Americans Aren't Ready For Violence
The belief that confrontations can be had without risking violent outcomes is a belief millions of Americans hold.
I often observe that Americans have an uncomfortable relationship with violence. On one hand, we love the fantasy of it. It’s reflected in our popular culture and, increasingly, in our political rhetoric as well. We love to talk about people who disagree with us, people who don’t think the “correct” thoughts, people who are a little too honest in sharing their opinions, getting “what they deserve” and who knows what else. One doesn’t need to be specific. The implication of violence alone speaks more to what they’re thinking than any specifics could.
On the other hand, when actual violence does occur, Americans are appalled, unable to process what they’ve witnessed. That’s because, aside from crime, violence is, for the most part, absent from our daily lives. We don’t even witness physical altercations on a regular basis. Despite our society’s fantastical addiction to violence, we also have strong taboos against even justifiable uses of it. Killing another human being, even in defense of self or others, is deeply troubling to most people. That’s not to say it shouldn’t be, but it’s to say that it’s an act Americans struggle to view with nuance, even when morally permissible.
Part of the reason why America is headed for civil war or some other form of domestic armed conflict isn’t just because our political divides have become so intractable. It’s also because Americans have become so divorced from the realities of violence. This detachment makes people think they’re invincible, that they’re protected, when in reality, it’s leading them towards death.
You Don’t Get To Fight Anymore
Towards the end of my last essay, I mentioned that Alex Pretti, the 37-year-old man who was the latest to be shot and killed in Minneapolis during deportation operations, had a run-in with ICE agents a week before his death. Video of that incident has since been released.
Watch and see for yourself. Does this look like a calm, reasonable person to you?
Even after all that, Pretti decided to show up to the site of another deportation operation a week later, this time armed with a gun. I’m assuming he wasn’t armed in the first altercation, otherwise the consequences would’ve been more dire, whether he lived or died. People keep citing his Second Amendment rights in Pretti’s defense, but this misses the point.
First, Pretti didn’t just have a gun on him. It was loaded. By this, I don’t mean it merely having a magazine inserted. It had a round in the chamber, proven clearly by the fact the gun apparently discharged either on its own or by someone pulling the trigger. To be fair, this is what carriers are taught; have a round in the chamber so you can be ready to fire immediately when necessary. This is also what made Pretti’s conduct so reckless.
All shooting classes will stress the importance of avoiding situations which can turn violent. Not one of these classes teaches trainees to confront and get into arguments with law enforcement, let alone anyone else. Remember the saying, “An armed society is a polite society?” It wasn’t referring to how everyone else behaves around an armed individual. It refers to how the armed individual acts around everyone else. To say Pretti was exercising his constitutional rights, end of story, is to completely miss the lesson here.
You don’t get to fight anymore.
I’d add “You don’t get to go to protests anymore” to that statement as well. In fact, choosing to carry isn’t supposed to be liberating. It’s instead like having a child, a commitment, taking on responsibility. It limits your choices, the types of behavior you can safely engage in. Back in the days when everyone carried around weapons, nobody acted without a care in the world, completely oblivious to their surroundings, like they do today. That’s because carrying weapons both imbued great responsibility and served as a recognition of the danger that was ever-present around them.
More [bold mine]:
The moment you put a loaded gun in your waistband, your status in any confrontation fundamentally changes. You are no longer just a man in an argument. You are a man with a firearm. That means if things go sideways, even if you didn’t start it, the risk profile of that encounter has just escalated dramatically.
Once you’re carrying, every fight becomes a potential gun fight, because you brought a gun. That makes your presence in a shoving match reckless and dangerous. Not just for you, but for everyone around you.
That should humble you. And it should inform every decision you make.
Apply this to Alex Pretti’s actions. Were his of a responsible man? I don’t think so, but make up your own mind. Even if you didn’t think what he did was legal, it was still ambiguous enough to where he was gambling with his own safety, as well as that of officers and bystanders. We all know this is a classic leftist tactic, engage in legally ambiguous behavior and walk that tightrope as a way of harassing and impeding authorities while also having plausible deniability of wrongdoing. They call it protest, but protest doesn’t mean all behavior suddenly becomes permissible.
