For myself, based on the facts currently available, I take the same stance on Good as I did on Babbitt: I don't know that I would have taken the shot, but I will not criticize the officer for doing so, given the situation.
What’s really incredible is that I never heard of Ashley Babbitt, or at least forgot about her. I remember an officer dying a few days later that people were tying in, but not her. I’m a Republican too, so you think I would have heard about it from a Republican friend, but Substack didn’t have Notes at that point, and I disconnected from News sites and social media after Kavanaugh’s hearing. It’s insane that something like that happened and I was unaware. I seriously thought you were talking about Good the whole time and had to google Babbitt.
More to the point of your article, my opinion on Good is that the Officer should be fired, but not charged with Murder. I’d have to look closely at Minnesota’s manslaughter statutes to know if one of them apply. In my quick google on Babbitt, it looks like the same thing should have happened to that officer, and I am disappointed to see he was promoted, not fired. I expect the same thing will happen to Good’s killer at the end of the day.
Sending someone afraid for their life to prison because they reacted poorly feels unjust to me, but that doesn’t mean we should ever trust you with a gun and a badge again.
This very much mirrors my sentiments as a deep-blue south Minneapolis-ite as well. Fired and condemned as “allowed-but-wrong”. Not persecuted and not held up as an example for others.
Immediately in the wake of Jan 6 I commented something to the effect of "I am glad Babbitt was killed," which was probably too strong but it's what I said. My true sentiment was "I am glad that no congressmen were harmed and it seems like shooting Babbitt was a contributing factor in that."
I am not glad Good was killed but I give the ICE agent the benefit of the doubt that he believed that he was acting in self defense. I give the lions-share of the blame to those who have been actively raising the temperature against ICE, lying about what they are allowed to do, and acting like ICE is not a real federal agency but a collection of racist loose cannons.
"Many others had recently gotten away with worse, and she knew that."
This. A lack of proper response to illegal protesting behaviors has eroded the law. This has been done by both sides.
Both sides are also ramping up rhetoric to crazy levels (e.g. Frey, Walz and Trump) for their own personal gain and are costing people their lives, both through killings and, more subtly but much more prevalent, through causing people to continue to live through fear which is still a form of losing your life, IMHO. We have begun to confuse leadership and bravery with self-serving narcissism.
A well-measured post. And, an excellent rhetorical blurring of the partisan signs.
With regards to your footnote about times when it's appropriate to resist a peaceful arrest, my immediate reaction is that when you're in the resistance in Nazi Germany, and the Literal Nazis are probably going to kill you after a show trial, then you're justified. Unfortunately, given what too much the country thinks about our current government, that true statement sounds somewhat ominous.
Yes, agreed, my statement only applies in places where an arrest is actually an arrest in the Anglo-American sense of the word: the first stage in criminal due process. In jurisdictions where that's not the case -- and there are many the world over -- many bets are off. (And you're right about the last sentence, too.)
NIce how you led off about Ashley Babbit as though she were Renee Good. Point well taken.
I regularly do sidewalk counseling at a local abortion facility. As part of how I was trained, I do not block cars and people entering and leaving the facility. My purpose, and the purpose of those I work with, is peaceful persiasion and prayerful protest. Sometimes, that persuasion results in women changing their minds. I hope I would feel the same way about similar protests regarding causes I disagree with.
I do not agree with violent protests, no matter the cause, nor with "civil disobedience" protests that resist the legal consequences. I hoep I would feel th3 same way ab out any causee, whether I agree or disagree.
Thanks for this, James! You are much better read than I, so I imagine you're familiar with Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" where he explains and documents this phenomenon of cognitive bias. We make an initial decision about a situation by intuition, and after that we're drawn to the accounts that justify it after the fact and defending against the accounts that call it into question. (Less validly, he concluded that Hume was right about the source of our moral judgments being in sentiment, and Plato was wrong about them being in attention to the eternal Forms. Plato was not trying to describe how people make these judgments now, but explaining how they SHOULD do so. Not every great social psychologist is also a good philosopher.) As for me and the current case, I can't figure out what I'm looking at when I try to watch those videos...
I’d like to add a third datapoint in here as well. The “2020 Riots/Uprising” (depending on your aisle) and specifically the sacking of Minneapolis’s 3rd Precinct Police Station.
Had the police officers elected to try and hold the building they would have been justified in using lethal force against the mob trying to break in. It would have been an even-more-awful outcome to a story that ended awfully anyway with the building being burned to a husk. The officers at the time elected to remove themselves from the situation and monitor from afar instead of staying in an environment which risked tripping over into lethal outcomes.
I hope those officers who made those decisions are held up as examples to others because that’s the sort of preservation-of-life decisions I want my officers to make. There are endless heroic stories from J6 of officers holding the line without resorting to lethal force, those are the ones I want to use as examples for others. Not the shooting of Babbitt. Not the shooting of Good.
In the face of terrible circumstances, I want to expect the best from the subgroup of our population we’ve asked to keep the peace and enforce our laws.
I would counter that no, I do not want cops who run when the mob gets unruly. If the cops are abandoning their base, what am I supposed to do if the mob come after my house or business? I still want the people who made the decision to abandon the 3rd precinct to be dragged through the street as cowards....
I really want to see a conversation someday between the minority that consistently thinks armed officers should prioritize enforcing the law (thus both Babbitt's and Good's shootings were appropriate, and abandoning the 3rd Precinct was not) and the opposite minority that consistently thinks armed officers should prioritize the preservation of life (thus both Babbitt's and Good's shooters should have held their fire, even if legal, and the 3rd Precinct was appropriately abandoned).
That interesting discussion is drowned out by the partisan noise, but it's real and, to me, fascinating to see the different places the two groups are starting from.
Loss of property sucks. So does loss of order. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that loss of property, order, and life sucks worse. Attempting to hold the line at the 3rd precinct would not have solved the chaos of that night or prevented the damage up and down Lake Street but would have further escalated the night into something that became lethal. That night must have been hard enough for law enforcement. Labeling them as cowards after the fact for making a decision that preserved lives doesn’t seem appropriate.
