives of his comrades, and so he fired his weapon to remove the perceived threat to his fellow officers lives.
This explains exactly why he fired almost immediately after he saw the gun drawn. Not an extrajudicial execution as some are recklessly calling it, but a tragic example of having to make life and death decisions with an imperfect view of the ... battlefield for lack of a better term ... and the foolishness of getting in the way of armed men.
I tell my kids they have the right of way at the crosswalk but right of way is not going to save their life if the car doesn't see them, so look both ways and make sure cars are slowing down.
The same sense of caution should be used when deciding to get in the way of men, even good and lawful men, with guns.
It made sense to protest the Vietnam war or Iraq or Afghanistan in America, not in the war zone.
We have freedom of speech and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, but do that from the sidewalk, in court, or before Congress, not in the line of fire of a police action. And I don't believe we have the right to block roads, scream in the faces of law enforcement or military personnel, or impede them in the fulfillment of their lawful duties which these immigration enforcement actions are.
The officer walked up to him and the woman with the backpack and started an altercation.
Using your right of way analogy the officer drove up on the sidewalk to take out your kids, no crosswalk involved.
If you’re going to defend this with a “well look at what she was wearing” type defense then you’re just ok with government agents executing citizens whenever they feel like it.
Texas and Florida have WAY more illegals than Minnesota [1], why are ICE not terrorizing citizens there?
This federal violence and murder is not about illegals. Anyone that thinks it is is not paying attention.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1l8o8mu/percentage...
If anyone told me in 2024 that America may see its own Tiananmen, I'd have laughed, but I'm not so sure now. I can totally see something similar at a smaller scale, and millions of Americans defending it with "it was necessary to keep law and order."
I am seeing a cold civil war with Pacific states banding together for health initiatives. And states gerrymandering their districts prompting other states to then gerrymander theirs in response. That kind of cold civil war.
Minnesota now calling up their state's national guard is the first sign I see of the cold civil war warming up.
I believe we are seeing more of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partisan_(military) type situation.
In rural areas, it may be the case that small towns and regions could be "on one side" or another, but obviously we see that in major urban centers, all different sides are mixed together, territorially speaking, and so the conflicts and "front lines" just sort of spill into the streets without a lot of uniforms or phalanxes or "us vs. them" delineation.
When it becomes a war, your side will drop bombs, burn houses, and kill people every day. And you will cheer them on. Because the alternative is defeat and death.
War is a terrible thing, and Trump is steering America toward it.
it has been one since we, collectively, failed to make trump pay the price for his insurrection attempt
it's not out of the question that incitement to invoke insurrection act and then cancel the midterms is the strategy
To quote the main author: the revolution will be bloodless “if the left allows it to be.”
Edit: "Minnesota has the largest Somali population in the US, according to NBC. The community has been subject to widespread criticism from Mr Trump, who has called them "garbage"."
Somalis and Ilhan Omar.
Was talking to a Unitarian Universalist minister recently. He says his life is pretty much dealing with immigration issues for the past year.
He said there is considerable 'chatter' that the next significant target will be Maine because there is a large-ish Somali community there.
I have no idea how reliable that chatter is, so take it as a piece of gossip on the internet.
It is an attempt to demonstrate unchecked force against their political opponents under the guise of immigration enforcement. Self defense (when warranted) is the only remaining option, because a bully will only escalate to see how far they can go. Restraint by aggressors will not be forthcoming.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/24/us/pam-bondi-... | https://archive.today/kYumW
Just brings the shit to his people
Welcome to the new world. It will suck for a long time from now on.
"I was afraid for my life!"
the right to defend ones own person in the face of death or debilitation is not given by any form of government, thus it can not be withdrawn by such.
- get rid of all immigrants (illegal alients)
- get rid of everyone who is against ICE
- take Canada, Greenland, Mexico and Colombia
Thus seriously, any minimal possibility to justify actions of ICE? Scared, non trained, a very stupid agent, whatever ?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/alex-pretti-fatally-sho...
I have a 2 year old daughter.
With every fibre of my being I’m not spending a cent on any US business, person, company.
Also using the term "virtue signal" marks you as an idiot.
"Oh, you are donating your time and money to charitable programs to the poor? What virtue signaling." It has just become a cliche to say that doing anything based on your values whatsoever is bad.
https://np.reddit.com/r/Minneapolis/comments/1qlvpgy/better_...
This is going to keep happening.
Over, and over, and over again, until ICE is disbanded and those involved are held accountable. When that happens (and how high the casualty number gets) is up to the American people.
His crime? Filming them.
"A video of the shooting appears to show that a gun was taken from the man BEFORE THE FIRST shot was fired."
"At least 10 shots being heard in total. Most of them are fired after a brief delay, when the man is already lying motionless on the ground."
That's why Good and Pretti doing what they were doing -- observing and filming -- is so damn important, and why ICE will literally murder people, with the full backing of the Trump Administration, to stop it.
No, there’s people that love what ICE is doing, people that hate it, people who try and stop it, and the rest of us who look on in horror at the trainwreck and collapse happening in front of us…
But I can’t think of a single group of people who are ignoring it. Other than maybe for a lack of perceived other options and to keep from going insane.
Myself? I’m basically a coward. I have two young children. I don’t want to go protest ICE and get killed by one of these wannabe gestapos. I’m in a real state of fear for my children and the world they’re going to grow up in, but I literally don’t know what else I can do. Maybe I’ll help join the campaign if a democratic candidate this year and help them get elected.
But I’m not ignoring it. I can’t think of anyone who is.
The lack of self-reflection in your post might be the most disturbing thing I've read in this thread.
You think we just shouldn’t discuss it at all because people are angry?
Putting our heads in the sand will not help.
no, it’s perfectly fine to be angry, I would be very concerned with anyone’s mental health who isn’t angry about this.