Playing the I’m Not Touching You game against an armed individual is grievously stupid. Playing the game against an armed individual while being armed yourself is a suicidal move. It goes against all gun safety best practices, a total abdication of the commitment made to the safety of oneself and others when the choice was made to carry a firearm in public.
Here’s a good lesson for everyone who wants to have an opinion on the death of Pretti or even that of Renee Good:
“You can carry a gun, or you can carry an ego. You don’t get to carry both.”
A gun and an ego together create a lethal combination. The ego tells them they can’t back down, that they can’t stay out of the trouble. The gun becomes a means of satisfying that ego. Except most of the time, I bet you the person who draws the gun doesn’t even think they’re actually going to end up shooting. They think they’ll just scare their opponent off, because who in their right mind wouldn’t back off at the sight of a gun? In the case of the two individuals killed by ICE, federal agents are supposed to protect them even as they try to impede them, so what’s the harm?
Pretti didn’t draw his gun, of course. But that only deepens the mystery: why take such a colossal risk as bringing a loaded gun to a place of law enforcement activity? Was he so consumed by anger, his pride so wounded from the week before, that he thought he might actually get revenge? Was he prepared to shoot law enforcement? None of this might matter with respect to his shooting death’s legality, but it does matter with respect to understanding why he did what he did and whether his death was preventable or not. Most important, upon whom does moral, if not legal, culpability lie?
I won’t answer any of those questions, because I can’t. I’ll instead offer a quick summary of what happened to Alex Pretti: he became radicalized, allowed far-left politics to become part of his identity, which led him to violently confronting federal agents, who proceeded to kick his rear end, humiliating him, fatally wounding his ego and pride to the point where he felt the need to show up a week later, this time armed with a round loaded in the chamber, ready to fire.
If the story sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Criminal violence aside, most violence stems from out-of-control anger, wounded egos, and hits to one’s pride. People end up in avoidable fights every day because their emotions became overwhelmed, stopping them from walking away. I’ve written many passages about the importance of conflict avoidance, as well as the importance of simply walking away when the choice is available. I have to wonder how many lives have been needlessly lost over the years because someone couldn’t control their emotions, gave into anger, and refused to avoid trouble when they could’ve.
In the end, the deaths of both Renee Good and Alex Pretti have simple explanations. While a conversation on the conduct of law enforcement is one worth having, it’s disingenuous to believe neither Good nor Pretti had any responsibility for their fates whatsoever. Our society routinely castigates people who stand up to criminals and social predators because doing so is dangerous, yet we also believe standing up to armed agents of the state is an act which should come consequence-free. That consequence need not be death, no, but there are always consequences.
The belief that confrontations can be had without risking violent outcomes is a belief millions of Americans hold. Similarly, millions of Americans believe simply being morally righteous, invoking their right to protest, will save them from trouble. Both beliefs are dead wrong (no pun intended) and stunningly dangerous to hold.
Death Wish
What explains this apparent death wish millions of Americans have? According to Scott Greer, it’s civil rights mythology in American culture.
“They’re going to kill some of us. But if we don’t risk our safety now and here, they will just keep killing us,” a Minneapolis protester told NBC. “If we don’t stand here now, despite the back to back murders and more, they will keep taking.”
This strikes a lot of people as strange. Man usually tries to avoid death, not seek out annihilation. Regular folk don’t do these things. These protesters don’t have a lot of experience dealing with violence or law enforcement. They’re not criminals or combat veterans. They’re goofy normies making really dumb decisions that may leave them dead.
Right off the bat, let’s be clear: most of these protesters won’t be killed. The person interviewed by NBC doesn’t actually believe she’s going to die. She’s being inflammatory, which is awful. But she’s not being serious, either. These are people with nothing particularly meaningful going on in their lives, people who’ve become so comfortable, they need something to fight for. When people become restless like this, they’ll draw up fantasies about how they’re fighting oppression, how they’re at war, and how they’re risking their lives when, in reality, none of them are prepared to lose even their material comforts.
In fact, if someone actually wanted to kill her, they’d just do it. There would be no appealing to law, morality, none of that. They just pull the trigger and that’s it. Otherwise, the only way these protesters would manage to get themselves killed is through provocation, which is what happened with Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The protesters are more likely to die because of a motor vehicle accident or even health problems than they are to die at the hands of ICE agents.