We are told to call for the police when our homes are invaded. If they won't defend their own base of operations, why would I trust them to defend me in mine?
I also had not heard of Babbitt, but the parallel is indeed instructive. Thank you!
I pray for the repose of both their souls. It’s truly tragic that “they must be made into martyrdoms or domestic terrorism. If the truth gets in the way of that, the truth will have to go.”
A quibble on footnote 2. You'd need to show that the spread in supporting the protests are statistically significant to make the claim that one group is generally more favorable towards protests. And since so many things fail to replicate, you'd ideally have multiple experiments replicating this result to be extra sure.
Even though it's a very plausible result there's all sorts of plausible papers that have failed to replicate.
I'm used to the world of polling, where, by convention, statistical significance is less rigid than academia, and I must admit that I simply eyeballed the numbers and the sample size and said, "yep, looks true enough." Very risky on my part, in retrospect!
I haven't quite figured out how to articulate this, so this is more trying to suss it out and not make a specific argument:
It seems like one factor that is very different here is the setting and the disposition of the mob surrounding both of our victims and the LEOs involved. Babbitt and the Jan 6 crowd obviously believed something illegal and destructive to the Republic was happening but they were also trespassing on government property, amassed as a HUGE crowd, and were chanting about killing elected officials. (Didn't they erect a gallows? Or did I misremember that when it was just a threat?) The LEOs on scene did not have a history with the crowd of viciousness, aggressiveness or the perception of showing up to disrupt a community. It seems like the situation on Jan 6 is really weighted -- at least on a gut level for me -- against the insurrectionists and in favor of the LEOs, regardless of why anyone was there and their beliefs about the certification of the election. I think the protesters really could have killed not just one, but many people that day, and it is a miracle it didn't devolve.
You're right that the media is painting all ICE activities as the beginnings of the American Gestapo, so I have tried to think clearly about what ICE is doing knowing most of what I am being shown is biased. However, something still sits so very wrong for me, especially in opposition to January 6. First, while protesters have definitely been extremely aggressive, there is a major disparity between the ICE officers, who seem to be armed to the teeth, and protestors throwing shit at them and whistling in their faces and mouthing off. Obviously, ongoing exposure to a bunch of people interfering with your job and threatening you is wearing, but when there is such a difference in power due to level of armament, I am skeptical in favor of the protestors. Being a dick to a cop isn't grounds for execution. (I understand that Good doesn't look like she was following orders, which is dangerous, but it also looked like she got conflicting orders from different agents.) As far I understand, the group in MPLS on the 7th wasn't huge, and no one was credibly threatening to kill the officers (though I might be wrong). Even if they did threaten, there weren't enough of them, and they weren't sufficiently armed, to truly win that fight; do we really think those ICE agents would have taken any real losses if they had been rushed? The Jan 6 protesters probably could have done so much damage with a little more willingness to be violent based just on numbers. I guess you could argue that Good could have run over the officer, but he seemed to have sufficient space to simply move slightly to the side and not get hit, and how fast could she possibly accelerate at a 45 degree angle on a residential street?
And finally, regardless of the legality of ICE's actions, it is obvious that the administration's goal is to incite fear. They are coming into communities masked and tackling people in the street. They've taken parents and left their children alone without bothering to communicate that it happened to any authority who could help those kids. Actions this aggressive, this ordered towards fear and a show of power, make me uneasy with a 1:1 comparison with Jan 6.
I do always, ALWAYS, ask myself when viewing protesters whether I would be aggravated or proud of them if they were protesting something I felt about deeply. That's why I usually gave BLM a lot of leeway; I had many irritating interactions with individuals in the movement, but I admired their willingness to put themselves in harm's way for their cause. I think many people believe ICE's actions may be legal, but inhumane in action, and I am willing to give them the same generosity I would give an anti-abortion activist who is aggressively fighting our current abortion laws, even when they kind of suck.
Again, me trying to work out why this feels so different and awful from Jan 6, which was also awful but not the same.
Thank you for writing this piece. Upon reflection, I think perhaps the most significant difference between the two killings is that the Capitol riot was still escalating in the moment when Babbitt was killed, whereas in this case Good appeared to be fleeing the scene.
Now, the main question for me on that vein is whether the officer who shot her genuinely believed she might be aiming to kill him, and whether this belief was reasonable for an officer in his position. If so, I don't think he did anything legally wrong; if not, Good's killing was a crime.
(One can argue that the general situation for ICE is escalating, but I don't think that it is escalating in the same we-might-die-today-at-the-hands-of-a-mon-if-we-don't-stop-them-advancing, which I think was a reasonable enough fear on January 6.)
Great post. What I have been trying to get people to realize is that the specific details of Good’s death fundamentally do not matter. I have in fact refused to watch any video on it, because I know it would just reinforce my partisan beliefs and that would be unhelpful.
The problem is sending thousands of undertrained and militarized agents to enforce a law that was perfectly well enforceable in the first place without them, much as (in my partisan view) it was a problem to rile up a huge mob on January 6 and direct them at the legislators trying to complete the process of the presidential election. Both actions created the likelihood that tragic violence would occur.
Thank you for being honest with yourself about your partisanship; please consider the possibility that said partisanship is coloring your perception of the overall situation in Minneapolis.
I have, and I’m constantly trying to keep that in mind. So laying all my cards on the table, I don’t have a particular problem with immigration enforcement as such; I don’t like it at this scope but I think it’s democratically legitimate. However, I have enormous concerns with the way it is being carried out. I believe with high confidence but not certainty that if this had been done in a less showy and militarized way, it would have triggered far, far less resistance while still achieving the same goals of immigration enforcement. I further believe that this is an intentional choice, and I haven’t really seen anything refuting that argument.
interestingly enough I feel like there is immense overlap between the perspective you are saying wrt immigration enforcement and how many conservative pro-2a folks think about Ruby Ridge, or Waco, or Bryan Malinowski, and similar cases, but yet never do the sides come together and push for reform on all the axes they care about.