> You think we just shouldn’t discuss it at all because people are angry?
Well, if we just want to discuss how angry we are, that’s just called venting. That’s fine, vent. But don’t confuse that with discussion. I don’t find venting about how angry something makes you to be all that compelling most of the time. Sometimes someone distills the issue at hand into something very poetic and poignant, and that can sometimes be cathartic, but other than that it’s just pure emotion being tossed around and it just amplifies hatred.
> Putting our heads in the sand will not help.
Not sure where you’re drawing this conclusion that I’m putting my head in the sand. Or that people posting their outrage on HN are somehow not sticking their head in the sand, as if the dispensing of internet hot takes is somehow “doing your part” (hint: it’s not.)
The idea that discussion should be dispassionate and analytical is just wrong. All that does is hides biases. Discussion should be honest; often that means being messy and angry.
And not everyone in every political thread is simply expressing anger. The majority of comments in this very thread are reasonable. The ones that aren't have been flagged, which is proper.
But flagging all political threads for "anger," regardless of the actual anger on display, while being far more lenient towards it elsewhere (no one is flagging every thread where someone expresses rage about javascript or AI or the modern web) seems hypocritical.
I haven’t really been able to find any comments here that are all that reasonable, other than the meta-discussion we’re having now (and trust me, I hate meta-discussion like this. Honestly I’m regretting even bringing any of this up at this point. I should have just flagged and moved on, and had a discussion with IRL friends or family about it instead. Or talked to a therapist, I dunno.)
In any case, I disagree that this thread, much less all "political" threads, deserve to be flagged by default. This community's specific grudge against politics is weird given how much politics gets excused in "technical" contexts.
I’m not against politics on HN. I’m against anger-driven discussions on the internet in general. It’s not only bad discussion by this site’s standards, it’s bad for the world. As in, the internet causes us to hate each other more than we otherwise would, and those divisions are (I believe) directly responsible for the shape of the political landscape today. This is not a game… people talk online, they develop hatred for other people they wouldn’t otherwise have, and take that hatred to the voting booth.
And I don’t count myself as better than average here either: I’m just as likely to post flippant one-line hot take responses to someone else’s flippant one-line hot take responses. I’m just as angry as all of you. I’m not trying to ignore anything, I’m not trying to silence anyone. I’m only saying that arguing angrily at strangers on the internet is the opposite of constructive towards actually fixing any real problems, and we would be better off with “normal” journalism where we hear the news from experts and discuss it with people we generally trust.
I didn’t find “hacker news” in any of it, least of all when it comes to turning the other cheek.
Is this a joke? I don't think anyone in this thread is half as angry as people get about React or Cloudflare
There’s that rhetoric I’m talking about! Thanks for giving a perfect example.
For topics like these, the expectation is that everyone comes in here and expresses sufficient levels of outrage. After all, if you’re scrolling through all the posts showing these awful things, you should have built up the requisite level of outrage by now, so if you post anything other than “HN is obviously ok with executions”, you must be one of them and therefore further evidence that these comfortable professionals are complacent and pro-murder.
The nuanced takes are nowhere to be found, because people who might want to come into these discussions with it, see the rhetoric being tossed around, and think “nope, this is all toxic, no way I’m joining in”, flag it, and move on.
But you can look at that exact situation (people flagging the post) and conclude “yup, the person doing the flagging is okay with executions.” It’s wild.
The sad thing is that there is a nuanced discussion to be had here. In fact it’s critical to this country’s survival that we are able to navigate our way through this. But this discussion, this navigation, needs to happen in small groups, where we can actually engage face-to-face. When we can see each other’s humanity, and know that the other person isn’t a monster, and doesn’t want to see innocent people die any more than you do. Where we can dissect each other’s viewpoints carefully.
None of that is really possible in online forums, because the group think is real, and the rhetoric destroys nuance, destroys compassion, destroys the ability to find common ground. It’s sheer toxicity.
If you say there's nuance, then out with it. Stop self censoring and speak your mind. What nuance do you see?
It's hard.
If it helps, there are plenty of folks doing work. Specifically, get trained by whoever your local rapid response network is. That will put you in contact with actual humans in your local who are in similar situations- for me that has bein invaluable.
my statement was about why I do, indeed, find utility these conversations you don't find useful.
That a) says nothing about my take on your understanding/ position on the issues around protest or politics and b) is a request to understand my position and not, like, a statement about the morality of your position.
And further, to me "being okay with the summary execution of people for protesting" seems like a pretty specific sentiment, and one which I have heard echoed here quite a bit. I find it super useful to see demonstrated so frequently that a person with excellent technical chops in a domain may often have massive deficiencies in their reasoning, if for no other reason that it helps me understand the weakness of my own cognition.
So, perhaps consider that it's you, in projecting a statement I didn't make in a very short and fairly clear post who is "giving a perfect example" of the level of nuance-free assumptions that do (as you correctly point out) often run rampant- and not just on this site, but in discourse in general.
To push my point a bit further, I am not here to make moral judgements or change peoples' mind on these political topics; rather, over the decade during which I've been interacting on this site, it has= has been super informative to trace the nascent fascism that breed in many of the confluences of technology and capitalism.
That may, to you, sound like hyperbolic rhetoric that is dismissive of other folks' opinions; from my position you're not understanding that this examination of (what is to me) highly disagreeable and almost sociopathic political discourse -is- the process of finding nuanced and useful understandings of our political situation.
The conversation in this particular thread has gone off the rails, in large part because I am very angry about what’s happening, and I tend to get heated in replies. So I apologize for letting my anger get the best of me in this particular instance.
My only point was to say “I flagged this, but not because I’m ignoring it.”
