How to justify murder

I.

I recently had the displeasure of reading two frustrating posts on the Renée Good shooting—Stochastic martyrdom by Kitten and Courting death to own the Nazis by eugyppius. These posts aimed to place the blame for Good’s death on the activist left and shift it away from Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot her, or ICE more generally.

While I would normally ignore inflammatory posts of this kind, Kitten’s post already has almost 200 likes, and Eugyppius’ has more than 1,000. Both make an intense effort to sound reasonable, but are ultimately full of strange assumptions and logical contradictions. I engaged with Kitten in the comments of his post, which you can read here, but I think these posts deserve their own rebuttal.

Also, Eugyppius and Kitten are not the same person, and should not be treated as such. I am rebutting them together because Kitten linked to Eugyppius’ article in his own, and because their views are so similar as to be often indistinguishable. Still, I will do my best to distinguish between them, and apologize if I fail.

II.

Eugyppius and Kitten both argue that common anti-ICE protest tactics are often misunderstood by the public. In their view, actually stopping or slowing down immigration enforcement actions is only one purpose of these protests; their other, more sinister purpose is to generate propaganda images for shadowy activist networks by provoking ICE agents into violent retaliation.

No, seriously.

To reduce the risk that I might misrepresent their arguments, I’m going to quote them directly and at length.

From Kitten’s post:

Even when technically non-violent in nature, these operations are designed to provoke a violent response from law enforcement, thereby producing mediagenic victims to use in propaganda. The goal is to trap enforcement efforts in a double bind — either obstruction tactics disrupt immigration enforcement, so activists win; or somebody gets hurt or killed for the dozens of cameras filming every encounter, producing a new martyr to dominate media coverage, so activists win.

From Eugyppius’ post:

Objectively speaking, these ICE-watching women engage federal law enforcement officers in repeated rounds of chicken. Their aim is to edge beyond being a mere nuisance and cause meaningful disruptions, while hoping always to stop short of becoming a serious, actionable threat. This is a very hard balance to maintain because of course threats are perceived subjectively. Where exactly the line falls will vary from officer to officer and from situation to situation, according to a multitude of imponderables. Anyone who plays like this is trying to get shot, whether she realises it or not.

Kitten does not explicitly state a belief in the shadowy activist cabal. He instead chooses to obliquely refer to “activist networks” and write sentences in the passive voice that avoid placing blame on any particular person or group beyond ICE Watch Minnesota. I have bolded the following quotations for emphasis.

The citizen-led anti-ICE operations taking place in Minneapolis and in every city where ICE shows its masked faces are better understood as a kind of militia action, rather than as a form of protest.

[Another protestor is] one of thousands of newly radicalized activists playing a dangerous game of interference with federal law enforcement.

Activist networks encourage their members to engage in behavior that they know will result in martyr production when applied at scale in a simple equation

Stochastic martyrdom is the encouragement of activist tactics that will predictably get activists hurt or killed when applied at scale, coupled with false assurances of personal safety for the people employing them.

The repeated assurances that radically dangerous tactics are actually perfectly safe explains the preponderance of women throwing themselves in harm’s way

the importance of these false assurances explain the widely circulating myths that federal immigration officers can’t touch or arrest US citizens

These quotes are a masterclass in restructuring sentences to hide their subjects, as Kitten obfuscates the hypothetically responsible party at every turn. Consider the following questions:

• What militia is undertaking action?

• Which activist networks are encouraging this behavior beyond ICE Watch Minnesota?

• Who is encouraging these activist tactics and providing false assurances of personal safety?

• Who is circulating these myths and falsely assuring people?

Kitten’s post leaves these questions unanswered. Perhaps they are more provocative by implication.

Eugyppius does not hide his chosen targets. He explicitly argues for the existence of a non-violent organization conspiracy that is manipulating these poor unaware protestors into sacrificing their lives to produce propaganda.

While the ICE Watchers appear to be clueless, they’re pursuing strategies devised by cleverer people. Dangerous and highly illegal protests like these invariably proceed from a shadowy world of diffuse organisations that float like pond scum atop the deeper waters of the left-leaning NGO milieu. The funding relationships are opaque, it’s hard to draw clear connections, but the specific leftist politics that are incubated within the NGO complex and party apron organisations again and again find their way to the street by a range of decentralised mediating activist groups.