Well, you see, when it happens to people on MY side it’s bad, but when it happens to YOUR side, it’s good. Duh. ;)
I was less informed and thoughtful during the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents, and I supported them at the time. Now I like to think I’d have a more nuanced view.
My only recalled leftist discourse on Babbitt at the time was that this was yet another example of law enforcement reaching for lethal force before other options. If someone celebrated her death, shame on them.
With Good, I have yet to see any evidence put forth that she was committing a crime of any kind. The argument that she was obstructing law enforcement is extremely weak--she was down the block from their actions, and several ICE vehicles drove right past her, including the man who very little time later shot her.
The argument that the officer feared for his life is not plausible in light of videos that likely were not out at the time you wrote this. He switches his cell phone to his left hand to have his gun available when a woman responds to his physical intimidation by suggesting he get a sandwich, when no threat is presenting. He puts himself in front of the vehicle, reaches the side by the time it moves forward, can clearly see (from his own cell phone footage) that Good is steering away from him, leans *toward* the vehicle for the first shot, and fires again through the side window when no argument for threat remains at all. (Shooting a driver *creates* unguided threat.) After she crashes, he mutters, "fucking bitch." That's not panic or trauma. That's contempt.
The most plausible explanation for this behavior is premeditated murder because women--specifically queer women--did not show fear in response to his intimidation. Women worldwide know what the tone of voice with which he says "fucking bitch" means. This had nothing to do with enforcing law at all, proportionate or not.
At first I thought a comparison of immigrant rights activists to unborn rights activists would be more warranted than with Babbitt. (Your pope has something to say about American practice on both topics, but you only seem to agree with him on one.) Pro life activists are also, as a group, careful to stay just inside the law--and sometimes, somebody steps over. Occasionally in a violent way that gets headlines and fortunately has no parallel in anti-ICE activism (yet, I say with dread). But mostly in small ways that are unlikely to get prosecuted.
Of course, I couldn't find any instance of law enforcement shooting an anti-abortion protester in the face. But that's only partially because law enforcement treats left and right wing protesters differently. The comparison with either abortion rights activists or with January 6 insurrectionists is no longer correct. Comparing law enforcement reactions to left and right wing protesters is no longer the correct rubric, because killing this queer woman *was not about law enforcement.*
I think you are incorrect that Trump's stoking the fire isn't deliberate. Trump's purpose for ICE is exactly this. Even if immigration enforcement up until now were hewing to the law as much as you've claimed (and it wasn't), we're seeing enough videos from the last week in Minnesota that it's clear that Gov. Walz's characterization in his statement yesterday is basically correct. We might believe that ICE until now had the purpose of good-faith law enforcement. *Trump's* purpose is to punish any and all who have rejected him, to wield every tool of government as his personal weapons. That purpose is now becoming dominant, and will be increasingly so with the hiring to come with its budget expansion.
Enabling murder with no consequence is the point. People's outrage in response is the point. Using the flimsiest of excuses to increase authoritarian reach is the point. Even if your take from not long ago of "it's not *that* bad" were true, it's not anymore.
I think this is an example of the sort of thinking this article warns against. If the most plausible explanation for Ms. Good's death is premeditated murder, then I believe it follows that premeditated murder (or at least manslaughter) is also at least a highly plausible explanation for Ms. Babbitt's death. Yet you dismiss her death in the first paragraph as an overreaction at worst.
I've avoided taking any public stance on Ms. Good's death, other than to call for consistent thinking about it. I expect there will be some form of judicial proceedings in the case (no thanks to the Trump DoJ) and that I will accept the findings of those proceedings as facts, as I did in the case of the murderer Derek Chauvin. (I was hesitant about that label until the jury verdict.)
That being said, I think your interpretation of the events is tendentious. You infer a great deal that, in my view, ought to be gleaned from investigation. Did you draw similarly aggressive inferences after Babbitt's death? If not, you may not be evaluating facts fairly.
As for Trump: oh, I agree he deliberately stoked the fire, in both Babbitt's case and Good's. He loves heightened conflict, and, as a tyrant, he does indeed aim to use every lever of power to which he has access (government or not) to hurt his perceived enemies. I just don't think his goal is civil war. That's all I intended to claim in this piece. I can see why you read my claim more broadly, though; I passed over it quickly, and was vague about what I meant because the way he stoked the fire after Babbitt died was quite different from the way he did after Good died. (Actually, now that I look, I may have gotten it wrong anyway: I thought Babbitt was shot *before* Trump's kill-Mike-Pence tweet, but it looks like it happened a few minutes later. Mea culpa there.) So I think we agree on this point, and sorry for the misunderstanding.
As for "enough videos from the last week in Minnesota", though... we don't seem to agree there. I have looked at a lot of those videos. (This is my hometown, after all.) Every time I see some alleged egregious abuse of power, when I look into it further, I discover really important circumstances omitted from the original video. The Richfield Target teens taken into custody have been wielded for a week as proof that ICE is just randomly scooping brown people off the street, but the teens followed the agents (who were trying to use the Target bathroom) for half a block, started a confrontation, and escalated it until they crossed the line into activity that was at least plausibly criminal. The man in Robbinsdale didn't just lose his ID in the car, but allegedly threw a punch (confirmed by local PD, which was on-scene). The "autistic woman just driving to a doctor's appointment" doesn't appear to have been anything of the sort. And so forth.
People who are rightly skeptical of official DHS accounts are just accepting whatever they read in an anonymous Facebook video caption (which again reminds me of J6 supporters, who exhibit the same behavior to this day). Thus, my basic view of ICE is, so far, unchanged from mid-December, both positive and negative.