More:
So why would liberals try to get themselves killed by fighting cops?
One motivating factor is the power of civil rights mythology. It’s one of the foundational myths in contemporary society. From kindergarten onwards, Americans are subject to panegyrics about what these protesters did. We are told to fawn over them and follow their example. Whenever big mean racists start doing big mean things, it’s up to Americans to “non-violently” stop them. The entire Left wants to be the Selma marchers heading into the lines of bigoted police. Most won’t actually take action; but they will celebrate those foolhardy few who do.
One day, just as our mythology once changed, it’ll change once more, and civil rights mythology will no longer be foundational. I’m not sure when that’s going to be - it sure seems a long ways off. But nothing will meaningfully change in America until we stop treating the Civil Rights Movement with religious reverence. So much of what animates our politics and defines our discourse is centered on civil rights mythology. We won’t have undergone any sort of “vibe shift” until this changes.
The role comfort plays in all this cannot be underestimated. A society without any real struggles to endure as a collective will grow anxious and restless. A society which doesn’t have to worry so much about things like physical survival and safety will instead take on the struggles of others and fight for ridiculous things like illegal immigration out of a sense of altruism.
There are times when fighting for the rights and welfare of others is warranted, but the sober truth is that most people aren’t preoccupied with the plight of others unless they have the time and emotional energy to do so. Fighting for people to come and stay in the country, for legal residency to effectively be optional, never made sense, but again, a society without its own survival to fight for, nothing to work towards, will find all sorts of nonsense causes to preoccupy itself with.
As always, the question which much be asked is this: how far are they willing to go? I’ll have to delve into this in more detail some other time, but for a moment, the risk of civil war in Minnesota seemed to be intensifying rapidly. Is that how far they’re willing to go? For illegal immigrants? Is that really what they’re willing to be kill and be killed over? Or has that question simply not been asked yet?
Liberals can say “yes” all they want. But once things do escalate to the level of armed conflict, they won’t be able to cite their right to protest, their right to bear arms, or any of their rights. These sorts of appeals work only with those working within that framework. Not only that, rebelling while also citing one’s rights has never worked. Though we all like to believe we never lose our rights as Americans, insurrection muddies the water. There exists no right to rebel, no matter what stories liberals like to tell themselves. At the very least, any would-be rebels ought to understand they’ll run into opposition, and the opposition is under no obligation to follow their rules, even when it’s the state.
In the real world, violence is the ultimate arbiter. If the state says your rebellion has to end, it’ll end, and no appeals to democracy or protest will change that. By the same token, in the real world, if a stronger party confronts a weaker party, and is willing to use more violence, they’ll prevail. No appeals to decency and fairness will change that. This is why all these anti-ICE protesters don’t dare get brave with actual criminals, nor do they actually have any interest in seeing even illegal immigrants who’ve committed crimes get deported.
They know the criminals would kill them without a second thought and they also see illegals as a useful weapon in maintaining anarcho-tyranny in America.
Liberals Discover Borders
In Minneapolis, protesters have set up checkpoints to look for ICE agents entering their communities:
And:
I’m not even going to address the hypocrisy here, where advocates for open borders and protesters against immigration enforcement are imposing what are effectively their own borders, in what’s unquestionably an act of insurrection. Trying to implement one’s own system of law and order has never been legal, and the only way they’re getting away with this is with tacit approval of local and state governments.
Leaving aside ethical and legal arguments, let’s focus on the practical considerations. I can’t begin to tell you how dangerous this is, both for the protesters and for the people subject to them. Nobody might get killed in the end, but that’s not the point. Acting as authorities is in itself an act of violence. Anyone who’s going to man blockades and checkpoints like this need to ask themselves: what do you do when someone refuses to comply? Are they prepared for the day someone refuses to play along?
Say, for example, a black man drives up, doesn’t appreciate being subject to an unlawful stop, and decides to give the protesters a piece of his mind. The conversation escalates, the protesters refuse to let him pass, then the driver gets out of a the car and a fracas ensues. In a worst-case scenario, an armed protester, similar to Alex Pretti becomes involved. Maybe the driver is armed, too. Imagine the gun goes off. What then? How will the protesters justify this? More important, how would Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz explain their complete negligence leading to the tragic outcome?