This is somehow even more underbaked than the previous set of quotations. Eugyppius’ only citation is a comically unhinged New York Post article, which asserts that

Radical leftist groups, including one financed with $7.8 million from progressive billionaire George Soros, are behind the anti-ICE protests in Minnesota, The Post has learned.

And proceeds to describe:

• Indivisible, arguably the largest and most well-known protest group in the country,

• Indivisible Twin Cities, a chapter of Indivisible that is so shadowy and deep-state that it has its own public website,

• A random anti-Israel group called the Council on American-Islamic Relations,

• And a mishmash of other small community-based organizations.

Apparently this is enough evidence to deduce that “cleverer people” from a “shadowy world of diffuse organizations” within an incubating “NGO complex” are secretly manipulating clueless protestors. Oh, and it’s all Soros’ fault again! We have him this time, folks!

Armed with the knowledge of this sinister conspiracy, the pair argue that ICE agents are effectively not responsible for the violence they inflict, so long as it has been sufficiently “provoked.” Eugyppius writes:

The truth is that the precise angle of the tires and exact positioning of the ICE agent’s body with respect to the left headlight of the Honda Pilot don’t matter very much. A shooting like this was inevitable given the protest tactics at hand [emphasis mine], and more shootings will follow.

But, even more tellingly, he writes:

should a protestor ever kill an ICE agent instead, the protesters won’t miss a beat in celebrating his death.

This is a particularly revealing statement, so remember it for the next section.

In a response to a comment of mine, Kitten writes:

This reminds me of the 9-11 operator in the joke saying, “you’re being mugged? But that’s illegal, tell them to stop!”

Eventually, somebody is going to get hurt, and all the training and preparation in the world can’t change that. The officer in question did not have the benefit of 4 angles of video recording to cooly examine before drawing his weapon to combat what he perceived in the moment to be a threat to his life.

And both insist that the protestors are themselves gleefully unaware of the risk they take on by obstructing officers. Kitten again:

Right up until the moment of her fatal shooting, Good clearly believed herself to be completely untouchable by federal agents armed with deadly weapons. To look at her face mere seconds from death is to see a woman engaged in playfighting, someone incapable of imagining that stalking men with guns, blocking their vehicles, ignoring their orders to desist, to leave her car, could possibly get her hurt. Whatever you think of the legality of Good’s shooting, the fact that she seemed to sleepwalk into it, blithely oblivious to the extreme peril in which she placed herself, should disturb you. It disturbs me.

Eugyppius goes much further, choosing to actively demean the protestors (and for some reason middle-aged women in general):

Hundreds if not thousands of freaked out suburbanites, by the looks of it mostly plump middle-aged women, now spend their afternoons stalking ICE convoys in their cars and filming the resulting encounters on their mobile phones.

In the United States right now, you have the ICE Watchers, whose ranks are filled with legions of bored soccermoms eager to defend illegal migrants and stop hate with their sport utility vehicles.

This random woman who probably has kids in school and a mortgage and a miserable ex-husband on the hook for god knows how much in child support thus openly contemplates weaponising her vehicle against multiple armed law enforcement officers. That level of middle-class political radicalisation is pretty amazing if you ask me.

Most of these women give the strong impression of being really naive and stupid, and like all lefty activists in the age of social media, they have only the registers of shallow mockery and victimised outrage.

The goal here is pretty clearly to enlist dumb women to obstruct the police in dangerous ways

I think I’ll let these quotes speak for themselves.

To recap:

• Unwitting protestors are being manipulated by either “activist networks” according to Kitten or shadowy leftist organizations according to Eugyppius.

• These organizations convince protestors that interfering with ICE operations is harmless, setting them up to be unwitting future martyrs.

• These protestors get unceremoniously murdered by ICE, just as planned.

• The images of those murders are exploited by those organizations for further activism and propaganda.

• These organizations want this because ??

• These organizations have the final goal of ??

Very cool.

III.

Before I get into my own rebuttals, I wanted to quickly highlight some of my favorite rebuttals from the comments of my note.

