A New Children's Crusade

Violence and the Fate of the Empire

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Have you spent some of the last week watching snuff films?

I have—and I know I’m not alone. This nation of ours is trying like hell to ban porn (and to use porn as a pretext for rolling out ID systems that can be leveraged for great social control) but it’s been producing gobs of bona-fide snuff films and airing them on TV.

Videos of cops shooting civilians. Footage of protesters torching buildings without regard to who is inside.

All of them are politically useful. Many of them are horrifying. And all of them seem to function as Rorschach tests for their audience.

Half of you (more-or-less) see “deranged left-wingers with behavior/personality problems obstructing the police and/or wrecking the world for the rest of us.”

Half of you (more-or-less) see “authoritarian use of police power, Gestapo tactics, and gleeful murder by government-sponsored thugs.”

In the last few days my feed has been inundated with a fresh crop of snuff films out of Minnesota (of the Good shooting, Jan 8 2024, for those of you in the future). If you came hoping for a full litigation or political or moral opinion on whether and why the Good shooting was a murder or a legitimate use of force, I’m sorry to disappoint you. That’s for the court to decide, and all the armchair quaterbacking in the world doesn’t have a thing to do with the case.¹

Instead, in this article I’m going to explore what this incident reveals about what’s going on in the US outside the arena of the law, morals, and politics, and how that understanding is probably far more important to those of us who weren’t on one or another end of that gun in Minneapolis.

So, back to those divergent perspectives I mentioned a moment ago:

Obviously, this divide is a big problem, and not just because it seems impossible to bridge. I’ve talked to a few people in recent days who make a good case for each of these perspectives, as well as the idea that both are correct.

A bigger problem would be if both of these perspectives are true, somehow—that would slot it straight into the category of “wicked problems,” which are “problems for which there is no solution that is not so expensive it’s unthinkable.” I discussed this phenomenon in a bit more depth in my article Where Have All The Children Gone?

But there is an even bigger problem than any of these:

What if neither of those things is happening?

In recent months, I have tentatively concluded that this is the correct evaluation.

What’s actually going on is more momentous, and far worse.

So I’m going to show you what’s going on, and how it works because it promises to be a consistent feature of our world for some time yet—and without the following perspective it will become increasingly difficult to make sense of anything that’s happening as time goes on.²

So let’s dive in.

The Rat Fink

Once upon a time, there village of Hamelin had rodent trouble. Exterminator after exterminator tried, and failed, to rid the village of its rats.

So the village offered a bounty: anyone who could solve its rat problem would get all the gold owned by everyone in the village.

The Pied Piper showed up from parts unknown. He took in the situation, said “No problem,” whipped out his pipe, and whistled a festive tune. The rats flocked to him, and he led them all out of town, dancing as he went.

But when it came time to pay up, the villagers, seeing how easy the task was for him, refused. Why, they thought, should they part with all their gold for such a trifling effort on the Piper’s part?

The Piper, understandably, objected. When it was clear that the villagers would not listen to his remonstrations, the Piper shrugged his shoulders, lifted his pipe to his lips, and whistled up another festive tune.

All the children of the village flocked to him, and he danced before them out of town.

None of the children were ever seen again.

Most of you will be familiar with this tale from your nursery school days, or from the various cartoon retellings and parodies that have been made of it over the years. Its precise significance has long been a matter of dispute. Is it a celebration of victory over the Plague? Is it a tale of grief over a disease that wiped out the next generation? Nobody is really sure.

But it has resonance. Since the 13th century, this German folktale has persisted, generation to generation. It contains an implicit warning about reneging on your deals. It has irony and doom and whimsy.

And the Pied Piper himself, at the end of the story, feels very similar to character that most of us have encountered in real life, at least once:

The cult leader.

The Children’s Crusade

Something else happened in the early 13th century that might lie at the root of the tale. Across Europe, a call rose for a delegation of children to heed the call of God and band together to march to the Holy Land. There, aided by divine favor, they would walk into the holy places that formed the crux of the conflict between the Muslims and the Christians of the time (not much has changed).³

Accounts differ as to what exactly happened. Some traditions record the event as springing from a couple visionary child prophets who claimed to receive a promise from God that he would convert all the Muslims in the Holy Land through the preaching of the children. Some historians believe that the Children’s Crusade is, itself, a conflation of a pair of large scale missionary expeditions originating in France and Germany, destined for the Holy Land, and consisting mostly of children, but also involving adult pilgrims.⁴ The one thing history does render a certain verdict on is that the event was a grass-roots (or at least, lower-forest) phenomenon that did not bear the stamp of papal approval.

Whether the Crusade was all children or a few adults, whether it was one event or two, the “crusaders” were never seen again (aside from a handful of people who showed up wandering in Italy). They did not make it to the Holy Land—they likely died less than a week or two’s journey from home.