I flagged it because I truly believe to my core that anonymous online discussion about emotional political topics is causing this country’s descent into fascism. Whipping people into a frenzy against one another, causes hatred to amplify past where it would be if it were just about the story itself. The discussions are where people go to out-signal each other, even if nobody’s there to argue the other point. Then if someone does end up saying something like “hmm, looks like the protester was actually carrying a gun” (or something equally not-wrong but clearly not the expected expression of ICE-hatred we all expect), they’re now the target of everyone’s anger. All that brewing hatred is now pointed at that one person, because they’re the closest thing on the site to someone who is actually pro-ICE. Then we have people like you casually saying things about this site being full of tech bros who are just fine with executions… I just feel like we need to tone everything way down. We need to be calm, to be honest. I know it’s hard. I don’t really know what else to say… it’s hard to formulate thoughts clearly in times like these.
Venting on the internet is a way for a lot of people to come to grips with what they’re seeing. I understand. If this is what helps you cope, I won’t stop you.
Me, it’s especially difficult to see how this hatred is so self-amplifying. I see a president whose primary method of getting to where he is, is to make people hate each other to a maximum degree. I watch liberals like myself fall for it. I see how he intentionally puts armed agents in locations where he knows people will protest, then I see how those protesters are killed in the most predictable way imaginable, because they’re seen as a threat by the people with guns. Then I see the hatred get worse, the protests get larger, with more innocent people joining in, and meanwhile Trump is shipping more armed agents to the same cities.
I wish I had an answer. The answer isn’t “don’t protest”, nor is the answer “let’s all put ourselves in a position to be killed” either. I hope on some level that the images of these people getting executed is seared into enough people’s minds that Trump pays an actual political cost, but then I remember what the BLM protests turned into, and how public support tanked for what should have been an obvious issue. So whatever is going to happen, I’m not sure any of our anger is actually going to help. But I don’t really have an answer. I’m sorry.
My reasons for flagging topics like this is it just fits a pattern of “administration does something abhorrent, people get mad, social media amplifies the anger, it turns into real world deaths.” I really don’t like seeing this happen. I don’t like the hatred amplification that the internet is doing to my country. I don’t know what else to say.
> it just fits a pattern of “administration does something abhorrent, people get mad, social media amplifies the anger, it turns into real world deaths
I need you to pay attention to how you're writing. You are laying the deaths of these people squarely on the left for how they react to abhorrence. And if you're going to blame people on the internet for these deaths, you should provide something concrete.
Please outline what bait you think the left took that caused the death of Renee Nicole Good. Explain what "Hatred" was leading us to this moment. Because her last words were "That's fine dude, I'm not mad at you." We must have a fundamental difference of opinion on cause and effect. Because what I'm seeing is a bunch of untrained goons getting frustrated with people and shooting them in anger, knowing that nobody can stop them, and most people making excuses for it.
The idea that the choice is up to us whether we get brutalized is insulting, and frankly, I've seen it being used to excuse political violence for far too long. The idea that the best thing for us now would be to bury these deaths as 6th page news is frustrating, because as someone actually close to this, I've talked with many victims of ICE, and universally, all of them are more upset with the silence and indifference than they are with ICE themselves.
> You are laying the deaths of these people squarely on the left for how they react to abhorrence
> Please outline what bait you think the left took that caused the death of Renee Nicole Good
> Explain what "Hatred" was leading us to this moment.
> The idea that the choice is up to us whether we get brutalized
> The idea that the best thing for us now would be to bury these deaths as 6th page news
I am going to reply to all of this in a chunk. And I want to picture in your mind that I’m someone in your life that you respect (friend, neighbor, loved one, doesn’t matter) talking. Because otherwise I’m just a handle on a forum, and faceless, like the car driving in front of you when you have road rage. It’s so easy to forget we are human beings having a conversation here. Please remember that.
The hate amplification is not causing these deaths. I never said that. I’m saying it leads to them, in a sense that it puts people in the position where it’s going to happen. A death can have nearly infinite things that can lead to it, in the sense that if any one of those things didn’t happen, things could have gone differently.
This is a very important distinction to make. It’s the difference between giving your daughter advice for “don’t dress like that when you go out, there are a lot of dangerous people out there” and saying “it was her fault she was raped”. The former is practical advice you might give to someone you care about, and the latter is the abhorrent victim blaming you’re casually accusing me of doing.
The hatred leads to deaths because there are armed men who are itching to kill liberals, and the hatred makes people think “I ought to go put my car in the way of them.” (I’m not referring to how Renee moved her car in obvious compliance with the officer telling her to, I’m talking about the fact that she had her car there in the first place.) Renee herself probably didn’t have any hatred in her heart at that moment, but I can nearly guarantee she had a lot of conversations just like the ones others are having here, where they look at what’s happening and, in an echo chamber, escalate the rhetoric they’re using. It may go from “ICE is wrong” to “ICE is kidnapping people” to “ICE is the gestapo” to “We need to stop them” to “let’s stop them” to “ok I’ll bring a gun just in case” in the blink of an eye (the gun part being something that’s more relevant to yesterday’s story than the Renee one.)
No, it’s not the left’s fault they’re getting brutalized. It’s the brutalizer’s fault. It’s not fault I’m referring to, it’s “if things would have happened differently this death may have been avoided.” One of those things that could have happened differently is for people to choose a different avenue than directly interacting with the armed men.
No, I don’t have a better alternative than that in mind at the moment, I’m sorry. I know people have to do something, but there has to be something that is less likely to result in deaths than directly interfering with the armed men themselves (yes, filming isn’t interfering, but I dunno, get a zoom lens and maybe do it from farther away. Because if you’re standing right in front of them it very much does seem like interfering. Or in Renee’s case, maybe don’t intentionally park your car in front of the ice agents.)
Listen, I'm sorry if I caused you emotional distress, and I can tell you're a kind person, but I wish you led with this comment, because it's a very revealing response. If my comment was "hateful" to you, I don't think you should lecture people on their emotional responses to these situations.