First, Plasma Bloggin' writes:

So, the latest mental gymnastics to deflect blame away from ICE for murdering Renee Good is to claim that it was Good’s own fault for doing something likely to get her killed, and pile on top of that a conspiracy theory that leftist activist organizations are intentionally getting their members killed for media attention (no evidence for this latter claim of course, just the usual nonsensical assumption that activists couldn’t possibly care about the thing they actually claim to care about - stopping ICE arrests - and so must actually be doing it for some other reason).

zinjanthropus adds:

It’s also telling how the post says “the angle of the tires and the position of the ICE agent’s body don’t matter very much.” Those are the precise details that help determine whether the shooting was justified or not — in fact, they show that it wasn’t. But we can ignore them, because this and any subsequent killings are inevitable, indeed willed by the left. In fact, if you really think about it, Renee Good was the assailant here, and ICE was the victim.

someone said that in the international relations context that if you want to blame a country for something, you give it agency, and deny other countries agency. That’s exactly what’s happening here. Renee Good had agency, Jonathan Ross didn’t.

As they point out, the only way to excuse ICE’s actions are to call them legitimate uses of force or portray them as accidents; otherwise, the fact that ICE agents will kill you for obstructing their actions and disobeying orders would be pretty chilling. And shifting blame off of ICE agents means shifting it onto activists—hence the weird shadow cabal nonsense. As Glenn put it:

I’ve seen about a dozen of these articles and I’m repeatedly struck by how empty they are. If the point of impeding ICE was to goad ICE into violence (and not, you know, impeding ICE), I think at least one of these writers could identify a single shred of evidence, even a single text in a leaked chat, that the Leftist Puppetmasters they’re so sure exist want to goad ICE into violence. Alas, I’m just supposed to take the word of someone who’s never participated in (and in fact actively resents) left-wing activism, and by all appearances doesn’t even attempt to exercise cognitive empathy.

And as Sarah Constantin notes:

I think first order effects are bigger and more important than second order ones -- that’s literally what makes them first order! what you literally see happening, right now, in front of your eyes, has to take precedence over theories and hypotheticals and inferred motives.

The “real killers” are the ones who in fact kill.

Focusing on the real killers really makes the hypocrisy stand out. Remember what Eugyppius said earlier?

should a protestor ever kill an ICE agent instead, the protesters won’t miss a beat in celebrating his death.

This statement is very telling. As of right now, no anti-ICE protestor has ever killed even a single ICE agent. In his zeal to portray these agents as simply defending themselves, Eugyppius accidentally invents a hypothetically murderous protestor to be mad at, an image completely at odds with his earlier portrayal of protestors as ditzy suburban moms who have no idea about the reality of violence.

I do want to note one particularly good point that Kitten and Eugyppius make: protest is risky, including the possibility of death. Some of the actions taken by protestors—such as the woman Eugyppius mentions in his piece, who says “my car’s bigger than yours” to an ICE agent—is unnecessarily aggressive and likely to cause escalation. These actions primarily serve to enrage ICE agents and don’t serve the purpose of physically obstructing those agents from carrying out their orders. If protestors really are unknowingly engaging in these risky actions due to activist organizations, organizers have an obligation to inform them of the risks they are undertaking, especially when they give advice like “cause a scene” or “yell at & shame them” as seen in Eugyppius’ post. It’s also irresponsible to suggest that any method of obstructing ICE agents is low-risk.

However, their choice to blame organizers still falls apart under scrutiny. Now that Good has been murdered, every single protestor is aware of the consequences. The fact that they are still out protesting implies that this knowledge would not have changed their behavior, because it has not changed their behavior. I have also yet to see any protestor say or even imply that an activist organization pushed them to do something irresponsible without warning them about the potential consequences.

Even if I conceded that activists had successfully tricked Good and other protestors into feeling safer than they should—which I do not—their argument is still flawed. To quote Plasma again:

But even if the article is right that Good irrationally underestimated the danger of what she was doing, that doesn’t reduce the blame that should be put on ICE at all - in fact, it casts them in an even worse light. If ICE is so violent that Good should have expected to be killed for what she did, then they are indeed brutal thugs who ought not be given any power.

At no point do Kitten and Eugyppius acknowledge any concerns or criticisms of ICE. Instead, in our comment thread, Kitten pled ignorance of the legality of both activist interference and ICE’s actions:

I don’t have an opinion on which specific acts of activist interference will be ruled lawful to arrest for, and my best guess is that the actual answer is pending the lawsuits that shake out of this. My claim is just that there exists a level of interference and obstruction which can and will result in a lawful arrest by federal agents. I’m not a lawyer, but my (unstudied) belief is that at least in some cases, deliberately blocking in federal law enforcement vehicles with your car is a crime they have the authority to arrest you for. If that belief is demonstrated to be categorically false I’ll issue a correction.

