ICEWatch and Insurgency

A warrant officer from the US Special Forces weighs in on how similar he thinks the ICEWatch patrols are to an insurgency.

With due respect to the gentleman, having a Signal chat is not evidence of a military organization. I have several myself, without in any way being involved in an insurgency. It's just good sense these days to use end-to-end encryption to keep from being spied on by corporations, even more than governments. 

What ICE and other agencies are doing is deeply questionable and of reasonable concern. Keeping an eye on them and reporting any abuses is sensible and good citizenship. We are meant to be a self-governing society. Citizens should keep watch on every activity of government, and restrain it as they feel is appropriate. It is, after all, the citizens who are the ultimate sovereigns of the United States. 

That doesn't mean that some groups don't get out of hand and over-react, of course. 

Still and all, if this were an insurgency instead of a citizen watch there would be a lot of dead cops. Americans have 400,000,000 guns in private hands and trillions of rounds of ammunition. There are a lot of angry protesters, and some of them armed: but there aren't any dead cops. There are two dead protesters, so far. 

What the government at all levels ought to take time to consider is how deeply the sovereign citizenry is rejecting this in at least some localities. I don't know or claim to know just what that means; perhaps we should, as we have often discussed, divide the nation in some way to allow the divergent political views space. Nevertheless, citizens are allowed to diverge in their opinions. Nobody has the right to use main force to compel Americans to abide by their preferred ideas about how we should be governed. 

A self-governing people will diverge. Sometimes compromises can be reached; sometimes not. Liberty implies diversity of opinion. We probably all agree about the color of the blue sky, but experience demonstrates that we have very different opinions about many things. If there is to be a free society, there has to be room for that. 

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