I am going to reiterate that the victims of ICE are begging people to share their stories.
> I am going to reply to all of this in a chunk. And I want to picture in your mind that I’m someone in your life that you respect (friend, neighbor, loved one, doesn’t matter).
I'm talking to you exactly how I talk to anyone in my life that would say what you're saying. Just because I correctly pointed out the impact of your rhetoric, that doesn't mean I'm "spewing hate at you." I'm disappointed in you. I hear a lot worse from people I'm related to.
> This is a very important distinction to make. It’s the difference between giving your daughter advice for “don’t dress like that when you go out, there are a lot of dangerous people out there” and saying “it was her fault she was raped”. The former is practical advice you might give to someone you care about, and the latter is the abhorrent victim blaming you’re casually accusing me of doing.
No man. Open your eyes. You are doing the latter. Renee is dead, and you have 1 sentence condoning ICE, and multiple paragraphs explaining what SHE should have done differently. That is exactly like saying "If she dressed differently, this may not have happened." You have more energy for what she did than the categorically disproportionate escalation of violence.
I wouldn't tell my daughter what to wear, and limit her freedoms, because I know that wouldn't stop her from being harmed. I would tell her to be with people she trusts and lean on her friends for safety.
> One of those things that could have happened differently is for people to choose a different avenue than directly interacting with the armed men
That's great that you're able to do that. Some people do not have that choice. I hope you have a good day.
I am simply at a loss for words.
This comment thread is probably the least worst in the entire comment section of this post, and it’s still fucking awful. I’m being called someone who’s condoning ice because of my expression that I don’t want to see people die.
Others are being called literal nazis for expressing similar thoughts.
The nuance between “I don’t want people to die” and “I condone ICE” is the exact thing I was saying is getting thrown out.
This is precisely what I predicted would happen from the start, and the exact reason I flagged it. I don’t regret flagging at all, and this is just further proof that I will continue to flag similar threads where people like you lose their empathy and hurl accusations like these around.
If you have loved ones that are victims of ICE and are begging for people to share their story, I don’t think the HN comment section is what they have in mind. Please send it to a proper news outlet.
It is basically equivalent to "First They Came".
First they came for the Immigrants And I did not speak out Because they were not Immigrants (hell they were stealing jobs so fck them)
Then they came for the US citizens who were Socialist/Leftists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Socialist/Leftists (hell they dare protest the government so fck them)
so and so forth..
There will be an accounting. Seems like in history that's more often the case.
Trump staged a coup to invalidate an election and install himself as president. Dem leadership thought that slow rolling his prosecution was the right idea. I believe that there is serious risk that the dems just say "well, let's try to put all that behind us" if they win in 2026 and 2028.
It looks like the agent that picked up the disarmed gun had his finger on it and ND'd the initial shot. He jolts his arm right as the first shot goes off. Then all the other officer panic and fire.
Edit: ND = negligent discharge
The winning move here is continued nonviolent opposition, but it only takes one spark to start a fire then who knows what happens
The military always has in the back of their mind the idea that they are above people, and this goes from the most deviant and incompetent soldier who still has a 6pack and fighting abilities and thinks all the guys in his small town are wussies all the way up to the highest ranked general who begrudgingly has to meet Senators and Representatives but still think they are nothing but wussies.
A common thread is that they think that society doesn't reward them with enough power for their valuable skills and instead it gives such power to undeserving people and their undeserving skills, for example a mayor who is able to cry on command to empathize with the population when some tragedy happens or the same mayor who got elected by being able to identify people's worries and lie that they'll fix them just to get power.
And if even the smallest doubt begins to enter the mind of the population , the doubt that yes maybe it could be better if the military ran things, the cold execution, the lack of emotion would bring us efficiency....it's already over.... the military dictatorship in effect already in place as there is no way to stop it after the seed of the doubt begins to emerge in the collective minds of the population.
If a malignant actor can convince the military that he can deliver the status in society that they really deserve they'll be willing to kill for that man. And if that malignant actor can also plant a small seed in the collective minds of the population....well get ready to kneel before your new dictator America
The Military thinks it's better than everyone and as a personality type they want to be involved in unprecedented stuff to 'leave their mark on the world'
A bad actor can seize such sentiment in a whim
Then they came for the legal immigrants they didn't like and I did not speak out, because I was not a legal immigrant.
Then they came for their political enemies and I did not speak up, because I was not their political enemy.
Then they came for me, and there was nobody left to speak out for me.
They do that because their policies are unpopular and they would lose power if most people voted. That’s why these videos matter: it’s probably not going to convince the MAGA diehards to recant but they’re shocking enough that anyone more patriotic than that might realize that this is far more than normal politics.
The folks I know who were previously sympathetic the constraints on government overreach watched state and federal governments impose policies that made no sense for their communities and were actively detrimental to their livelihoods and enforce those policies with fines and even jail time in some instances.
These people would have been against the tactics ICE is using in 2019. Today they’re ambivalent. The attitude is “what comes around goes around.”
That’s what you will get by not talking politics. US is on the fast track to be like Turkey.
Some of those ICE agents will kill some AI engineer’s father or mother who has the wrong accents, wrong color or doesn’t speak “American”, it will go viral in India or China and US companies will start paying warzone premiums to hire any talent.
On the contrary, if everybody is so focused on the National Politics contests as we've been ever since 2015 , it's only natural that the winner of that popularity contest becomes a demi God with unlimited powers (on top of what were already granted him by the very generous Constitution).
It's only logic, the more followed the contest, the more popular/emboldened will the winner of the contest be.
It's true for beauty paegents, boxing matches, movie and music prizes and yes even Presidential elections.
The answer is in local politics , attention there because that's where stuff has to be applied on the territory.
"flagged" always means that users flagged it, not moderator action.