And my broader point has little to do with the legality of ICE’s actions, which again I don’t have a strong opinion on. My point is that these tactics are tantamount to asking to be shot, in the aggregate, and this is true regardless of the legality of that shooting.

I also don’t have an opinion on whether it was appropriate for officers to surround Good’s car in this instance. I’m comfortable saying she was deliberately impeding their lawful operation and refusing to move when ordered, but as to what the best course of action would have been for the agents on the ground to remedy that situation, I’m neither a cop nor a lawyer.

This, of course, makes no sense. Obstructing agents is only tantamount to asking to be shot if you believe that agents will shoot you for obstructing them in defiance of reasonable use-of-force laws. And Kitten understands this point; when I asked him if Ross would have been justified to shoot Good had he not been standing in front of the car, he wrote:

For my own part, I’m inclined to believe that Ross had good reason to believe his life was in danger and the shooting was justified. The same would not have been true if he had been standing clear of the car.

So obviously, agents can only justifiably shoot you if you threaten their lives, which is not the same thing as simple obstruction.

On the other hand, Eugyppius once again does not bother to mince words. In a paywalled follow-up post—Why Jonathan Ross was legally justified in shooting Renée Good—he writes:

In what follows I will tell you exactly what I think about the shooting. I will tell you why it was legally justified, so my critics can get even more mad. I will tell you why, pragmatically speaking, police must have the latitude to use deadly force in incidents like this generally, which will really piss these people off. And then to send them into the ultimate rage, I will explain why almost all the argument and pseudo-forensic video analysis arguing otherwise is beside the point if not openly deceptive. At the same time, and to calm everybody down, I will outline why the preceding are pretty limited determinations and don’t mean the woman necessarily deserved to die or that anybody has to feel good or morally satisfied about unfortunate outcomes like this.

Since the post is paywalled, I unfortunately cannot comment on the quality of his arguments. Sad!

Either way, there’s a disconnect here between the violent actions of the ICE agents—who keep killing protestors and people in custody—and their portrayal as legitimate law enforcement. As Darby Saxbe so simply put it:

The victim blaming happening is insane. Last I checked, we don’t punish this stuff by death

Which I think sums this whole situation up nicely.

IV.

Obviously, Eugyppius is wrong. The police are not universally immune to manslaughter charges, because intent is not all that matters in law enforcement. Otherwise, ICE agents would be legally empowered to shoot anyone they like by walking in front of their cars. Accordingly, whether Jonathan Ross was legally justified in shooting Renée Good is entirely dependent on whether he had legitimate reason to fear for his life, which is itself entirely dependent on—you guessed it—the angle of the tires and position of the ICE agent’s body.

And, unlike the claim that protestors are deliberately trying to provoke violence by blocking agents with their cars, we have actual evidence that agents at the very agency that Ross used to work at have in the past tried to provoke violence by blocking cars with their bodies.

In 2013, the Police Executive Research Forum completed a review of 67 deadly force incidents at Customs and Border Protection between 2010 and 2012. What they found was damning: CBP agents were “intentionally putting themselves into the exit path of vehicles, thereby exposing themselves to additional risk and creating justification for the use of deadly force.”

Jonathan Ross was at Border Patrol during the entire 2010-2012 period when this behavior was documented.

We’re not claiming Ross personally engaged in this practice at the time. But he was at the agency when it was happening. He was there when CBP tried to bury the report. He was there when the directive banned the practice. He didn’t just learn the rule against stepping in front of vehicles—he was at the agency at a time this “culture” of stepping in front of vehicles to justify deadly force was so prevalent that it led to the investigation that put the policy in the books.

Note the second highlighted paragraph; it’s hard to justify shooting a driver as self-defense, since a car will continue moving towards you even after its driver dies.

In short, there is some decent evidence to support the notion that ICE is unnecessarily escalating situations against civilians—the Wall Street Journal found 13 instances in which ICE agents shot at or in civilian cars—and no evidence to support the notion that shadowy leftist organizations are trying to get civilians killed. I have yet to see any proof that Good—or other protestors—have been actively trying to run over ICE agents. On the other hand, ABC News reports that ICE agents restrained bystanders from offering medical help for 6 minutes, long after the danger had passed:

Minutes after Good is shot, she remains inside the Honda Pilot, video footage shows. Bystanders plead with DHS agents to let a man identified as a physician check on Good. The agents refuse, saying they have their own medics and that EMS personnel are on the way.

