the views of certain internet felines of questionable goodness as to the possibility of disliking and distrusting the media sufficiently are well known and i shall not belabor them here. covid was the great sorting hat/revelator on this topic, a time when, to put it simply, the excesses became so egregious, so blatant, and so utterly, hallucinatorily facile that anyone unable to see it was basically the dupe who’s still standing 60 seconds into the patter of a stage hypnotist and is about to be pulled on stage to have a proper fool made of them.

it turns out that group is bigger than i had previously realized and it’s pretty clear that many of these people are going to keep trusting broadcast news and captured outlets until their pronouns become “was/were.” and there’s not a whole lot that can be done about that.

there is another group who will reflexively invert anything mass-media says and assume the opposite must be true because “all they do is lie.” and, obviously, this heuristic has had a pretty good batting average of late, but it also not only lacks any rigorous basis, but it cedes the perceptive frame on the issues to the misrendering and emotive slop of media. and even if you win on the facts:

merely surrendering the structure of the debate to this gang is dangerous.

distrust of their claims is not enough. you need to escape their frame entirely.

modern media has become the most optimized and unified propaganda system in the history of systemization. the verbatim talking points and frames erupt everywhere and the intent is to delude, deceive, to inflame but never to inform.

their manipulation is more than wrong. it’s “meta wrong.” and much of the meaningful manipulation is “second order,” not rooted merely in fake facts but in perception and discussion shaping and so it is unwise to let the media mavens and those who call their tunes decide what the framework and salients of the discussion should be.

you cannot win from within their semantic and conceptual cage.

that’s why they build it.

let’s take an example:

the whole media as one: “this is extremely dangerous to our democracy.”

you tie the word “extreme” to threat and democracy. it’s extremists threatening democracy!

this, on a cursory level, sounds terrible. oh no, we’re under attack! the left invented this claim, but the right takes it up as well making their own claims and grievances. they want to win about “who is really the threat around here?”

but as soon as the right does this, they have already lost.

people see the first fight and think they can win it or even that they did, but to even accept the question posed in that manner is to concede the real field.

and that is the part people miss.

this is not a frame in which the right can possibly win even and perhaps especially if everyone agrees with them about just what is “extremely dangerous to our democracy.” why? simple:

the US is not supposed to be a democracy. it’s supposed to be a system in rights that stands paramount to leviathonian instrusion or the whims of the demos and proof against that most aggressive and intractable form of tyranny, tyranny of the majority.

but if they have you running around protecting “democracy” you have already ceded this argument.

in the ways that matter, this is already over.

and you lost.

this is why you cannot, EVER, allow your enemy to be the one who poses the question and who sets the frame of your perception and why, in such matters, you should trust the media least of all.

what remains of the rotted edifice that was once, perhaps, journalism is a captured force. we can argue about whether the capture is by political (or IC) patrons and pay for play activists propping up the newsroom budgets or by the simple, terrible exigency of the need to compete for eyeballs in a world that not even an ADD addled hyperkinetic 6 year old can keep up with, but it really does not matter - the results are the same and so is the terrible confluence of need and praxis DBA “the news.”

and this cannot be fixed within existing structures, therefore they must be discredited and abandoned because they will set every frame in the most inapt and inflammatory of terms and once you begin to argue within that structure, there is no path to truth.

example:

meet media poster child liam ramos who the media and congress critters all universally proclaimed “was kidnapped by ICE” as he “returned from preschool.”

it’s a powerful, evocative image. the poor child, alone in the cold, sad, scared with his lilo and stich hat and a disembodied authoritarian hand on his backpack. this photographer certainly knew his business.

but here’s what really happened:

• ICE was there to arrest the boy’s father, adrian arias, an illegal alien from ecuador who (per most accounts) fled and left the boy alone. (adrian was later captured)

• ICE then took custody of the boy. they attempted to return the boy to his mother who was inside their home but she refused to open the door or take her son. (why is unclear, but “fear of arrest” seems a likely candidate)

• so, ICE was left with the boy and took him to mcdonalds. (yes, really)

• the boy was, at last report (and validated by the family’s own lawyer), with his father at a family detention facility in TX. they were transferred together, apparently at the father’s request.

• given that they have legal representation and that ICE already sought to bring the child to his mother, i presume that that option is still open and that for, whatever reason, the family are making a different choice.

so: the media/politico facts and framing here are mostly lies.

but even as we refute them, we lose because we are refuting them in the frame of humanitarian response and child abduction.

and that, again, cedes the argument. this was not just “some thing that happened.” it was not arbitrary oppression. it was law enforcement. this was a crime scene where an illegal was being arrested.

had the father been an american citizen accused of grand theft auto and arrested, this whole outcome would be utterly unremarkable.

see why the frame matters and why even following the media accounts on these topics will lead you into enduring inability to understand?

some will tell you that what is happening in minneapolis right now is some sort of inevitable emergent property of immigration enforcement.

but this is clearly and obviously false.

far more people have been deported in the past with little (if any) fuss. and the same politicians who now wail and rend their hair over this all cheered it and led it.

more people are being deported in other parts of the US right now, and they are not having these problems.

what is happening in MN is not some unique ICE imposed humanitarian calamity or jackbooted conquest: it’s a choice, a choice by local governments, agents, and the provocateurs with whom they mingle and whom they fund, all gathering in one place to make a mess, just as they did in 2020.

this is not a crisis of overreach, this is a crime scene, and once you realize that, you’ll realize why the cartel needs to fight and why you cannot, on this topic, follow the media:

you need to follow the money.

the local politicos are in this up to their grubby necks.

and those they are whipping up into astroturf activism are professionals, paid to be there, equipped, and trained as insurgents by organized, well funded networks of insurgency trainers bankrolled by many of the sources whose names have become synonymous with such “actions” like chinese catspaw neville roy singham, the bush foundation, monarcha, and others.

