Tribally Compromised

I’ve been having debates with some commenters on Facebook about the Minneapolis shooting involving ICE agents, and the exchanges have been revealing. Not because of disagreement, but because so many of the replies appear ideologically compromised. Not mistaken. Not misinformed. Compromised. The distinction matters.

What’s struck me is how rarely they argue from evidence or law. Almost every reply is framed around identity. “The left.” “Criminals.” “Violent protesters.” Once the label is applied, the thinking stops. The conclusion is treated as self-evident and the facts are waved away as an inconvenience.

When pressed on what actually happened, the discussion immediately leaves reality. Out come the hypotheticals. “If she’d killed an officer.” “Imagine if the roles were reversed.” Entire fantasy scenarios are constructed and then used to justify a real killing. It’s an emotional sleight of hand. Invent a worse crime, react to that, and pretend you’ve explained the one on the video. You haven’t.

There’s also a persistent moralisation that substitutes neatly for law. “She put herself in that situation.” “Minding someone else’s business.” And my personal favourite, FAFO. I had to look that one up. It turns out it’s American slang for “Fuck Around and Find Out”, which is doing a lot of work here. It’s not a legal argument. It’s a shrug dressed up as wisdom. It says that if someone annoyed armed agents, whatever happened next was deserved. That’s not law. That’s revenge with plausible deniability.

Another common move is authority by allegiance. Because someone is law enforcement, their fear is treated as dispositive. Because it happened quickly, legality is assumed. Status replaces proof. The officer’s identity does the work that evidence is supposed to do. This is exactly backwards. The higher the authority, the higher the standard, not the lower.

When those routes fail, the argument collapses into conspiracy. Minnesota must be “burned down”. Investigations are fraud. The media is in on it. This isn’t analysis. It’s insulation. It reframes accountability as persecution so no facts ever have to be confronted.

What’s most revealing is what’s missing. Almost none of the replies engage with timing. None address geometry. None acknowledge that self-defence is shot-by-shot and expires the moment the threat passes. None try to reconcile their claims with the video that everyone can see. Those omissions aren’t accidental. They’re necessary, because engaging with those questions would collapse the argument. 

And now we have the institutional mirror of that same impulse. Minnesota’s independent use-of-force investigators have been excluded from the case. The FBI has blocked the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension from accessing evidence, interviews and scene materials, forcing it to withdraw. The very mechanism created after 2020 to ensure independent scrutiny has been shut out, leaving the federal agency effectively investigating itself.

That does not prove misconduct. But it does something almost as damaging. It concentrates control of the facts in the hands of those with the most to lose, after early political claims have already been made that do not sit comfortably with the video evidence. In any democracy that still cares about legitimacy, that is exactly how you destroy public trust even if you believe you’re acting lawfully.

This is what ideological capture looks like, at both the individual and institutional level. Identity first, evidence last. Moral instinct instead of legal standard. Narrative control instead of transparent process. It’s not that the wrong conclusion has been reached. It’s that the tools required to reach any defensible conclusion are being pushed aside.

And that’s the uncomfortable part. The argument isn’t really about this case anymore. It’s about whether Americans are still prepared to be governed by law, or whether belonging to the right tribe now determines who lives, who dies, and who gets an explanation afterwards. Whether you believe implicity a Federal government that has made lying to the public an art, or you don't.

The shooting of two suspects in Portland, Oregon, proves that. Portland Mayor Keith Wilson, a Democrat, called on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to halt all operations in the city pending the investigation and said; "We know what the federal government says happened here, There was a time when we could take them at their word. That time is long past."

QED