More than six minutes after shots rang out, local first responders are seen on video arriving at the site of Good’s crashed Honda Pilot. An EMS technician or firefighter begins pulling Good’s body from the car and firefighters start to render assistance to Good.

And CBS reports that Good was still alive after those 6 minutes:

Renee Good, who died last week after she was shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, sustained at least three gunshot wounds and a possible fourth, according to a Minneapolis Fire Department report obtained by CBS News Minnesota.

The incident report shows that paramedics arrived five minutes after Good was shot in her SUV following the encounter with ICE agents. Medics found the 37-year-old unresponsive with an irregular pulse and attempted life-saving efforts on the scene and in the ambulance to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Responders found two apparent gunshot wounds to her chest, one to her left forearm, and “a possible gunshot wound with protruding tissue on the left side of the patient’s head,” the report says.

If that doesn’t scream manslaughter to you, I don’t know what to tell you.

Furthermore, we actually do have violent protestors now: the Black Panther Party is apparently back in force. The stark difference between them and the suburban white women should make it clear how ridiculous this whole thing is. Forget cars and unarmed aggression: the Black Panthers literally have guns. If you think that obstructing a road constitutes violent protest, boy are you in for a surprise.

Will this convince Kitten and Eugyppius that the prior set of protests were genuinely non-violent and do not constitute militia action in the face of actual militia action? I doubt it. It seems more likely that they’ll say something like “see, the tactic worked, and now the Black Panthers have their manufactured justification to enact violence!” or espouse some other fringe conspiracy that requires believing that all of your enemies are both extremely coordinated and more tight-lipped than any other conspiracy in history.

As an occasional non-violent protestor myself, I can tell you that this is not the case. In fact, the opposite is true; modern American protests are far too decentralized to coordinate properly. Organizers understand this to be an active problem in cases that require simultaneous mass mobilization, like election defense. There’s a reason we’ve only had two national No Kings Protests: there’s no hierarchical leadership structure in place to plan them and organizing them is a real pain in the ass.

This would be obvious to anyone with actual protesting experience—or barring that, a basic understanding of history. The main strength and weakness of modern protest is that it is so decentralized; it means that the government cannot shut the protests down by arresting a single person, but also means that there is no widespread agreement on tactics. This method was pioneered by Hong Kong back in 2019. But of course, this was also the case back in the Civil Rights Movement; the non-violent MLK faction stood in stark contrast to Malcom X and other violent factions, and it would be ridiculous to assert that they were secretly in cahoots the whole time. For my part, I do not endorse violent protest, have never engaged in it myself, and never plan to. I simply have no way of restraining those who do.¹

But their utter ignorance about modern protesting tactics and resultant conspiratorial wishcasting about their imagined enemies is only part of their folly. The other issue: neither of them have condemned or criticized ICE in any way, and neither has acknowledged the utter incompetence on display.

This is ridiculous, given all that we know about ICE. It is patently idiotic to treat them as standard law enforcement, given that their hiring and training standards are so notoriously low. Even the DHS itself has been issuing “legal refreshers” for their agents, warning them about proper use of force and explicitly reminding them that passive resistance and agent noncompliance is legal.

Notice the emphasis on REASONABLE.

When pressed on this point by Eurydice in the comments of her own excellent post about the incompetence of ICE, Kitten wrote:

Nor did I anywhere assert that all criticism of ICE is purely ideologically motivated or that there are no fair-minded, legitimate criticisms of the agency. That would be an indefensible partisan position I don’t hold, which is why I didn’t say that. What I do believe is that a great deal of criticism of ICE stems from opposition to immigration enforcement, full stop.

Another commenter called him out for not actually answering the question, to which Kitten responded:

I’m happy to engage this point in the comments to my piece, I’m just uninterested in engaging it with the author of this one. Assuming you want to know my mind and aren’t just taunting, feel free to leave a comment on my article and I will respond when I have a minute.