I picked a black man in this hypothetical because this is the one person in America whom liberals still reserve any respect (more like fear) for, the one person who’s allowed to react in an instinctive human fashion. The only way the Left stops this dangerous nonsense is if blacks have anything to say about it. If a protester, say, kills a black person at one of these blockades, you can bet the Left will work overtime to make this stop and quietly make the protests go away.
It’s unfortunate that’s what it’s come down to. But I see no other way for the Left to arrive at the realization they’re asking for trouble, that they’re not ready for the kinds of violence they’re courting by doing what they’re doing. The flaw in the thinking of liberals is their insistence on the right to engage in civil disobedience, while also insisting everyone else act in accordance with the law. Yet civil disobedience is still illegal and the constitution doesn’t give them any right to engage in it. If they do, they do so entirely at their own risk, and they don’t get to violate anyone else’s rights in the process.
Part of the problem is that in addition to an addiction to chaos and disorder, Americans are too easily cowed by the power of protest. While some of this is due to the historical role protest has played, a lot of this is also because Americans fear protesters. There’s nothing more intimidating than a mob and most Americans are simply too afraid to stand up to it.
The thing is, if you keep letting the mob get away with it, there will be no stopping them when it hits the fan. I’ll leave you with a story Bosnian War survivor Selco Begovic shared in his excellent book SHTF Survival Stories: Memories From The Balkan War [bold mine]:
When SHTF started, the great majority of us thought that what was going on around us was something like temporary rioting that got a bit out of control. The city services still worked in some areas and everybody was waiting for the madness to stop.
In that short period before the sh*t hit the fan with full force, people usually lost their lives because they did not recognize the situation.
People were out rioting, stealing, fighting. But all that was still “moderate” in comparison to what was coming.
At that moment, people still were “inside” the system, so we all were trying to hide more or less when looting was going on in the neighborhood. The police were still arresting people and trying to control things. People were shooting each other yes, but it was not yet like full-scale shooting and violence. Most people were simply scaring each other with shootings.
One of my friends was involved in a shooting in those early days. After looting some stores, he got wounded. The wound was not too dangerous – he was shot in the foot.
As I said, most of the city services were still working and trying to bring order to that chaos. City ambulances came and picked him up and they rushed to the hospital with him.
About one kilometer from the place where he got picked up, the group of people that actually shot him stopped the ambulance with an improvised barricade. First, they shot the driver and then they killed my friend in the back of the ambulance. They killed him a little bit slower than the driver, and more painfully – they used knives. We got there a bit later, but it was too late for my friend.
Now this story may sound confusing to you. You may say “it happens in war.” But for 95% of folks at that time it was not war – it was just violent rioting. And 95% of folks still trusted the system. They had trust in police and government that they were going to restore law and order. People still trusted that ambulances were “protected” and nobody would stop them, not to mention shooting at one. It felt very wrong that this happened, but it was one of the first wakeup calls that fair and unfair were concepts of the past.
My friend, in the first place, should not have been there in that time of chaos. The ambulance driver should have said, “screw it” and taken valuable medicines and gone home at the first signs of real violence and total collapse. He did not. It is easy to call him a hero and maybe the day before or hours before he helped save the life of someone else - but it was still too high a risk to be out at this point in time.
If your reaction is, “But we’re not in a civil war,” you’re missing the point, which is that when the mob controls the situation, you’re completely at their mercy. No amount of appeals to decency, law and order, none of that, will make a difference. If it did, they probably wouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, setting up barricades.
Conversely, if the people manning the barricades today aren’t prepared to deal with someone who doesn’t recognize their authority, then they’re just asking to get run over, pummeled, or gunned down. The anti-ICE protesters are exploiting the fact most Americans are law-abiding or at least not looking for trouble. If hostilities escalate in this country - and they will - they may find more people unwilling to put up with threats to their safety and well-being. They’ll also discover that people like Mayor Frey and Governor Walz are, in fact, cowards who’ll abandon them the moment things become too hot to handle.