And there are a lot of readers who will flag all submissions about US politics, no matter the polarity of the article.
The thing is that dang has generally not unflagged any posts about topics like these in the past, so there's little reason to think the flagging is only a result of temporary inaction by the moderation team. Rather it is a consistent pattern permitted to exist by said team.
Calling discussing something on HN "hypothesizing into the void" is a strange choice of words, either meant to be patronizing toward me specifically or toward all HN users.
You're in luck, because there are thousands of public answers and you can search them easily: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange... (by dang), https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... (by tomhow). The answers we give by email are no different from the ones we give in public.
Whether they are helpful or forthcoming you'll have to decide. They are repetitive (and are even more tedious to write than they are to read) but here are some places to start:
stories with political overlap - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
not a current affairs site - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
consistency in moderation is impossible - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
flags and turning off flags - https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...
repetitiveness makes a story and a discussion less interesting in HN's sense - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42787306 - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If you take a look at some of those answers and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it. But it would be good to familiarize yourself with the standard explanations, because they're nearly always adequate to explain what you're seeing, although they will probably leave you frustrated if you feel strongly about the politics of a story.
FWIW, here's a short version: users flag things for various reasons; we turn off flags on a few such stories, but not more; that's because HN isn't a political or current affairs site; which stories get flags turned off is never going to satisfy anyone's political priorities, because the community is in deep disagreement with itself and because moderation consistency is impossible.
People dislike it when a story whose politics they agree with doesn't get to stay on the frontpage, but since it's impossible for all such stories to be on HN's frontpage, this frustration is unavoidable.
I think you have misunderstood the request. The request was not to clarify the general moderation policy, but rather clarify the reasoning why this specific story was not considered as one of the few stories where such action was taken.
I have already clarified my specific concerns regarding flagging and this specific story in another post in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46745562
People are curious to hear the reasoning for keeping the flag on this specific post, since thought has obviously been put to it and a decision to keep it was made after thoughtful consideration. I.e. which of the several different policies you highlighted had the most weight in this decision, and which mitigating circumstances were considered as reasons for bypassing this policy and removing the flag (even if they were discarded in the end).
It is precisely because consistent moderation is not possible that this is needed (otherwise it would be easy to just refer to the consistent guidelines). The quality of the moderation depends on the judgement and reasoning of the moderators, and the only way for the users to form their own picture (good or bad) of this judgement is to ask to hear how it is applied to specific scenarios where it is ambiguous.
I am very sympathetic to the fact that it must be tedious and sometimes repetitive, but if the decision is controversial I think it is an important part of moderation and important for the community as a whole.
i think if you read more past discussions around moderation (including one dang directly linked) the reason for this would be obvious. read the search results for flags being turned off.
moderators try, as they said, to let the community moderate itself. they try to impress very little bias into the system. but they do try to promote constructive and interesting conversation, and the more things deviate from that mission, the less likely it is to be actively encouraged to be on HN
the likelihood of the conversation around this news post is very unlikely to be interesting and constructive. people have very entrenched beliefs and no one's mind is going to get changed from emotionally loaded comments on this post
additionally, this is now also the third post of this nature to be on HN in the past weeks, and there's unlikely to be anything new to the conversation added this time that wasn't covered by the previous thousands of comments on previous submissions
they are not actively reducing the visibility of this post. they're just declining to artificially inflate its visibility above the same criteria 99% of submissions also have
* If you look at some of the old links I dug up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46747388, you'll find that this point has also been around a long time. Specifically these:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23380817 (June 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20453883 (July 2019)
Clearly there must be a line somewhere. It was not here and today, but when and where is it? Trying desperately to cling onto normality at every cost when the actual reality is far from normal becomes a destructive endeavour in the end.
I have been a regular visitor on this site for 14 years, and have have never spoken up about this before. In fact I have always stood by the moderation policy and appreciated it. But I have a line where avoiding "inflammatory discussions" simply becomes obstinate and clueless, and harmful in the way that it gives convenient cover for the actors committing the real inflammatory acts, counting on people not caring enough to give them grief for it. And for me, that line has been crossed.
I'm curious: Have you not noticed any increase in people saying "this time it's different", or that different kinds of people are saying it now? Is it really just the same old people repeating the same old phrase to you?
> a repetitive topic
Small note: It has never been a repetitive topic, since all discussions about ICE performing extrajudicial killings have been quickly flagged of the front page and never (as a topic) discussed by the wider community.
Yes, when you bring up extreme scenarios such as nuclear war (or civil war, as slg did - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746817), that's a way of saying that we're fiddling-while-rome-burns, burying-head-in-sand, etc. The problem is that you're assuming your conclusion by invoking those scenarios. That doesn't make the argument stronger.
I agree that the probability of such scenarios is not zero, and no I would not like to end up in the same bucket as the schmucks in Dr Strangelove or (more tragically) the last person in the "first they came for" meme. But none of us knows the future, and there's another scenario with nonzero probability as well. That is the scenario in which HN goes through swings and fluctuations (conditioned by macro trends), sticks to its mandate, and emerges intact.
As far as probability goes, that second scenario has the advantage of having happened many times already. Each time it's happened, I've ended up feeling that we made the right call. Does that prove it's the right call this time? Nope—we don't know the future, like I said. But at least there are close historical precedents supporting it, as well as the core principles of HN supporting it.
There's another argument too, although I quake a bit at bringing it up. Suppose the truly extreme, end-of-world scenario really is coming to pass. What contribution do we make by jettisoning HN's mandate, going to war and turning the site into a battlefield, sooner rather than later? How do more posts of angry denunciations and screaming at each other move the needle on the end of the world? That is the step in the argument, like the ??? of the underpants gnomes or the "then a miracle occurs" in that physics cartoon, which no one ever spells out.