Regardless of what happened in history, the story of the Children’s Crusade as transmitted directly (and in its fictional form as the tale of the Pied Piper, if such is actually its root) has obvious modern parallels. Take the Manson Family, for example. In this little commune, a self-proclaimed visionary harvested the children from wealthy middle-class families and imparted to them his divine mission, which required them to start a race war by murdering a string of upper-class white Los Angeles residents and staging the scenes to appear that they were the work of deranged black criminals.

A new crusade has been bubbling up for a while now. It got its first public showing at Occupy Wall Street, but it had been building before then. And it’s now escalated into a quiet, but very real, civil war.

And if you think I’m exaggerating, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

The Worlds We Live In

Not all that long ago (it was less than a week before I started working on this article, but that's like, forever in today’s news cycles) the US military invaded a foreign country, extracted its leader, and brought him to the US for trial on crimes that the US doesn’t have the legal jurisdiction to enforce.⁵

In the days since this rather spectacular incident, I can’t count the number of times I heard the phrases “International Law,” “War Crimes,” and “Illegal Act" bandied about. I’m sure you heard it too, just like we all constantly hear similar phrases, along with “Illegal War” and “Illegal Invasion” when it comes to Russia’s war on Ukraine, and “Genocide” and “Terrorism” when it comes to the never-ending conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

These terms reveal the worldview of the speaker. Whether spoken in earnest or cynically, they all appeal to a set of assumed norms, philosophies, and ideas.

Ideas about fairness, and institutions that betray an understanding of the word as being a refereed arena where things are right and wrong, where wrong things are punished, and where something being “forbidden” or “prohibited” means it can’t be done.

This world has social contracts and civil liberties. It has laws that, by existing, stop people from behaving in certain ways. It’s a world that’s flat, where all people, high and low, domestic and foreign, are bound to the same set of laws and norms. It’s a world where pointing to those laws and norms is the right, proper, and adequate way to enforce them. Where violence—especially political violence—is a form of ultimate evil, and thankfully is almost never necessary.

It’s a world where morality is clear. Where there is always a right and a wrong—and, even though sometimes people may disagree on what is right or wrong in a given situation, they nonetheless share a common moral instinct that agrees on what is right and what is wrong in the abstract.

It’s a world where this broad moral agreement means that we can work out our differences peacefully. We can remind those in power of these things through protests(which are peaceful demonstrations of conscience).

A lot of us pretend to live in this world.

Which is a shame, since it’s not actually a world that exists.

The world we actually live in has two-tiered justice (or more). It is rife with corruption which goes unpunished and is actively aided by those in power. It’s a world where norms and laws only ever bind the normal and the lawful. It’s a world where power’s chief concern is defending itself, even to the exclusion of its putative obligations.

All other things being equal, nobody walks away from power.

But Dan, I hear you say, That’s not true in America. Presidents walk away from power all the time, at the end of their term. It’s called the “peaceful transition of power” for a reason.

It’s a nice idea, but it’s not often true. In my lifetime, most Presidents (all of them with the possible exceptions of Reagan and Biden, who were both well down the road to senile dissolution at the time they left office) became more powerful and less accountable after they left office.

And it ain’t just Presidents.

For longer than I have been alive, the United States has been in an incrementally-escalating undeclared civil war. In this war, norms and laws are weaponized against those who are out-of-power (or out of favor with the powerful)—however, those same norms are not generally honored by those who are in power and/or in favor, except in the sense that it was once usually important for the powerful to retain a sheen of deniability/respectability when breaking those norms.

The quiet, persistent, one-way ratchet that erodes public trust works because each of the two major political tribes is happy to enjoy their corruption and persecute their adversaries when they are in power, and when out-of-power they are delighted to complain self-righteously about the inexcusable behavior of public officials who are on the other team.

“Rules for thee, but not for me—freedom for me, but not for thee.”

Power seeks to preserve itself before all else, even to the exclusion of all else—this is the most basic, bedrock rule of politics.

Emperor Palpatine was correct.

Qualified Impunity

In the world we pretend to live in, the cops are good people who enforce public order and are champions of civil rights—and in the United States, at least, there is a real tradition of Sheriffs who are willing to stand up against unjust or unconstitutional laws by refusing to enforce them as a matter of policy.

Sheriffs, however, aren’t cops. Sheriffs are elected officials—cops are government employees, and only a sharp minority of them are employed in Sheriffs’ departments (these are the deputies that work for the Sheriff’s department). And, though this is usually a meaningless distinction, the job of a Sheriff and his employees is to enforce the peace in his jurisdiction, while the job of a cop (whether a police officer, a state policeman, or a federal officer) is nominally to enforce the law.⁶

Now, in most everyday instances, there’s not a lot of difference between the two, but in the aggregate, the difference matters, because cops are not accountable to the people they police. Cops cannot be fired by the public via elections, and in most jurisdictions they also can’t be fired by elected officials without great rigmarole (due to union due-process requirements that are written into their contracts). And, thanks again to the contractual relationship between the rank-and-file cops and the governments that employ them, if you sue a cop for violating your civil rights and you are one of the lucky few who wins, the cop will not pay the settlement: the government’s insurance carrier will.