In many ways, what’s happening in Minneapolis is a dry run for some future domestic armed conflict. We’re seeing how many people are willing to hit the streets and become insurrectionists, and we’re getting a reading of their willingness to actually place themselves in harm’s way. It’s also a look at how detached from reality they’ve become. Many of the participants are older people and women, the kinds of people who not only don’t fight wars, but also tend to not survive them once impacted. The implication is that many of them will likely need to lose their lives before they understand what they’re getting themselves into, what it means to actually be part of a revolution, an uprising, whatever they think they’re participating in.
If only so many innocents didn’t have to get caught up in it.
That’s all for this one. What are your thoughts about the increasing willingness of Americans, particularly on the Left, to participate in dangerous behavior? Is this just childish, decadent outbursts on their part? Or does this signal a real willingness to engage in serious violence? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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Actually he WAS armed in the first encounter. His pistol is quite visible in the video. And it is certainly possible that the agents who had to deal with his second tantrum were there for the first one and knew he was armed. Otherwise all your points are right on target/
A pissed off farmer in a category 2 or 3 tractor with a front loader can, and probably eventually will, shred those barriers in seconds flat. It's highly unlikely most of the urbanites behind those barriers have any idea how much power a tractor actually has. Hitting one of those piles of junk at, say, 8-10 mph, is going to shove all those piled up pieces of whatever forward in a rough cone shape. Some pieces will be contained by the bucket and will start traveling down the road with the tractor. Unfortunately, anyone hiding behind the barricade is going to be among the items being scattered and scraped down the street. Even those standing to one side, but on the other side of the barricade from the tractor, are likely to be smashed by the spreading debris. The odds are very good they will die, and quite painfully as well. Shoot at said farmer, and there is a very good chance said farmer will shoot back. And probably accurately, and with a shot gun, or long gun of some flavor. A tractor is not an armored car, to be sure. But if it is carrying a large, heavy steel front loader blade before it (which, if one were going to ram barricades, one would), there is a very good chance that most 9mm, .380, or even .45 will not even be penetrating the steel bucket's walls. If the farmer has run flat tires on his tractor (and many industrial tractors do use run flats) even "shooting out a tire" becomes ineffective. The odds on a street protestor and would be barricade guard stopping a determined tractor driver are at best very low.
Concur that most Americans, particularly affluent white females but increasingly men as well, have no comprehension of genuine individual violence. Heck, most Millennials and Gen Z weren't even allowed to play dodge ball as a kid, due the "violent" nature of the game. Heaven forbid!
Getting into a fist fight with the bully who has been bullying you for an extended period of time at school used to be almost a rite of passage to manhood for most normie males. Now, standing up to a bully with a punch in the nose gets an 11 year old in cuffs and in many cases, in jail (albeit briefly.) You're right, Max, they have no idea. They are going to push, and push, and push, and at some point, as the old saying goes, push will come to shove. Bullies bully, until that day they discover that the punk kid they've been picking on doesn't always cower. When the punk kid finally has enough and explodes in a flurry of very real violence against said bully, suddenly the bully is the "victim". That's poppycock, of course. They are just getting their well earned just desserts. If the bully is lucky, they suffer no serious permanent physical injuries. For a culture that is fed a seemingly unending stream of violent movies and TV shows, actual blood shedding violence, even the basic bare knuckle fist fight punch in the face version, is as if from another world.
Same goes for many who have taken martial arts classes of various types, especially as young people. While those might be good exercise, such students rarely come home with shiners, fat lips, and bloody noses. Mike Tyson's full November 2012 explanation of his famous quote is as follows: ‘Everybody has a plan until they get hit. Then, like a rat, they stop in fear and freeze.’ (citation: https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2012/11/09/mike-tyson-explains-one-of-his-most-famous-quotes-3/)
There is a reckoning coming due, Max. "And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost." Unfortunately, although many have forgotten much, humans do have an innate capacity for violence, even if it has been culturally suppressed. Those who stop in fear and freeze when hit will get hit again. But not all will freeze, and at that point, violence is prone to escalate.
May God have mercy on our nation. Perhaps if we undergo a national period of earnest fasting, prayer and repentance, we will be able, like Nineveh, to turn from our evil ways. But I wouldn't bet on that happening at this point in time until a good deal of blood has been shed.