I don't think anyone who has been inhaling the profoundly pointless triviality of the internet message board genre for as long as we have really believes that there's some unrealized potential to help society via shriller and more sarcastic flamewars. I assume also that anyone who genuinely believes that we're already in an extreme scenario has more important things to do than post angry comments on the internet. It seems clear that this is not about effecting change or effective opposition—it's about expressing feelings. I'm all in favor of feelings, but that's not the conversation that people say they're having when they have these conversations. (I'm not talking about you here! just so that's clear.)
> Have you not noticed any increase in people saying "this time it's different", or that different kinds for people are saying it now? Is it really just the same old people repeating the same old phrase
I don't think it's all the same people (though some!) but to me it's the same dynamic. But I hear you, and yes I might be wrong and live to regret it. I'm not speaking from a place of certainty.
> Small note: It has never been a repetitive topic, since all discussions about ICE performing extrajudicial killings have been quickly flagged of the front page and never (as a topic) discussed by the wider community.
Well, I was thinking of this thread: Minneapolis driver shot and killed by ICE - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46531702 - Jan 2026 (351 comments), although you're right that that one wasn't on the front page (I thought it had been, because we turned off the flags on it, but apparently not.) But there have been major threads on this topic (or topic cluster): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu..., some have been on the frontpage, and that's of course only a slice of the political stories that appear here.
I actually also agree fully with your analysis of the fundamentals here, just not your wider perspective.
Yes, I fully agree there is a risk of changing HN to the worse for no reason. But doing the right thing in uncertain times always carries a risk. As seen in this very story we are discussing: Alex Pretti risked his life filming the violent ICE agents, for very uncertain gain, and ultimately paid the price. I still think he did the right thing. Compared to the price Alex paid, "a worse HN" seems like a risk worth taking.
And no, I don't think allowing more controversial topics on HN will make a major difference in the context of world politics (or prevent the apocalypse). But when it comes to things like these everyone will always feel too "small" to matter, and the end result if we listen to that feeling will be that no one does anything instead of everyone doing something to improve the situation.
I'm not spending my time arguing here because I think it will change the course of history, that my posts will actually change the moderation policies of HN, or because I think that by doing so I would save the world. I'm doing it because it's a minor line in the sand I could draw in a community I am active in, and it's better to try to do what we can (however minor) than just giving up. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something, etc etc.
I don't think we will reach any agreement regarding the wider perspective today, but I do feel like I have gotten the nuanced answer I requested regarding the moderation policy of HN in the context of the current mayhem going on (beyond just avoiding flamewars). So, again, thank you for that.
This is spoken like a mere observer. The benefit of "jettisoning HN's mandate" is to prevent the worst case scenario that you depict. You and HN have power. Some of the richest and most powerful people in this country and on this planet look at this website. These stories being on the front page and people reading the comments can actually lead to change which could decrease the odds of true disaster.
People need to stop pretending that the internet isn't real. This ordeal in Minnesota is in large part because a Youtuber showed up at preschools demanding to see children because he believed some conspiracy he saw on the internet. The stuff said on the internet does have real world ramifications and I'm frankly shocked how someone in your position that has seen the world change to the degree that is has in your time as the moderator here is still falling back to the "profoundly pointless triviality of the internet message board".
That's not a criticism. I understand how a perception like what you're expressing can arise, but it can only arise from afar.
Another mistake would be to think that [flagged] and down weighted submissions do not get many many eyeballs and that C-suits of large SV and other tech companies don't take part.
The whole reason we can't have these posts on the front page is that the comments in the threads so frequently break the guidelines and turn the site into a place that repels people who want to have thoughtful discussions. So there is no yet-known way to have our cake and eat it; the presence of these stories on the front page means abandoning the site's rules, because so many commenters are unable discuss them in a way that respects the site's rules. And the outcome of this is that it pushes HN towards being irrelevant, precisely because these discussions offer so little that powerful people would find persuasive.
I would love it if HN could be the very best place for discussing difficult topics and be a place where we really could push politics in the right direction. That can't happen if the discussions about the most important topics rapidly devolve into easily-ignored background noise.
Lol, I don't know what that is supposed to mean. I'll admit to including an undercurrent of shaming with that suggestion to hopefully cause some introspection, but it's still just a suggestion.
Beyond that, I just fundamentally disagree with the point you seem to be making People can't be trusted to talk nicely so they won't get any place to talk at all just doesn't feel like the right principle for the moment.
Regardless, my original point stands. Everyone's unique role in life grants them a certain amount of power. Now is the time to consider what it will take before you use your power to exert whatever positive influence you can.
Provocative political articles about the UK seem more likely to escape flagging, which has the strange consequence that HN sometimes seems to spend more energy decrying the current state of the UK than that of the US, despite the relative imbalance in user numbers.
I have to assume this perception has mostly to do with the time of day you're normally looking at HN. As someone who is looking at the threads for hours each day, there's certainly far more politics-related discussion about the U.S. than any other country.
Unless peak US times are very late in the day, I'm pretty sure I do look at HN quite often during peak US hours. I'm only 5 hours ahead of the East Coast here. Gemini (ha!) tells me that
>...peak engagement hours generally align with US workday hours, particularly in Pacific (PT) and Eastern Time (ET). The highest activity typically occurs between 11 AM – 4 PM UTC (roughly 6 AM – 11 AM ET / 3 AM – 8 AM PT).
Here are recent stories about U.S. politics with inflammatory titles that spent multiple hours (over 22, in one case) on the front page.
The Palantir app helping ICE raids in Minneapolis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633378 - Jan 2026 (858 comments - 2 hours)
Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46355548 - Dec 2025 (471 comments - 22 hours)
A Developer Accidentally Found CSAM in AI Data. Google Banned Him for It - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46233067 - Dec 2025 (93 comments - 2 hours)
You can't refuse to be scanned by ICE's facial recognition app, DHS document say - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45780228 - Nov 2025 (509 comments - 7 hours)
Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45505103 - Oct 2025 (163 comments - 3 hours)
We could debate what counts as "recent" or "inflammatory," but I don't think that would be productive.