My basic view of ICE Watch, on the other hand, is increasingly that they are similar to J6ers -- mostly peaceful, mostly earnest, but with an actively insurrectionist minority seeking to prevent the general enforcement of U.S. law by force, ranging from obstruction to pelting with objects to physical altercations to vandalism and sometimes worse violence. (Even on your notably outlier view that the A.G. doesn't have any duty to order the removal of illegal immigrants, I think we agree that he certainly has the legal *authority* to do so.) That's why J6 is a better comparison than any other protest movement in recent history. I don't know what specifically Gov. Walz said yesterday, so can't speak to it.
I'm not sure why you brought up "my pope," but I don't see daylight between my view and his publicly stated view. He opposes the inhumane treatment of immigrants. So do I.
I know that this is off topic, but I'm very concerned about the whole Greenland fiasco. It's one thing for there to be tensions between law enforcement and the communities in which they operate, it's another for the POTUS to threaten to invade an ally in a naked land grab. How do you see the Greenland debacle going, and what are the odds that Trump invades the island?
Sorry. Living in the Twin Cities right now, it is easy to forget that other things are happening in These United States. Greenland just doesn’t get a lot of my mental bandwidth at the moment as my entire friends list, neighborhood groups, newspapers, all of it, are blaring ICE SIGHTING ALERTS and calls for almsgiving. (The latter is good!)
What I would like to happen: It would probably be objectively good for U.S. defense if Greenland were a U.S. territory. I’m not sure how good exactly, but, if Greenland *wanted* to be a U.S. protectorate, I’d be all for it. If they don’t (and it seems like they don’t, especially now), then it doesn’t seem like we should go to the mat over it, but maybe we could make them a really good offer that would change their minds — without the insane and evil threat of military force.
What I expect to happen: Trump will continue to burn goodwill, alliances, and trade for no benefit to the United States or to himself personally. We will not gain control of Greenland. We may lose considerable influence in Greenland and ultimately damage our defensive capabilities there, as we have damaged so many U.S. diplomatic assets in the last twelve months (usually also for little reason and little gain). I don’t think his threat to invade is real. The tariffs he imposed as blackmail seem fairly obviously illegal and make SCOTUS even less likely to uphold his tariff authority than they already were. So maybe that’s the one practical positive outcome from all this: Trump’s Greenland madness could be the decisive factor that gives tariff power back to Congress.
Unlikely outcomes:
I give a 1-3% chance Trump actually takes kinetic military action in some kind of Greenland campaign. This is obviously insane and is 1-3% higher than it ought to be. Our presidential election system is broken.
I give a 10% chance that Trump acquires Greenland by some means (including the smaller chance of military force). I don’t think whatever price he pays in this outcome is likely to be worth it, but he does have a talent for acquiring things he sets his mind to (like the Nobel Peace Prize).
Needless to say, if we seized Greenland by force of arms, this would be a grossly unjust war. NATO would and should activate Article V against us, its founding member. NATO would end immediately, with devastating long-term geopolitical consequences. In the short term, Americans would be morally forbidden from voluntarily supporting the war effort. I don’t advise treason, in the sense of cheering for America’s enemies in a live war, but we certainly couldn’t cheer against our European allies in such a conflict. They would be within their rights to attack us, including by killing our president. Given how abysmally the Greenland thing does in polls, it’s hard to imagine many people would shed a tear if it came to that.
But, as I say, I don’t think that’s probable. Trump is a bully and an idiot but he is not suicidally insane.
Any US defense interest in acquiring Greenland is a lie because the US already is in control of the defense of Greenland under the existing arrangement. This is about Trumps covetousness and nothing else at all. The US would for example be entirely free to bring their military presence there back to cold war levels but actually have reduced them because there just isn't much of a strategic reason to have a bigger presence there.
Also, I really hope "but maybe we could make them a really good offer that would change their minds" is just a brainfart. Consider for a moment of what you would think about, say, China offering the population of Puerto Rico a sufficiently big bribe to make them change colonial powers.
I am of the old-fashioned view that sovereignty over a territory your country needs for defense is always better than treaty-based or agreement-based access, so I think it would be good for the U.S. to acquire Greenland. Again, I'm not sure how good. Perhaps only very marginally good.
As for "really good offer": my understanding is that Denmark's view is that Greenland should determine its own destiny, and that they are fine with Greenland going into U.S. hands if we give them enough. Everyone's happy there: the U.S. is happy because we get Greenland, Greenland's happy because they get whatever we paid, and Denmark is happy because they don't mind a U.S. presence on their doorstep, Denmark no longer has to pay for Greenland (I understand Greenland is a net fiscal cost to Denmark), and Denmark satisfies honor by allowing Greenland its self-determination.
That is not the U.S.'s view of Puerto Rico, especially re: China. On the other hand, if Canada really wanted to acquire Puerto Rico for some reason (Canada sucks in the winter and they want a summer territory? just spitballing here), and they offered P.R. a huge sum of money and promises of development, and P.R. said with a clear voice that they want it, I'd be delighted to let P.R. go into Canadian hands. (But if Canada invaded an unwilling P.R., I'd fight the Mounties on the shores of San Juan, because the U.S.A. is their sovereign and that's our duty as long as we hold sov there.)
So, yeah, not a brain fart, and tbh I'm surprised by the strong view you take against a theoretical acquisition of Greenland where nobody's arm gets twisted and everybody is happy with the outcome.
One problem with the first paragraph is that territory the US "needs for defense" covers a lot more of the Earth than you would want to acquire unless your ultimate goal is some kind of world government. For example then you would also need the Rammstein airbase but that isn't usable without most of Europe's airspace which in turn isn't defensible without the ground under it...
Anyway on the rest:
Being ok with local democratic destiny-decision is very different from being ok with foreign powers influencing local democratic destiny decision. For example Americans are usually very down on foreign political donations though that too got a little blurred in the current bananification.
That you would be happy about some ways to get rid of Puerto Rico is a refutation of the better to own point, but otherwise a red herring. The US doesn't have a territory where it would both allow secession and regret if that option was actually taken, so there is no perfect analogy to Denmark and Greenland. But my China example is getting close enough to make my point: "They can determine their future" and "Foreign powers can influence them to determine their future in the foreign powers' self-interest" are very different propositions.