That’s a lot of insulation for the instruments of policy of a government that is ostensibly bound by the limits of the Constitutional protections of civil rights, but since 1967 (and, more importantly, 1982 when the terms of this idea were solidified) there’s been something else in the mix:

“Qualified” Immunity. This legal principle, elucidated in the decision of the Pierson v. Ray case and clarified in the Harlowe v. Fitzgerald case by the United States Supreme Court, holds that police officers can be neither sued nor prosecuted for violating the constitutional rights of members of the public unless that police officer has been trained by his department in such a way that he could have readily anticipated that his actions would violate policy and relevant case-law.⁷

On its face, this doesn’t seem that unreasonable: nobody wants to be prosecuted for actions they didn’t know were wrong. In practice, under the case-law that has developed since the decision, it means that if a case directly paralleling the circumstances that an officer is under investigation for hasn’t been previously litigated in a way that favored the public, then the officer is immune from prosecution or lawsuit for their violations of the law. That sets up a paradox where you can’t prosecute a novel violation of civil rights, so getting precedent set to limit the poor behavior of law enforcement officials is tricky, at best. Generally, the only way to do it is to sue the employer of the cop in question, get a judgment on that basis, and then use that judgement as precedent in the future.

The result? Law enforcement officials who are disposed to abusing their authority can often do so with impunity, under the protection of flimsy excuses, and the public has no practical recourse at all.

Before the routine use of bodycam footage, it was easy (and, arguably, prudent) to look at this ridiculous situation and determine that cops should be guilty-until-proven-innocent where complaints were concerned. However, the not-quite-a-decade since their use became common has painted a far more complex picture. Shoots (i.e. incidents where a cop shot a member of the public) that many of us in the civil liberties community would previously have presumed to be dirty turned out to be clean, and interactions between law enforcement and the public were far more dicey and ambiguous than many of us imagined.

It turns out that those who enforce both the peace and the law (and policy) routinely deal with people who are belligerent, abusive, violent, and stupid. This is the source of the “blue wall” mentality endemic to law enforcement—a frame of mind whereby those who are part of the fraternity of law enforcement are presumed decent, and “civilians” are presumed stupid, while activists and criminals and troublemakers are considered “the enemy” in a street war being fought every day.⁸

This makes the reality of law enforcement in the United States far more fraught and difficult-to-quantify than either anti-cop civil libertarians or “blue line” partisans are eager to grapple with.

It also means that, when interacting with a police officer (from any agency) one is well-advised to premise the interaction upon the very basic and unfortunate reality that the person behind the badge is primed to consider you an enemy who’s looking for an opportunity to attack or humiliate them…and they are armed, trained to kill, and have the weight of the government behind their decision to act on these fears (fears which are often, but not always, justified).⁹

Social Malfunction

America used to have something called “sociality.”

Most people spent most of their time outside the home—including most of their non-working time. Socializing with neighbors, engaging in common-cause political campaigns (such as collecting signatures to build a new public park or do a bond issue to paint the high school’s basketball court), arguing over drinks at the bar or the coffee shop, playing at the bowling alley and pool hall and mini-golf course, seeing movies at the theater, playing tennis and basketball and baseball at the community center or the park, shopping at farmers markets and craft fairs, attending services at churches and events at fraternal orders…it would take an entire article to list all the social activities a typical working-class or middle-class citizen engaged in during my young adulthood (a time when sociality was already significantly degraded by historic American standards).

We don’t do much of that anymore, and we largely don’t do it because of screens (not just phones, but also computers and televisions) provide a degraded gestalt social simulacrum which has, over the years, become more and more artificial and distant.¹⁰

One of the very few social institutions that still persists at scale is the “political protest.” Protests and protest movements are high-trust environments where shared ideology creates a collective sense of identity, much the same as happens in churches.

And, just as churches make fertile hunting grounds for rapists, fraudsters, and political hucksters, all of whom use the high-trust environment to build themselves a power base and a fortune on the backs of the faithful, so do to dissident political clubs and protest movements.

The People’s Temple,¹¹ Black Lives Matter, and VDARE are but a handful of dozens of US political movements in recent US history that stripped the lives and/or fortunes of their followers on the basis of the trust extended for a common cause.

People are lonely, but they are generally materially comfortable (even when they’re desperately poor). Since the two largest sources of meaning in human life are struggling to achieve a difficult purpose (like survival), and sharing oneself in community, is it any wonder that meaning is thin on the ground?

People without meaning are the perfect prey for modern Pied Pipers.