> The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management
All of your examples focus on specific events and factual claims, not sweeping doom and gloom claims about the state of the US. I'll leave the reader to draw their own conclusions.
By the way, we're both making claims here based on what we've seen of HN, not some kind of objective scientific analysis. I asserted a trend and gave an example of the trend that I was talking about. It's silly to complain about that when you are doing the exact same thing.
Your specific examples are not very convincing, but as I said, anyone reading can compare the headlines and judge for themselves on that point.
That’s not the question I asked.
In much of what I’ve read about the fall of rule of law and dictators rising to power in other countries, people very often talk about one of two things - how they wish they had done more to stop it, or how they’re proud of what they did and they feel they made a difference - even if small.
Even the parents of Alex Pretti who was killed yesterday said in a statement they’re very proud that Alex was protecting a women at the time he was killed, helping others like he always did.
Given what you just said above, I can only think you either don’t really understand how much power you have to enable or curtail discussions or you know exactly and last night when you closed your eyes and thought about it you realized you aren’t / won’t be proud if it gets real bad.
I’m sure you’ve read a lot of history Dan. Has there ever been a case where stopping citizens talking about what their government is doing has worked out well for the people? I’m not aware of one.
I know these discussions are “off topic” for HN Dan, but I’m shocked you don’t see that literally nothing else will be important for a decade or more if the dictator takes full control or starts a civil or world war.
The lives of a vast number of people will change drastically for the worse, and you’ll have to live knowing you stopped people talking about it when there was still something to be done.
I hope on the life of my little girl none of this happens, but man you’re going to have a hard time looking in the mirror if it does. I don’t envy you, and I understand you’re between a rock and a hard place.
Doing the right thing is often the hardest path.
Do you genuinely feel you are doing the right thing?
In case it helps at all, "When your door is kicked down, your partner is dragged away and citizens are executed on your street, will you feel proud about how you have helped suppress these discussions?" struck me as grammatically, rhetorically, and emotionally more aggressive than even "have you stopped beating your wife yet?" as an incriminating cross-examination.
The much more important and concerning observation is that it’s real. It’s not hypothetical. That is happing to real people in the US right now. Today. I wasn’t exaggerating, I wasn’t being aggressive for effect or to intimidate.
I was asking how you would feel when what it’s happening to your fellow countrymen happens to you.
I’m very aware it’s a hard hitting statement and question, and that’s because reality in your country is currently hard hitting. It’s life right now, like it or not.
To close the loop on your example above, if your question was asked to a twice convicted wife-beater it would be a perfectly reasonable question. The same applies here.
Those things in my question are real, and it’s important for you to think about them and plan for them and think of the future through that lens.
You have an enormous responsibility in this because you, an individual, have the power to stop discussions by educated people that may lead to all this being prevented.
Of course it’s easy to say “there are plenty of other places to discuss this stuff, which is true. But people are here and they want to talk about it. People have a community here, and people are reaching out to that community in desperate times.
It seems you’re so focused on keeping “low value” comments and discussions off HN you’ve forgotten how important it is for people to be able to discuss such important topics before it’s too late.
So I ask again - do you think you’ll be proud of shutting down discussions around the collapse of society for millions of people if and when the consequences are in your house?
"Politics" doesn't care about your apolitical spaces. It's coming for everything and you'll have to draw the line somewhere.
I believe that the bulk of this community favors the counterargument, and that it would be a big mistake to let political passions dominate how the site is operated, since that would be the end of HN qua HN. We think a website that's not overwhelmed by politics and political battle—that clears space for other things that gratify curiosity—has a right to exist. I believe most HN readers agree with that and are grateful that we haven't pulled the plug at moments of pressure.
I'm not saying anything radical here - this is the standard way that HN has always operated, and I'm repeating what I've always said:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26253103 (Feb 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25785791 (Jan 2021)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23380817 (June 2020)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20453883 (July 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16968668 (May 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16581518 (March 2018)
I understand you can dismiss that with "There is always a feeling of this-time-is-different", but what happens when it's truly different? Have you set a line for yourself of when it will be different or are you the frog telling everyone else that the water's not that hot? Or are you claiming there is no line and even if there is an all out civil war you won’t want any discussion of it on this site?
I'm not saying that your argument is wrong—I would have to know the future in order to say that, which I don't. All I can do is give the reasons why the counterargument holds more sway from an HN-admin point of view. (Which, btw, is not some sort of disagreement about the politics of this story or other stories.)
if you want an apolitical forum, don't call it hacker news, it's false advertisement.
maybe call it ostrich news or something.
I realize these distinctions get lost when people are feeling heated, but HN has never been an apolitical site and we don't describe it that way. There are more options than just (1) being apolitical and (2) being completely aflame. Not that they're easy squares to occupy.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
1. Trivial intellectual trinkets,
2. Important topics that happen to overlap with intellectual interest,
3. Important topics that we somehow manage to have a thoughtful discussion about.
Is "off-topic" really about the standard of discussion and not about the topic?
There's a lot of mysterious influences in the dynamics between topic type, community culture, and standard of discussion. I mean to say that allowing thoughtful discussions of controversial topics is not a pipe dream, but it only happens occasionally and we're not really capable of sustained flight, so to speak. It seems like the interesting (worthy, important) adventures into inflammatory topics are parasitic on the comfortable trivial intellectual fluff, which keeps the forum-wide inflammation level down.
I don't know, Dan. This does feel different. Innocent people are being killed on the street, under color of law and sanctioned at the very highest levels of government.