"That you would be happy about some ways to get rid of Puerto Rico is a refutation of the better to own point"
Is P.R. important for our defense?
"One problem with the first paragraph is that territory the US 'needs for defense' covers a lot more of the Earth than you would want to acquire unless your ultimate goal is some kind of world government"
If everyone were happy to join the U.S. (and I could trust their voters not to be insane), I'd love to have the world join the Union. (If we can't trust their voters, they can at least all be protectorates.) This is, perhaps, the final neoconservative dream... and I am still basically a neocon at heart, albeit a deeply-humbled and reconstructed one.
So, yes, I do think sovereignty is better than not-sovereignty when talking about territory important for our defense, even if that leads to U.S. global government. I just don't think it's better enough to be worth going to very much effort, especially not in the face of opposition, and certainly not by waging an unjust war of conquest.
Anyway, we seem to be arguing about a completely hypothetical situation: a purely theoretical world in which the U.S. makes Greenland a non-coercive generous offer that Greenland and Denmark both accept. We may have principled disagreements in that world.
But I want to emphasize that I think we are on exactly the same page here in our world, where Donald Trump's actions on Greenland have been deranged, dangerous, and deeply counterproductive to not just our Greenlandic foreign policy, but our foreign policy all over the world. It's nuts. It needs to stop. I think we're sympatico on that.
I'm reserving thoughts on the main subject of the article (except to say that Ms. Babbitt's, Ms. Good's, and now Mr. Pretti's deaths are tragedies) for a while longer; I'm just chiming in here to say that if we really wanted a summer territory, we'd be more likely to negotiate with the UK and the Turks and Caicos: https://www.visittci.com/nature-and-history/history/canada-proposed-union
(Or any of the other British Overseas Territories located in the Americas, though I don't know if there's ever been substantial local support for such a union outside the Turks and Caicos Islands. Also, given current tensions between the US and Canada--Donald just broke out the "Governor" epithet again for Carney, which amusingly would have been accurate at some points in his career when he was Governor of the Bank of Canada and later the Bank of England--I wouldn't be interested in adding territory to Canada where transit between those areas and the main part of the country requires either substantial diversion or crossing sovereign US airspace and/or territorial waters, since we can never again trust that the US will be friendly. This would of course also rule out any attempts to acquire Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands.)
(In Afghanistan, Denmark had a higher per-capita casualty rate than any other NATO member--Georgia's was yet higher--and as I recall, as a percentage of the size of the country's armed forces, the highest such rate at least among NATO members there was incurred by Canada, starting with a friendly-fire incident which saw a US pilot bomb a Canadian position, killing four. I suspect that a lot of US veterans of Afghanistan or Iraq--Denmark sent troops to Iraq, and Canadian soldiers on military exchange in US units sent there were not recalled--either had their own asses pulled out of the fire by a Canadian or Danish soldier, or know someone who owes their life to a Canadian or a Dane. That Donald's harshest rhetoric is directed against these two countries, therefore, is grievously insulting, and while I don't think it would be justified at all absent actual military aggression, at this time I think a Canadian-Danish operation to kidnap Donald and Melania Trump would be less unjustified than the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro: https://substack.com/@dpareja/note/c-195790209. Everyone from human rights lawyers to Marine Le Pen were going WTF over that one; see also https://www.uncommons.ca/p/its-in-our-collective-interests-when.)
Also, here's a largely economic analysis of why any offer to buy Greenland (which, as isn't noted in the article, would almost certainly also have to come along with a massive ongoing cash subsidy, since my understanding is that Greenlanders oppose independence at this time largely on the basis of their living standards decreasing without the current Danish subsidy) would have to be astronomically huge to have a hope of being accepted: https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-price-of-greenland-and-the-cost-of-attacking-sovereignty/
(Another interesting thing to note: the current government coalition in Denmark currently only enjoys majority support in the Folketing because it is supported by all four members representing the autonomous territories of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. So there is in that sense a base political motive for the current government not to wish to lose sovereignty over Greenland.)
"Also, as for not counselling treason, here's one US veteran outright stating "I would commit treason if the US invaded Greenland or Canada":"
I confess to having phrased what I said very carefully, because it occurred to me at the time that I wrote it that, if I plainly stated what was *really* on my mind, it was conceivable that some future court could construe it as a capital crime, and I wanted to think it through more carefully before committing to it.
So I don't advise treason, in the event of a U.S. war of aggression against Denmark! I also don't advise against it. I express no advice whatsoever at this time on the subject of undermining U.S. war efforts in the event of an unprovoked war with Denmark, for example by acts of sabotage at the Fort Snelling military base near me.
(I'm probably being overcautious, since U.S. treason law is pretty clear that you can't be tried for supporting the enemy before it was a declared enemy.)
It's so hard to tell with Trump whether he's bloviating or if he really is hell bent on getting Greenland by whatever means necessary. Given what Miller and Bessent have said I'm leaning towards it being the latter. Hopefully cooler heads in Congress, the Military and the Admin will be able to prevail and talk Trump out of it, because God help us if they don't.
As for the tariffs, I've heard that the recent delays in the verdict could be signs that they're gonna side with Trump. Do you think that's the case, or are there other reasons?
"As for the tariffs, I've heard that the recent delays in the verdict could be signs that they're gonna side with Trump."
I've been unplugged from the chatter, so maybe I'm out-of-date, but I don't think that the tariff case has been even slightly delayed. My baseline expectation for any major SCOTUS case is that the opinion will be issued in June. There was a lot of chatter last week about the tariff case coming out on January 9... but that was the *very first opinion day* of the entire term. (Several preceding opinions had been simple per curiams, none of them longer than 5 pages with huge margins; Jan 9 decided Bowe v U.S., the first meaty decision of the year, and not a major one.) The possibility that we might get tariffs on the earliest possible date was tantalizing, because it was possible to imagine SCOTUS rushing that decision out as quickly as possible. But I thought it was kinda nuts when people started talking like it was expected.