The business of political organization is built around this human need for meaning. Left wing or right wing (yes, the right wing has organizers, too, they just don’t prioritize the same kind of praxis as does the left), political organization is the art of gaining power through cultivating the desire for meaning, stoking a range of emotions (dissatisfaction, anger, disgust, rage, vengeance, fear, nostalgia, self-righteousness, etc.) and pointing it in a particular direction.

Since roughly 2012, the power of the left-wing organizers has been aimed solidly at “make sure that no one on another team can ever wield power again.”¹²

There are a few reasons this is the case, but they all boil down to the most basic impulse in business: “Eliminate the competition.”¹³

In any marketplace (business, politics, religion, etc.) a monopoly is a special position. Without competition, there is nothing that forces accountability. Exploitation of one’s customers can proceed with maximum impunity, extracting value from them to advance one’s own agenda.

There’s a reason that churches that cost millions—or billions—of dollars are filled with parishioners who often can’t make ends meet. There’s a reason that political parties whose low-paid apparatchiks make a quarter-million-dollar a year depend on the donations and sweat of people on food stamps. There’s a reason that all of these organizations, and all those like them, are havens for pedophiles, people who profit from slave labor, and those who sell out their allegiances behind the backs of their supporters.

In order to get the other team permanently out of power, one must use a strategy. In this case, the strategy goes like this:

1. Recruit bored, lonely people and convince them that they can make their life meaningful by…

2. Relentlessly spreading propaganda and socially punishing those who don’t conform and, most importantly…

3. Engaging in street praxis.

“Street praxis” is a particular form of political activism. It isn’t merely a protest—but to understand that, we need to know what the purpose and nature of political protest is, and how it can evolve into street praxis.

Methinks Thou Dost Protest Too Much

You’ve seen protests on the news. People get together, assemble in an area (usually sporting garish signs announcing their pet issue) and hold a rally, or a sit-in, or a march. The protest ends, then they go home.

People do this to show support or opposition for a policy or candidate or issue, right?

That may feel intuitive, but if you think about it for a moment, it doesn’t make sense. You can much more easily demonstrate broad support for a political cause by getting petitions signed and by paying lobbyists to make your case in person to your representatives (or otherwise influence them).

Okay, how about raising awareness and public support?

Well, how many people do you know who have ever been positively swayed by a public demonstration for a cause that they didn’t already buy into? If this is the motivation, it’s clearly misguided.

So what’s left?

Well, there’s movement solidarity—getting the faithful together in person builds bonds and loyalty. That helps when it comes time to do a petition drive.

But politics is not an aimless social activity, and it’s not about the feels. The job of the political organizer is to acquire power.

So consider:

You’re an organizer. You’ve managed to induce a few hundred—or a few thousand—people to show up, and to say what you want, and to walk how you want, and to support your aims.

You’re not “demonstrating support for a message.” You’re demonstrating that you can raise an army.

Protests are a sort of message violence; they are intimidation rituals.

Peaceful protests are intimidation rituals that behave according to the rules of the ritual. Ghandi perfected this kind of not-really-non-violence, and he figured out the trick to turning this kind of tactic into a revolution:

Incitement.

Ghandi (and especially those who came after him in the activism world, who developed his tactical arsenal quite substantially) understood that political power does not come from reality, but from the way that reality is framed. The United States had already long used this propaganda technique to sell imperial warmaking to the public (see my post Lifting the Veil for a reasonably comprehensive introductory history), but Ghandi realized that you could weaponize the morality of his political opponents against those same opponents by engaging in actions that, while not directly violent, were effectively so violent that they required a response from the other side which would cause that side to lose credibility in the eyes of its loyalists.¹⁴

The trick to inducing this kind of self-own in your opponent lies in acting just below the threshold for socially-permissible violent response.

For example, let’s say that you’re a medieval European prince who is widely held to be benevolent and just. Your subjects (bear with me here) subjects have 21st-century ideas about morality, justice, proportionality, and capital punishment (whether you, as a ruler, believe in these precepts or not is immaterial—all that matters is what your subjects believe is important).¹⁵

One day, you’re walking the ramparts of your castle and you see a man down by the moat, and he’s scratching at the wall. His activity is consistent with that of a local who’s desperate for stone to repair their home. The base of your wall is several meters thick, so even though the guy is technically committing an vandalism on the castle and stealing your property, you know that having your archers shoot him will erode your legitimacy.

So you let him off with a warning.

But the next time you’re walking the ramparts, he’s down there doing the same damn thing. So you have him hauled in, give him a stern talking-to, and throw him in the dungeon for a few days.

The behavior, nonetheless, continues, and continues, and there’s nothing you can really do about it, because it’s clear the guy is too bloody stupid or stubborn to stop unless you kill him.

Over the course of months, though, you notice that he’s pulling all his stolen rocks from one place. If he keeps at this long enough, he’ll tunnel under the wall—not a big tunnel, probably not even big enough for a full-grown man to get through if he’s not starving to death. Annoying, but it probably doesn’t matter.