When's the last time something like this happened? Kent State? This incident and the Renee Good killing seem worse than Kent State, somehow. Maybe because they were so up-close-and-personal, because they were recorded in real time, and because of the executive branch's overt, sustained gaslighting about what happened. Lies easily debunked by the recordings, yet still accepted as truth by a terrifying, unreachable chunk of our population.
My fear is that the flames being lit now will consume everything they touch. That seems to be Trump's intention, and he almost always gets what he wants somehow, doesn't he?
I think that's what sig was suggesting. There will be no refuge in neutrality. We will all be forced to stand on one side of the line or the other, and use whatever resources are at our disposal to hold that line.
so when you [@user] tag a user rather than email its kinda like a rhetorical question, your not expecting a reply, but if someone just happens to pass by and notice your tag, they might answer.
also @user might mean wasted desire to some, but other users here might see a previously agreed upon heuristic is in play, and act in that context.
for example if someone from a very small subset of usernames that i recognize, were to @rolph me, i might SMS them at a previously agreed mobile number, if i see the signal in a reasonable time.
Pardon me, but summary executions in the United States taking place in broad daylight, with seeming impunity, is very much a new and novel phenomenon, and incredibly interesting to many of us.
These are events of historic significance.
You would need to actually grapple with the specific context to be convincing. Otherwise you could just as well respond to a police officer smuggling an automatic weapon into the senate chamber and unloading the magazine into the lawmakers with "hate to break it to you - but officers killing people in the US is not new".
With posts such as "Donald Trump is the president-elect of the U.S." and "Trump wins presidency for second time" being allowed (just to pick the top two Trump submissions), there is a clear precedent that big events in American politics are considered suitable for the front page.
I can see only two stances justifying removal here
(1) someone winning the presidency is considered an important event, but that same president then organizing a paramilitary force of lackeys to unlawfully execute protesters in "enemy states" without any repercussion is not considered as an important event but simply normal politics (which is not an apolitical position but rather a radical and controversial political opinion enforced by the moderation team)
(2) the topic is expected to cause anger, and only well-mannered and jovial discussions are suitable for the front page. This completely disregards that sometimes the rational and constructive response to these kinds of developments are anger, and a discussion about how to direct and act on such anger within the tech community should happen.
Everything is politics. And enforcing (or not correcting) mandatory silence on certain political topics is a political decision by the moderation team, colored by their priorities and their word view.
I also want to re-iterate and highlight the excellent summary made by lynndotpy:
> For anyone wondering why this is relevant to HackerNews: > - There are tech companies and workers in companies outside California, > - A government deploying a militarized police force to execute people in the streets is bad for the economy, > - That government is the United States, and so this is bad for the world economy, > - A lot of the people in our industry are immigrants from outside the United States, > - If you're a HackerNews user in the United States, you can be shot and killed just like this.
As for the existence of "censors" that don't "allow" you to see anything. That's not how this site works, and your lack of carefulness stating that leads me to downvote that.
As much as I hate that anything regarding the rise of fascism in the US get's insta-flagged (by a community, not a "censor"), it's still very easy to find such posts, for example on an aggregator [1] and on the /active subpage you just mentioned.
It will also be broadly shared on regular (social) media, which is an oft stated reason this kind of stories get flagged by the community, although I think there are many other reasons.
Yeah, that's a problem. Not even a link in the header/banner to active.
It won't happen to them because their boss (Garry Tan) is associated with the power behind the thrown (Peter Thiel).
I didn't say "have a legal firearm".
There's some key points in there.
He was on his knees with two officers holding his arms, another beating him in the head with some hard item while the one on grey disarmed him.
Only after the person in grey moved a few meters away can you hear a gunshot and then they unload 10 or so shots.
Seems like an accidental discharge or they thought he got his gun in his hand since it wasn't in the holster anymore. Either way, extreme incompetence shown once again by aggressive and untrained white supremacist thugs, which is exactly what they want.
As a society we should be skeptical any time the government decides to use lethal force against it’s own civilians.
What dystopia do you live in where a shoving match, resulting in someone getting restrained, should turn into execution of the restrained person in broad daylight?
Will we? None of the ICE goons are wearing body cams, there will be no court case over this. The pink lady’s video might show something, but that’s it.
https://bsky.app/profile/bradmossesq.bsky.social/post/3md6pi...
---
Related, six days ago. Since then, the FBI agent who indicated a civil rights investigation into the shooting of Renee Good was warranted, has resigned.
I'm not defending them, just guessing at the explanation. I'm operating from the assumption that the ICE agent did not randomly with absolutely no cause decide to execute a guy; probably something made him believe in that moment that he should shoot. You can see from the other, closer video that he very suddenly draws his weapon, as if in reaction to something.
Edit: someone else ITT theorized that the disarming agent ND'd which caused another agent to shoot in reaction. That's also pretty plausible.
Obviously someone panicked. We can clearly see they did not line them up and actually shoot them with a firing squad.
But what is the point of this thought exercise? Where does it lead? To more “training” for the agents?
The whole thing is illegitimate and immoral. There is no need to engage with what was going on in the guy’s head. We are way, way too far past that point.
It's not an excuse, it's an explanation. By all means throw the book at him for murder or whatever. I think it's important because understanding why things happen is important to stop them from happening. If you just stop at "they're evil murderers" then your options for fixing that are very limited.
> But what is the point of this thought exercise? Where does it lead? To more “training” for the agents?
Yes, at the very least.
So far, it appears that the killer will not be investigated, much less prosecuted. This is how you start civil wars.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46559763
This does appear to be the case, same with Good
Minnesota's DOC chief corrects the record. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXcAqhjVXoU
You are spouting authoritarian philosophy. In America, you are supposed to have rights vis a vis law enforcement. They do not have dominion over you.
Sometimes the law and its agents are armed thugs terrorizing the populace.