Now, to be fair, tariffs were argued quite early this term, with orals in early November, so it's reasonable to bet that the decision will be out before June. Last term, there were 7 oral arguments in November (of 2024). None were major cases. Two got dismissed as improvidently granted (oof), so I'm not counting those. The first of the cases decided was indeed in January: EMD Sales v Carrera was decided unanimously on 15 Jan 2025.
But the *last* of the cases from November 2024 were not decided until the end of April 2025 (Velazquez v. Bondi, on Apr 22; Advocate Christ Medical v. Kennedy, on Apr 29).
So I don't think people should consider the tariff case late until the end of April.
Trump could still win it, of course. I still think he's likely to lose, but he could still pull it out. But I don't think the timetable provides evidence one way or another. Sounds like anxiety seeking validation. We've all been there, of course.
I could be wrong, of course, especially since I've been unplugged from the conlaw feeds lately.
I think the idea here is if the tariffs are illegal the damage currently keeps compounding. On the other hand if they are legal there is no hurry. So what the Supreme court thinks of the actual question should correlate with how urgent they think it is.
I like to think that SCOTUS will be very hesitant to rush any major cases after the dog's breakfast they made of the insurrection case. Even people who agreed with the outcome thought the reasoning in that was an absolute pile, and it required a good deal less nuance and finesse than tariff law.
I do see your point, and, yes, it was fair for people to wonder whether SCOTUS might see tariffs as SUCH an emergency that they'd make it their A-1 top priority case and rule on it first thing in January. But it was always (in my view, anyway) a pretty low-probability outcome, so no reason to update our expectations yet.
On the specific topic of tariffs I would just note this:
In 2024, following the lead of the United States and to support North American auto manufacturing, Canada imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle imports.
Due to recent trade tensions (and pressure from Manitoba, against pressure from Ontario), Canada agreed to allow 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles to be imported yearly at the previous tariff of 6%. (The Beaverton noted that this is tantamount to choosing lawful evil over chaotic evil.)
This so incensed Donald (he recently told Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, an old acquaintance of JD, to say "Tell the Canadians I love them", which I can only interpret as the sort of "love" a domestic abuser has for their partner; this may also be the only sort of "love" that Donald knows) that he threatened a 100% tariff on all imports into the US from Canada.
Here's just one problem with that: the US gets most of its potash, a necessary component in agriculture, from Canada. The other major producers are Russia, Belarus and China (which is a net importer). A 100% tariff would essentially cut off that supply.
(I will note that another necessary component of fertilizer, whose name I can't recall at the moment, is mostly produced in Florida, and we import quite a bit from there, so this is an issue for trade in both directions.)
I will completely reserve my thoughts on what the resulting spike in food prices would do to the US economy, and to families across the US.
(Nods) This is good.
For myself, based on the facts currently available, I take the same stance on Good as I did on Babbitt: I don't know that I would have taken the shot, but I will not criticize the officer for doing so, given the situation.
What’s really incredible is that I never heard of Ashley Babbitt, or at least forgot about her. I remember an officer dying a few days later that people were tying in, but not her. I’m a Republican too, so you think I would have heard about it from a Republican friend, but Substack didn’t have Notes at that point, and I disconnected from News sites and social media after Kavanaugh’s hearing. It’s insane that something like that happened and I was unaware. I seriously thought you were talking about Good the whole time and had to google Babbitt.
More to the point of your article, my opinion on Good is that the Officer should be fired, but not charged with Murder. I’d have to look closely at Minnesota’s manslaughter statutes to know if one of them apply. In my quick google on Babbitt, it looks like the same thing should have happened to that officer, and I am disappointed to see he was promoted, not fired. I expect the same thing will happen to Good’s killer at the end of the day.
Sending someone afraid for their life to prison because they reacted poorly feels unjust to me, but that doesn’t mean we should ever trust you with a gun and a badge again.
This very much mirrors my sentiments as a deep-blue south Minneapolis-ite as well. Fired and condemned as “allowed-but-wrong”. Not persecuted and not held up as an example for others.
Immediately in the wake of Jan 6 I commented something to the effect of "I am glad Babbitt was killed," which was probably too strong but it's what I said. My true sentiment was "I am glad that no congressmen were harmed and it seems like shooting Babbitt was a contributing factor in that."
I am not glad Good was killed but I give the ICE agent the benefit of the doubt that he believed that he was acting in self defense. I give the lions-share of the blame to those who have been actively raising the temperature against ICE, lying about what they are allowed to do, and acting like ICE is not a real federal agency but a collection of racist loose cannons.
"Many others had recently gotten away with worse, and she knew that."
This. A lack of proper response to illegal protesting behaviors has eroded the law. This has been done by both sides.
Both sides are also ramping up rhetoric to crazy levels (e.g. Frey, Walz and Trump) for their own personal gain and are costing people their lives, both through killings and, more subtly but much more prevalent, through causing people to continue to live through fear which is still a form of losing your life, IMHO. We have begun to confuse leadership and bravery with self-serving narcissism.
*Prays harder*
Oh goddammit, you if-by-whiskied me. You LINKED to the if-by-whiskey speech and you still successfully if-by-whiskied me!
A well-measured post. And, an excellent rhetorical blurring of the partisan signs.
With regards to your footnote about times when it's appropriate to resist a peaceful arrest, my immediate reaction is that when you're in the resistance in Nazi Germany, and the Literal Nazis are probably going to kill you after a show trial, then you're justified. Unfortunately, given what too much the country thinks about our current government, that true statement sounds somewhat ominous.
Yes, agreed, my statement only applies in places where an arrest is actually an arrest in the Anglo-American sense of the word: the first stage in criminal due process. In jurisdictions where that's not the case -- and there are many the world over -- many bets are off. (And you're right about the last sentence, too.)