Well, not unless an army comes and lays siege to your castle. Then they could send a boy to crawl through the tunnel and poison the well, or open the gates from the inside, or set the castle on fire.

And you have another problem: your failure to deal harshly with this man has set a precedent that encouraged the rest of your farmers to start casually using your castle and other public works as a quarry. Your legitimacy is under threat no matter what you do.

You realize that if you don’t do something shocking—and soon—you’re going to lose your crown. So you order archers to shoot looters on sight, and authorize your guards and other henchmen to use whatever force is necessary to restore order.

The people, who have grown used to your restraint, can’t believe what you’re doing and start bullying your troops. The escalation games start again, this time on a broad level.

Your subjects shout at your troops “Are you such a eunuch that you have to hit me to prove your manhood? You’re betraying your friends by enforcing that thug’s orders! You should be ashamed!”

And your troops, eventually, get fed up. One of them shoves away a subject who’s up in his face. Someone in the crowd throws a rock, hits another soldier in the face, and the commander orders the men to charge. Armed with swords, spears, and arrows, your forces attack the disgruntled villagers, killing several and scattering the rest to the wind.

In the weeks that follow, you learn that the crowds were filled with agents of a rival prince who envied your lands and had, for years, been paying some of your villagers to undermine your castle walls and sow discontent.

But now it’s too late; you have no authority left. Your people do not fear and respect you, they fear and hate you. It’s only a matter of time before your rival rolls in with an army to conquer you, and when that happens, none of your people will respond to your calls for defense.

Anyone who’s had siblings recognize this as a version of the game called “I’m not touching you.”

This is how the game of “non-violent” political agitation (a.k.a. street praxis) works. When practiced by disciplined groups within high-trust environments, it’s astonishingly effective. But if you remove either the discipline or the trust, things go awry quite quickly.

Without discipline, the crowd moves as a mob. While the difference isn’t easy to see on the news short of a full-fledged anarchic riot,¹⁶ it’s an easy spot (and even to feel) the difference between a mob and a free-for-all on the ground. In terms of engagement, a mob can’t be controlled or negotiated with—it will either overrun the environment, or it will be dispersed. If the mob has begun to riot, the only two ways to disperse it are:

1. Lay siege to it and wait it out (eventually, people will have to sleep and/or run out of food) and then haul the participants off to jail, or

2. Meet it with overwhelming violence, causing the members to break and flee. This can involve anything from rubber bullets and tear gas (if the mob isn’t prepared for these measures), or firing live lethal ammunition into the crowd, or driving large vehicles through it. Anything will work, really, as long as it puts individuals in such fear that their individual consciousness breaks through the mob consciousness.

In a low-trust environment, on the other hand, the public cannot be depended upon to side with the agitators once they manage to goad the authorities into violence. A previous generation of left-wing agitators learned this lesson the hard way in 1970 when the Kent State riots occurred. After a multi-day sit-in during which the “protesters” looted, vandalized, and set fire to buildings (in addition to engaging in other kinds of mob violence around town), the National Guard was brought in to disperse the crowd at one of the protests on campus. In response to orders to disperse and to tear gas canisters, and following a protracted game of cat-and-mouse around the campus, member of the crowd began throwing rocks and bottles at the guardsmen, who then loosed their weapons. Sixty-seven rounds were fired into the crowd, fourteen students were shot, and five of those died from their wounds.

While the event is now remembered as the “Kent State Massacre” by those of us who were taught a selectively edited version of it in school,¹⁷ the nation at the time overwhelmingly favored of the actions of the Guardsmen in that square (all Guardsmen who pulled their triggers unanimously won the wrongful death suits brought against them). It was the final major event in the 1960s revolution which had so eroded social trust that the general public was happy to throw the presumption of justification behind the guardsmen, not the college kids. The event effectively killed the left wing and delivered the White House to the Republicans for the next 20 years (despite the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals).¹⁸

A Nation at War With Itself

Look beyond the law, and the tribal noise on social media, and the excitement and pleasurable outrage both sides of the political divide are reveling in, and a bare reality reveals itself:

The left-wing protest movement is not a protest movement, it is an army. The shock troops (and some of the frontline troops) are well-armed with ice bottles, bricks, sonic weapons (air horns), vehicles, and fireworks—all of which are potentially lethal weapons, but none of which look lethal to your average 24-hr TV news viewer.

The frontline troops are people who are there for the protest—they came for a good time, they believe that they’re legally untouchable because of their race/class/citizenship privilege, they believe that the law (which they do not understand and have often been kept deliberately ignorant of) protects them unless they actually try to kill a cop. They’ve been recruited by memes and believe they’re protecting the innocent—their objective is to generate TikTok views and get a bit of street cred so they can brag to their grandchildren that they fought the fascists and saved the US from tyranny. After all, as we all know, all that is required for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.¹⁹

The ICE faction is not entirely what they claim to be. There is good reason to believe their agents are not being adequately trained in the law and in jurisdictional matters,²⁰ nor are they operating with a care for optics we would normally expect from law enforcement. They don’t care if they’re perceived as stormtroopers, because while their job is to enforce the law, their mission is to restore public trust in and respect for the government by enforcing policy at a loud, terrifying volume. They are not just law enforcement; they are also an army.