My questioning of him in the comments of his piece lead to the very noncommittal exchange shown in the previous section. At no point did Kitten acknowledge that ICE is woefully undertrained for a law enforcement agency. Nor did he acknowledge the legality of disobeying officer commands. And neither he nor Eugyppius have acknowledged that untrained and unrestrained law enforcement agents are self-evidently more likely to apply lethal force in situations that do not call for it.

To the best of my knowledge, Kitten still hasn’t provided any fair-minded, legitimate criticisms of the agency.

So, let me cite the DHS again. The DHS thinks that its officers need more legal training to lessen the risk of them acting unlawfully. Obstructing an officer may not be legal, but passive resistance—including disobeying officer commands—very much is.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Hell, even current and former ICE agents are uncomfortable with Ross’ action. From TIME:

When asked about the deadly shooting that sparked mass protests in Minneapolis and across the country, both the current and the former ICE agent expressed their reservations about Agent Ross opening fire three times.

“If you fear for your life and you’re in imminent danger, policy says you could fire at that vehicle if there’s no other recourse,” said a current ICE agent with more than 20 years of experience in the agency.

“If someone is able to make the argument that she was trying to hit him, he feared for his life, and all he could do was shoot…then sure, he can justify it that way. But I think when you look at it a little bit more, it’s … very problematic for him,” the agent said.

Both the former agent and the current agent also questioned why Ross was assigned to this operation in the first place, given a previous injury involving a driver at the wheel of a vehicle just a few months before the confrontation with Good.

The current ICE agent pointed out that while the pretense of the immigration operation in Minneapolis is to investigate welfare fraud, neither border patrol officers nor ICE agents in charge of deportation, also known as Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers, are trained to investigate financial fraud.

Kitten and Eugyppius’ incessant refusal to criticize ICE seems pretty strange now, doesn’t it?

V.

But it gets worse. As Bentham’s Bulldog pointed out, it is possible to believe that the shooting was justified and have a sane and reasonable reaction to it. That reaction looks something like this:

I disagree with this take somewhat, but I can respect it; it puts an appropriate amount of blame on both parties and acknowledges that shooting someone who is driving towards you does not make you or anyone else around you safer. Notice the wording here: impulsive actions under the influence of fear led to an awful event. That is the position of a respectable and respectful opponent.

So how did the Trump administration respond? Well, JD Vance called her a “deranged leftist” and Kristi Noem called her a “domestic terrorist”. But the most enlightening response comes from Donald Trump himself.

His first reaction was to lie about it on Truth Social:

hard to believe he’s alive, huh.That Ross guy must’ve been hit pretty hard.

But he has since completely reneged on his position:

President Donald Trump, in a CBS News interview Tuesday, addressed the father of Renee Good—fatally shot in her car by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minnesota last week—saying she was likely “a very solid, wonderful person” but that her “actions were pretty tough.”

“I would bet you that she, under normal circumstances, was a very solid, wonderful person, but her actions were pretty tough, he added.

This puts Kitten and Eugyppius in the uncomfortable position of defending the Trump administration more zealously than the administration are defending themselves.

It also puts them in the uncomfortable position of seeming even more inhumane than Trump.

Reading over Kitten’s and Eugyppius’ posts in full, we find a disturbing lack of sympathy and empathy. At no point do either say that the incident was an avoidable tragedy. In fact, I’m going to quote Eugyppius’ second post again with emphasis, because I think it is very telling:

At the same time, and to calm everybody down, I will outline why the preceding are pretty limited determinations and don’t mean the woman necessarily deserved to die or that anybody has to feel good or morally satisfied about unfortunate outcomes like this.

Eugyppius does not say that Good didn’t deserve to die. He also does not say that he personally feels bad about the outcome or thinks that the situation is morally unsatisfying. The most he says is that the outcome is “unfortunate.” Kitten similarly omits acknowledging that the shooting was an unfortunate or avoidable accident. At least he does not imply that he thinks Good deserved to die or that he feels morally satisfied with the outcome.

In the attempt to defend their strange conspiracy theory, they have tied themselves into knots. They must call the protestors dumb and imply that they don’t know what they’re doing in order to shift blame towards the larger shadowy activist network (and the left as a whole) when the protestors inevitably get hurt or killed. However, the protestors have to be more than just dumb, because otherwise they’d be too sympathetic: look at these poor stupid victims of the shadowy leftist cabal!