NIce how you led off about Ashley Babbit as though she were Renee Good. Point well taken.
I regularly do sidewalk counseling at a local abortion facility. As part of how I was trained, I do not block cars and people entering and leaving the facility. My purpose, and the purpose of those I work with, is peaceful persiasion and prayerful protest. Sometimes, that persuasion results in women changing their minds. I hope I would feel the same way about similar protests regarding causes I disagree with.
I do not agree with violent protests, no matter the cause, nor with "civil disobedience" protests that resist the legal consequences. I hoep I would feel th3 same way ab out any causee, whether I agree or disagree.
Thanks for this, James! You are much better read than I, so I imagine you're familiar with Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" where he explains and documents this phenomenon of cognitive bias. We make an initial decision about a situation by intuition, and after that we're drawn to the accounts that justify it after the fact and defending against the accounts that call it into question. (Less validly, he concluded that Hume was right about the source of our moral judgments being in sentiment, and Plato was wrong about them being in attention to the eternal Forms. Plato was not trying to describe how people make these judgments now, but explaining how they SHOULD do so. Not every great social psychologist is also a good philosopher.) As for me and the current case, I can't figure out what I'm looking at when I try to watch those videos...
I’d like to add a third datapoint in here as well. The “2020 Riots/Uprising” (depending on your aisle) and specifically the sacking of Minneapolis’s 3rd Precinct Police Station.
Had the police officers elected to try and hold the building they would have been justified in using lethal force against the mob trying to break in. It would have been an even-more-awful outcome to a story that ended awfully anyway with the building being burned to a husk. The officers at the time elected to remove themselves from the situation and monitor from afar instead of staying in an environment which risked tripping over into lethal outcomes.
I hope those officers who made those decisions are held up as examples to others because that’s the sort of preservation-of-life decisions I want my officers to make. There are endless heroic stories from J6 of officers holding the line without resorting to lethal force, those are the ones I want to use as examples for others. Not the shooting of Babbitt. Not the shooting of Good.
In the face of terrible circumstances, I want to expect the best from the subgroup of our population we’ve asked to keep the peace and enforce our laws.
One note here--the officers at the police station had time to think about their response. The officer in Good's case did not.
I would counter that no, I do not want cops who run when the mob gets unruly. If the cops are abandoning their base, what am I supposed to do if the mob come after my house or business? I still want the people who made the decision to abandon the 3rd precinct to be dragged through the street as cowards....
I really want to see a conversation someday between the minority that consistently thinks armed officers should prioritize enforcing the law (thus both Babbitt's and Good's shootings were appropriate, and abandoning the 3rd Precinct was not) and the opposite minority that consistently thinks armed officers should prioritize the preservation of life (thus both Babbitt's and Good's shooters should have held their fire, even if legal, and the 3rd Precinct was appropriately abandoned).
That interesting discussion is drowned out by the partisan noise, but it's real and, to me, fascinating to see the different places the two groups are starting from.
I would also like to see/have that discussion.
I also wonder how that applies to regular civilians (e.g. Stand Your Ground, Castle Doctrine)...
Loss of property sucks. So does loss of order. I don’t think it’s controversial to say that loss of property, order, and life sucks worse. Attempting to hold the line at the 3rd precinct would not have solved the chaos of that night or prevented the damage up and down Lake Street but would have further escalated the night into something that became lethal. That night must have been hard enough for law enforcement. Labeling them as cowards after the fact for making a decision that preserved lives doesn’t seem appropriate.
We are told to call for the police when our homes are invaded. If they won't defend their own base of operations, why would I trust them to defend me in mine?
I also had not heard of Babbitt, but the parallel is indeed instructive. Thank you!
I pray for the repose of both their souls. It’s truly tragic that “they must be made into martyrdoms or domestic terrorism. If the truth gets in the way of that, the truth will have to go.”
A quibble on footnote 2. You'd need to show that the spread in supporting the protests are statistically significant to make the claim that one group is generally more favorable towards protests. And since so many things fail to replicate, you'd ideally have multiple experiments replicating this result to be extra sure.
Even though it's a very plausible result there's all sorts of plausible papers that have failed to replicate.
Quibble(s) accepted!
I'm used to the world of polling, where, by convention, statistical significance is less rigid than academia, and I must admit that I simply eyeballed the numbers and the sample size and said, "yep, looks true enough." Very risky on my part, in retrospect!
I haven't quite figured out how to articulate this, so this is more trying to suss it out and not make a specific argument:
It seems like one factor that is very different here is the setting and the disposition of the mob surrounding both of our victims and the LEOs involved. Babbitt and the Jan 6 crowd obviously believed something illegal and destructive to the Republic was happening but they were also trespassing on government property, amassed as a HUGE crowd, and were chanting about killing elected officials. (Didn't they erect a gallows? Or did I misremember that when it was just a threat?) The LEOs on scene did not have a history with the crowd of viciousness, aggressiveness or the perception of showing up to disrupt a community. It seems like the situation on Jan 6 is really weighted -- at least on a gut level for me -- against the insurrectionists and in favor of the LEOs, regardless of why anyone was there and their beliefs about the certification of the election. I think the protesters really could have killed not just one, but many people that day, and it is a miracle it didn't devolve.
You're right that the media is painting all ICE activities as the beginnings of the American Gestapo, so I have tried to think clearly about what ICE is doing knowing most of what I am being shown is biased. However, something still sits so very wrong for me, especially in opposition to January 6. First, while protesters have definitely been extremely aggressive, there is a major disparity between the ICE officers, who seem to be armed to the teeth, and protestors throwing shit at them and whistling in their faces and mouthing off. Obviously, ongoing exposure to a bunch of people interfering with your job and threatening you is wearing, but when there is such a difference in power due to level of armament, I am skeptical in favor of the protestors. Being a dick to a cop isn't grounds for execution. (I understand that Good doesn't look like she was following orders, which is dangerous, but it also looked like she got conflicting orders from different agents.) As far I understand, the group in MPLS on the 7th wasn't huge, and no one was credibly threatening to kill the officers (though I might be wrong). Even if they did threaten, there weren't enough of them, and they weren't sufficiently armed, to truly win that fight; do we really think those ICE agents would have taken any real losses if they had been rushed? The Jan 6 protesters probably could have done so much damage with a little more willingness to be violent based just on numbers. I guess you could argue that Good could have run over the officer, but he seemed to have sufficient space to simply move slightly to the side and not get hit, and how fast could she possibly accelerate at a 45 degree angle on a residential street?