Both armies have something in common:

They are being set up to fail.

At one end of the field, you have the federal government. This faction aims to gain credibility when it meets protesters who loot neighborhoods, launch fireworks, set buildings on fire, obstruct and harass, throw rocks and ice bottles and bricks, carry professionally-printed signs, and vaingloriously abuse the people who are enforcing a popular government policy (immigration enforcement). The more haphazardly the ICE agents do their jobs, the more unfortunate encounters they engage in, and the more opportunities they have to be featured on the news—proving, each time, that the Trump Administration is listening and responding to the will of the people, even if it’s doing it in a boorish manner.

How do I know this?

Because if all they cared about was getting rid of illegal immigrants quickly and cleanly, they would first aggressively pursue the employers of illegal migrants, and then do much smaller-scale street-level mop-up operations afterwards (as most illegals would self-deport if their income potential was snatched away). Migrants who cross the border illegally are guilty of a misdemeanor—anyone who knowingly employs an illegal alien is a felon (this includes all those politicians and lobbyists who employ illegal au pairs and other domestic staff).

This operation is therefore about more than just deporting illegals (whether their criminality is habitual or merely incidental): it’s about making war on the state and local governments who are profiting from the human trafficking industry and all the political power it confers.²¹

On the other end of the conflict you have the dissidents. This army aims to provoke a violent response from these agents. Any time the agents exceed their authority, any time they buckle under an attack and fight back, any time they defend themselves from an assault with a deadly weapon²² that doesn’t look like a gun, the insurgent side wins a PR victory—this is the strategic goal, as it stokes resentment against the sitting administration and increases the odds that, next time around, they can win elections on behalf of candidates they can control (a very profitable enterprise, and one as old as the United States itself).

For the administration to win, the ICE soldiers must suffer horrific abuse, injury, and occasionally death.

For the insurgents to win, the frontline protestors—the ones who are there for the LOLs and the Tik-Tok cred—must die.

They must die publicly, in front of the cameras, in as ugly a manner as possible.

It’s one Pied Piper against another, each whistling up the idealistic, the ignorant, and the lonely into an undeclared-but-ever-escalating kinetic war in American cities (most of which have governments who are complicit in and profiting from the criminality going on in their jurisdictions).

It’s our Children’s Crusade…we’re just using adults who’ve been deliberately kept ignorant of how the world works. Children’s Crusade 2.0: this time with bigger bodies and bank accounts!

Reality Check for the Children’s Crusade

The public pitch for joining an anti-ICE (or anti-anything) protest in today’s world looks like this:

Take an afternoon off from work, go to where the government is doing shitty things, and obstruct. Stand in their way. Shame them. Make the agents realize they’re human beings on the wrong side of a fight against the Nazis. You’ll inspire people. You’ll do good. At worst, you’ll get thrown in jail for a few days. There’s no real downside.

The secret truth, the one that the people who run these events know and are careful to keep out of the awareness of the cannon fodder, is that when you go into the field and obstruct any cop—let alone Federal officers—you aren’t just committing a crime which can get you arrested (though you are), you are entering a war. You’re going up against well-armed men who are trained to execute policy through violence, who have programs and manuals for how to execute policy through violence, who are capable of and generally comfortable with killing when the job calls for it (they aren’t allowed into the field if they’re not).

If you step onto a playing field with such people, you’d best be prepared to kill or to die for your cause. Unfortunately, the strategy of those who encourage you to be there depends upon your thinking that it’s mostly fun-and-games.

And mostly, the people who protest think just this.

When Renee Good was shot in Minneapolis, her wife can be heard on the video shouting “Why do you have real bullets?!”

The Pincher Move

So here’s what the game looks like as it’s now played by the dissident faction:

Induce disaffected people to walk unarmed into a war. Admonish them to be “peaceful,” but change what tactics you consider “peaceful” in an ever-upwards ratchet until you find a sweet spot at just below the threshold of a shooting war. Mobilize an ostensibly unarmed army on that basis, and press, press, press until you don’t just provoke a shooting or two, you provoke a series of massacres.

You do this because you and your enemy both understand that large groups of people are not individuals voicing a conscience—they are a mob. They can kill without ever consciously intending to. They can trample barriers and troops and other people, racking up impressive death tolls without a single shot fired. It happens at soccer games all the time.

But as long as they’re not waving guns, they aren’t going to be perceived by the public as what they are:

A poorly-directed military force made up of dupes who are happy to march into certain death, high on the vapors of moral certainty; blood sacrifices that will legitimize any and all revolutionary action.