The result is an incoherent mess. Are the protestors at fault for their deaths? Or are the leftist activists who are egging them on the ones who truly deserve the blame? Neither Kitten nor Eugyppius explicitly say anything of the sort, and so we are left with this unsolvable contradiction. Of course, there is an easy resolution to this problem—both can be at blame if you are willing to bite the bullet and say that dumb protestors deserve to be killed for being dumb enough to be manipulated—but this resolution is obviously evil and neither endorse it in their arguments.

It’s very telling that Kitten in particular is choosing to portray non-violent protest as militia action. It seems Kitten considers taunting agents and blocking them with vehicles comparable to armed “militia action,” although Kitten does not justify his use of this highly suggestive phrase. If he didn’t see non-violent protest as equivalent to militia action, he would have an incredibly hard time insinuating that the non-violent protestors are inciting violence and thus are at fault for being murdered.

So, here is a less conspiratorial account of events:

• Protestors are mad about ICE.

• These protestors either actively seek out activist organizations to learn what they can do to stop ICE or learn about protest tactics via mimesis (largely online).

• The more risk-tolerant of the protestors realize that obstruction tactics largely work and are willing to potentially face arrest for defying ICE agents.

• During one of these obstruction events, an ICE agent shoots a protestor in a viciously gruesome and highly controversial way.

The truth is that non-violently obstructing law enforcement agents is a tactic as old as non-violent resistance itself. Every protestor fully believes that ICE is a bunch of lawless thugs and knows the risk of violence they face. They are the ones chanting that “it can happen here”. If they didn’t then, they certainly do now.

Furthermore, law enforcement agents are ALWAYS on the hook for killing people. Obstructing law enforcement, particularly by blocking traffic, will lead to your entirely lawful arrest. Obviously. But if law enforcement is not facing an immediate and credible threat on their life, they do NOT have the authority to shoot anyone. As Kitten himself stated: if Ross had reason to fear for his life, his decision to shoot Good was justifiable, and vice versa. Not even the police are above the law.

VI.

Now to address the elephant in the room.

I’ve been arguing this case in a vacuum, because that is how Kitten and Eugyppius choose to frame it. They see ICE as a legitimate law enforcement agency that is solely trying to carry out legitimate laws, despite the obstruction of those pesky protestors and their nefarious activist organizations. I have done my best to make a case against their positions assuming that ICE is in fact acting in good faith, with the sole aim of deporting illegal immigrants and only arresting citizens who are obstructing them from their lawful duties.

But of course, we do not live in their world. We live under the Trump administration.

In the real world, Trump will boldly whinge to reporters about how he should’ve seized voting machines when he had the chance in 2020.

again, you can’t make this stuff up.

In the real world, the DHS will openly tweet about deporting 100 million people. This is despite the fact that the DHS’ own reports stating that there have been about 11 million illegal immigrants in the USA for the past 20 years.

That report was from 2022. For completeness, here is the 2018 version published under the first Trump administration that reports approximately the same numbers—no blaming the Biden administration this time.

And in the real world, ICE regularly detains US citizens without asking for identification, an act that would be useless if they truly only sought to deport illegal immigrants.

So no, I don’t think their case stands up under scrutiny even from within their own worldview. But if you step out of their echo chamber and into the real world, you’ll find that ICE is not operating from a context of regular lawful governance, but of intense democratic backsliding. I would be remiss not to mention all the harm that Trump has caused and has yet to cause. And I would be even more remiss to not make the most obvious prediction of all time: ICE is only going to get worse.

The farce here is easy to spot. Manufacture consent for a murder; get all immigrants out, even the legal ones; consolidate power in an authoritarian administration. Ironically, Kitten and Eugyppius are themselves unwitting fools who are playing into the administration’s hands. Or they’re doing it knowingly. Or maybe they’re the victims of a shadow cabal of even more secret and deep-state right-wing interests. Who knows?

Ah, hang on. Eugyppius isn’t even American. How ironic.

Many thanks to everyone who discussed this issue with me in the comments of my Substack notes on the subject and elsewhere, and special thanks to Eurydice for giving detailed thoughts on a first draft.

1. This was largely why I stopped showing up to pro-Palestine protests on my campus; I agreed with the cause but did not support the excessive escalation and yelling at officers. Those protests would give Kitten and Eugyppius a heart attack. And ours were pretty tame compared to other colleges!