(much more here from “insurrection barbie”)

this is nothing like the size it is being made to appear. it’s all a made for media inflammatory to make little look big and relevant. (classic bolshevik playbook)

it’s all hyper organized and stage managed. it’s not so much protest as a drama production. the images are designed to show what isn’t so and to shear context from emotion.

“i’m the victim!” says the trained activist carrying vehicle disabling caltrops to impede federal officers by disabling vehicles. “whyever would they assume my ill intent!”

wildly irresponsible calls to “get guns and use them on federal officers” go out, made by soy cowards and agent provocateurs who know better than to be within a country mile of what comes next.

then some activist comes to push people around and get in the face of federal officers and resist arrest while armed with a 9mm SIG sauer (that looked oddly new and unused) and gets shot.

honestly, despite half of twitter seeming to have some really strong opinion of what “the video obviously shows,” unlike the renee good video, i cannot make head or tail of it. there are just no good shots or angles i can see.

but, again, this argument is missing the point. had he been disarmed by the time he was shot? was he reaching for/drawing his pistol? was the first shot his (or a malfunction from a SIG notorious for such)? i’m not sure it matters.

you come strapped to an action whose purpose is to impede armed officers. you act aggressively, you resist arrest.

sorry, but “well did he draw first?” is kind of out the window and people do often carry second weapons.

sure, carrying a gun is legal, but that does not make doing it while getting aggressive with cops either smart or safe. play dangerous games, win dangerous prizes.

i once got pulled over for speeding while having a gun clipped to the driver side door of my car. (legally, i have multiple CCP’s) i kept my hands on the wheel, informed the officer of the weapon, said “obviously, i intend this as no threat to you,” and asked how he’d like to proceed so that we did not have any misunderstandings. he thanked me for doing so, we had a nice chat about which handguns we each prefer, and i got let go with a warning to stop driving like an andretti.

if you want to be safe, this is really not that hard.

but if you act threatening, you’re putting yourself in a different and dangerous situation.

this gang either seems to want that or not to understand the situations they are creating.

and if you go looking to pick a fight, chances are excellent you can find one.

these outcomes are being courted. they are being cultivated. it’s stochastic martyrdom as made for TV image bytes.

the media wants to show you a morality play, but it’s really a crime scene crashing into a darwin award.

and no, you do not get to sit back and say “well, i want all this but none of the bad stuff.”

because that is not and was not ever on the menu.

and that is by design.

the whole point of the immigration mess it to make it near impossible to clean up and the whole reason that this horrorshow is in MN and not elsewhere is because this is a crime scene.

it’s a political crime around grand theft election.

it’s 10’s of billions of stolen money much of it flowing to extremely bad people including politicians.

and the point of creating this chaos and unsafe situation is to generate more crimes to hide the other crimes, a sort of steganography by atrocity.

the whole machine is complicit, and all this violence is because it would rather throw its followers into a firefight with federal officers than have the crime syndicate rolled up.

and they play for keeps.

it’s the nature of the tribe and the actors they are in bed with.

this pattern of fraud has been going on all over the country, but i get the sense minny was something of a hub, the place where the politicians (and the airport) were most compromised.

a whole lot of cash certainly seems to have flown out of MSP without any questions being asked…

that’s where the real story lies.

just follow the money and the results and you’ll see this clear as day.

follow it as it leads up to groups like “act blue” (and i suspect that’s going to be the biggest scandal of all before long)

ICE is not “doing this to minneapolis.”

minneapolis is doing this to ICE.

this is chicago police superintendent snelling putting on what i can only describe as “a reasonableness clinic.” in the 1990’s or 2000’s, this speech would not even make sense. it would be “uh, duh” and people would ask “you OK, amigo? why on earth would you think that people did not know that?”

and this fact gives you a strong sense of what all changed.

and that shows you the towering lie espoused here.

ICE is all over the US doing these same things. and only in one place has this “unrest” occurred. one need not be an expert in data handling to form some confident views on which way the causality flows.

this was a choice.

these groups could easily have had peace.

but they chose this instead:

the vast networks of fraud, voter and fiscal, the politicians, the activists, these are neither seperate nor severable: it’s all one big thing.

and they are fighting to preserve their grift and their non-incarcerated status.

they want this to be a misframed morality play played out in captive media whose goals are to deceive and inflame because, even if they lose the ethics debate or fail to convince you, they have you arguing morals and not financials.

they wish to be seen as the victim.

it’s all they do and all they know.

but these people have all the morals of a scorpion with its thumb out seeking to hitch a ride on a frog.

and these “actions” are so artificial they make easter peeps look like steel cut oatmeal.

the story here is about money and about a political machine that got too big and too rotten to tolerate and too vast and too avaricious to hide.

it will run uphill like a forest fire. walz was not chosen to be kamala’s running mate because he could “appeal to male voters.” it was because of the machine he was plugged into. consider who that must mean was in on or at least aware of this game…

this is not protest, it’s an amoral kingpin sacrificing pawn after pawn while he tries to run away and to burn bridges that reach upstream from him. i’m not even sure we know who it is yet. (but i have a fair few thoughts on this topic)

and the deaths, the mayhem, the disruption:

they are not on the people who seem able to do their jobs with efficiency and professionalism in the rest of the country.

blame rests with those who are picking this fight to prevent the reversal of one crime and the investigation of a crime scene.

mistake that for victimhood and maybe “making it across the river” is just not your thing…