It is an old tactic, and it often works. It worked in Red Square in 1917. It worked in Boston in 1770.²³ But there are two historically proven ways to make sure it doesn’t work:

1. Those in power depart utterly from historic precedents and manage to use administrative action, nonlethal suppression (sonic weapons, perhaps?), financial strangulation, and other creative means to end the revolution, or

2. Those in power depart in the other direction, and utterly destroy the revolutionary movement by killing, imprisoning, or exiling every single person involved in the financing, leadership, academic and ideological backbone, and material supply chain of the puppet revolutionary force.

In our current circumstances, the first option seems unlikely (and not just because those currently in power include many who seem to be spoiling for a fight).

The second option is dangerous and (for most of the public) very unappealing, as it would arguably effectively end the Republic and mark the beginning of something else.

A third option exists: competing citizen armies show up and wage open warfare against the current crop of dissidents. This seems unlikely as the dissidents are (as always is the case) largely drawn from the ranks of those who feel they have nothing to lose. This is why revolutions succeed (when they do)—those who are happy (or at least, contentedly miserable) with the current system are loathe to step out into the line of fire and risk leaving their children orphaned, their spouses widowed, and their family’s future ruined.

Which leaves us with option 4: nothing happens. Nobody blinks. Nobody breaks. People continue to die, but at just below the threshold that will actually trigger open warfare. Today’s battles wind to a weary close, and tomorrow there’s a new city, a new cause, a new reason for the panic-ridden entertainment of public bloodshed. Wealth and property continues to burn. Citizens continue to be terrorized by dissidents and authorities alike. Institutional credibility continues to erode, and we slide, almost imperceptibly, down the slope until we become a country-in-name-only ruled by local crime syndicates and competing armies, much as is the case in Brazil today.

We stand at a pivotal point in history—and neither I nor any of you reading this (as far as I know) are in a position to do a goddamn thing about it.

But, at least until this war is shut down, finished, or falls apart, we can comfort ourselves with the fact that it feels damn good to shout about our moral opinions on the Internet.

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If you enjoyed this post, you may also want to check out my Unfolding the World series, a history of the current geopolitical storm rocking our world, its roots, and its possible outcomes.

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1. I was originally going to give an unqualified legal opinion on the incident, but as footage has emerged my opinion has changed several times, so I have chosen to refrain entirely.

2. I realize that this is a big claim. Don’t worry, I’m gonna earn it (or I’ll get a lot of egg on my face—either way, it’ll be entertaining).

3. In case you’re wondering why the Levant (the land containing modern-day Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and some minor principalities) has been a prize piece of real estate since the ancient world, here’s the answer:

It’s not due to its natural resources (which are basically nil) nor often due to its religious significance (though that’s a great way to motivate the troops), but because it’s the point at which the Silk Road hits the Mediterranean, and also the site of a major trade route from North Africa up to Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). Before the voyage of Marco Polo, whoever controlled the Levant controlled access to the East from Europe and the Mediterranean (and vice versa). It’s the best possible place in the world to put a toll booth.

Today, it remains strategically important as it is the perfect piece of geography from which to project power into Turkey, Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Persian Gulf, which is why it was a prized possession of the British Empire and is now a tightly-locked-in client state of the American Empire.

4. Part of the problem with history is that it’s not always possible to know what really happened.

5. He will, of course, stand trial anyway, because that’s how international relations work: countries don’t behave according to what they think they’re allowed to do, they operate according to what they can get away with and/or must do, and all other considerations be damned.

6. I say “nominally” because, given the realities of selective enforcement and political prosecution, the actual job of cops is to enforce policy rather than law. The distinction is meaningful, and it’s persistent, and the difference between law and policy gives wide latitude for—to use an example that will appeal primarily to one part of my audience—governments to strictly enforce business licensing and tax requirements on one portion of the electorate while enabling another portion to loot the public purse in amounts that would embarrass the GDP figures of most nations on Earth at the expense of that first portion of the electorate who are kept in strict compliance (a move like this allows the “elected” government of a “free” people to effectively enslave one slice of the public to the service of another).

Or, to use an example that appeals to another portion of the audience, a government policy might enforce strict compliance with immigration laws on the people who cross the border illegally (a misdemeanor) but decline to enforce them against the employers who employ immigrants (a felony—usually more than one).

7. The exact rule is:
"[G]overnment officials performing discretionary functions generally are shielded from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known."

Pretty nifty exception, considering that, for the rest of us, ignorance of the law is not a defense.

8. Shortly after states started mandating police bodycams, I edited the autobiography of a veteran cop who had, himself, begun as a firm police partisan, but who had come to believe that the idea of a “good cop” is a dubious one. The internal protocols and policies of police departments at which he’d worked (all of which have good reputations) made public-friendly policing incredibly difficult, and he found that the internal politics of the departments made it difficult-to-impossible to be what he would have considered a “good” cop in his youth. He ended his career with honors, a sour taste in his mouth, and the belief that policing in this country is fundamentally broken—not because of racial animus, but because of the skewed priorities of the department bureaucracies which prioritize public relations over both the punishment of criminals and the protection of civil liberties. At the time of this writing, the book has yet to find a publisher, or I’d link to it here.

9. This reality is humorously captured by comedian Chris Rock in his routine on how to deal with cops:

10. It wasn’t always this way. Up until 2008-2010, I met the majority of people that I formed “online” friendships with in person even if the relationship started online and we lived on opposite sides of the country—relationships began online, and moved to phone calls and letters and visits while continuing online as well. My experience in this regard was not unusual in the era. I still do this from time to time, as do most of the better-adjusted online denizens I know.

11. A socialist activist group who founded the modern homeless-industrial complex in California and ended in mass suicide in Guyana.

12. It is important to point out: While there is a close relationship (and a good deal of crossover) between “Democrats” and the “left-wing”, they are not synonymous (the same goes for the right wing and Republicans). Most rank-and-file voters don’t know this stuff—if they did, the game wouldn’t work so well.

13. Of course, the right wing is currently aiming for a similar result on their side—their strategy depends less on street praxis (defined shortly after this footnote) other than that detailed below in the article.

The right wing strategy depends more on stoking, to the max, dissatisfaction with the bureaucratic state. Ironically, to do that they have to root out the corruption that is in the system and expose it. Once rooted out, the spectacle could be used to restore confidence and trust and consequently markedly reduce partisanship at least in the medium-term, but I personally suspect that this is not the goal of the exercise. Unfortunately, a full analysis of that would require a whole different article.

14. And before you protest, yes, mass boycotts and vast marches are effectively violent—they demonstrate the ability to raise armies, they grind economies to a halt. By doing the latter, their second-and-third-order effect can, and often do, leave people dead or permanently harmed (if you don’t believe me, think of the consequences of the economic interruptions from the COVID lockdowns and attendant policies).

15. This example is deliberately ridiculous. A medieval Christian peasant could expect to be killed in a variety of nasty ways for the crime of hunting to feed his family, or trespassing on the King’s land. While he might dislike these rules, he would be very unlikely to object to them on principle—obeying these rules and accepting these punishments were that era’s version of “rendering unto Caesar.”

16. Again here there is a distinction to be made. An anarchic riot is the type that was common during racial conflicts in the 20th century, and also tends to happen after big sporting events. The emotion of the crowd (rage, vengence, jubilation, or joy) breaks forth in uncontrolled ways, and destruction follows in its wake. This is different than the kinds of riots we now generally see in the 21st century.

While these 21st century events are “riots” in the sense of being violent, they are not anarchic. Instead of being generalized free-for-alls, violence occurs between factions, has specific targets or classes of targets, and the question of controlling territory often becomes salient as the situation unfolds. These are actual, genuine paramilitary battles playing out in the streets.

17. Or saw the romanticized version of it in the opening sequence of Zack Snyder’s production of Watchmen.

18. The Carter administration was the only Democrat-led government in this period, and he only won over the scandal-tainted Gerald Ford because he was a socially conservative southerner who was also a veteran and a farmer. It is to the Carter administration that we owe the deregulation of the airline industry and the willingness to impose harsh fiscal discipline to curtail runaway inflation…and also the mess in Iran and the Israel policy that netted the US a perma-war in the Middle East.

19. Falsely attributed by John F. Kennedy to Edmund Burke because of a mis-attribution in Bartlett’s Famous Quotations, it’s a close-enough paraphrase of something that John Stuart Mill wrote in the 1860s.

20. Inferred from their public conduct and from the shortness of their training period.

21. I am using polite language to discuss what is, in actuality, a slave trade that is—and has been—used as a tool of political gamesmanship for both parties since at least the 1960s. I have talked elsewhere about the front-row seat I got to this horrific industry when I briefly worked for an INS contractor facility in the early 00s.

22. To refresh your memory, a “deadly weapon” is any object capable of inflicting serious bodily harm—a gun, a sword, a club, a baseball bat, a brick, a beer bottle, an icicle, an ice bottle, a shoe, a pie, a stick, a vehicle (of any sort), a fist, a foot, or a finger can all do the job, and have all been the subject of self-defense/battery litigation over the years. A person on the receiving end of any of these implements (or others) who, from their own constrained point of view, believes themselves or another person to be in immanent danger of death or serious bodily harm, is generally legally justified in using deadly force to stop the threat.

23. As far as anyone knows, this was not a pre-planned incident, but it was seized upon after the fact in a way that set the precedent. All of the troops who fired into the crowd were acquitted—and they were defended at trial by John Adams, who was, even at that time, on the side of American Independence.