And finally, regardless of the legality of ICE's actions, it is obvious that the administration's goal is to incite fear. They are coming into communities masked and tackling people in the street. They've taken parents and left their children alone without bothering to communicate that it happened to any authority who could help those kids. Actions this aggressive, this ordered towards fear and a show of power, make me uneasy with a 1:1 comparison with Jan 6.
I do always, ALWAYS, ask myself when viewing protesters whether I would be aggravated or proud of them if they were protesting something I felt about deeply. That's why I usually gave BLM a lot of leeway; I had many irritating interactions with individuals in the movement, but I admired their willingness to put themselves in harm's way for their cause. I think many people believe ICE's actions may be legal, but inhumane in action, and I am willing to give them the same generosity I would give an anti-abortion activist who is aggressively fighting our current abortion laws, even when they kind of suck.
Again, me trying to work out why this feels so different and awful from Jan 6, which was also awful but not the same.
Thank you for writing this piece. Upon reflection, I think perhaps the most significant difference between the two killings is that the Capitol riot was still escalating in the moment when Babbitt was killed, whereas in this case Good appeared to be fleeing the scene.
Now, the main question for me on that vein is whether the officer who shot her genuinely believed she might be aiming to kill him, and whether this belief was reasonable for an officer in his position. If so, I don't think he did anything legally wrong; if not, Good's killing was a crime.
(One can argue that the general situation for ICE is escalating, but I don't think that it is escalating in the same we-might-die-today-at-the-hands-of-a-mon-if-we-don't-stop-them-advancing, which I think was a reasonable enough fear on January 6.)
Great post. What I have been trying to get people to realize is that the specific details of Good’s death fundamentally do not matter. I have in fact refused to watch any video on it, because I know it would just reinforce my partisan beliefs and that would be unhelpful.
The problem is sending thousands of undertrained and militarized agents to enforce a law that was perfectly well enforceable in the first place without them, much as (in my partisan view) it was a problem to rile up a huge mob on January 6 and direct them at the legislators trying to complete the process of the presidential election. Both actions created the likelihood that tragic violence would occur.
Thank you for being honest with yourself about your partisanship; please consider the possibility that said partisanship is coloring your perception of the overall situation in Minneapolis.
I have, and I’m constantly trying to keep that in mind. So laying all my cards on the table, I don’t have a particular problem with immigration enforcement as such; I don’t like it at this scope but I think it’s democratically legitimate. However, I have enormous concerns with the way it is being carried out. I believe with high confidence but not certainty that if this had been done in a less showy and militarized way, it would have triggered far, far less resistance while still achieving the same goals of immigration enforcement. I further believe that this is an intentional choice, and I haven’t really seen anything refuting that argument.
interestingly enough I feel like there is immense overlap between the perspective you are saying wrt immigration enforcement and how many conservative pro-2a folks think about Ruby Ridge, or Waco, or Bryan Malinowski, and similar cases, but yet never do the sides come together and push for reform on all the axes they care about.
Well, you see, when it happens to people on MY side it’s bad, but when it happens to YOUR side, it’s good. Duh. ;)
I was less informed and thoughtful during the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents, and I supported them at the time. Now I like to think I’d have a more nuanced view.
My only recalled leftist discourse on Babbitt at the time was that this was yet another example of law enforcement reaching for lethal force before other options. If someone celebrated her death, shame on them.
With Good, I have yet to see any evidence put forth that she was committing a crime of any kind. The argument that she was obstructing law enforcement is extremely weak--she was down the block from their actions, and several ICE vehicles drove right past her, including the man who very little time later shot her.
The argument that the officer feared for his life is not plausible in light of videos that likely were not out at the time you wrote this. He switches his cell phone to his left hand to have his gun available when a woman responds to his physical intimidation by suggesting he get a sandwich, when no threat is presenting. He puts himself in front of the vehicle, reaches the side by the time it moves forward, can clearly see (from his own cell phone footage) that Good is steering away from him, leans *toward* the vehicle for the first shot, and fires again through the side window when no argument for threat remains at all. (Shooting a driver *creates* unguided threat.) After she crashes, he mutters, "fucking bitch." That's not panic or trauma. That's contempt.
The most plausible explanation for this behavior is premeditated murder because women--specifically queer women--did not show fear in response to his intimidation. Women worldwide know what the tone of voice with which he says "fucking bitch" means. This had nothing to do with enforcing law at all, proportionate or not.
At first I thought a comparison of immigrant rights activists to unborn rights activists would be more warranted than with Babbitt. (Your pope has something to say about American practice on both topics, but you only seem to agree with him on one.) Pro life activists are also, as a group, careful to stay just inside the law--and sometimes, somebody steps over. Occasionally in a violent way that gets headlines and fortunately has no parallel in anti-ICE activism (yet, I say with dread). But mostly in small ways that are unlikely to get prosecuted.
Of course, I couldn't find any instance of law enforcement shooting an anti-abortion protester in the face. But that's only partially because law enforcement treats left and right wing protesters differently. The comparison with either abortion rights activists or with January 6 insurrectionists is no longer correct. Comparing law enforcement reactions to left and right wing protesters is no longer the correct rubric, because killing this queer woman *was not about law enforcement.*
I think you are incorrect that Trump's stoking the fire isn't deliberate. Trump's purpose for ICE is exactly this. Even if immigration enforcement up until now were hewing to the law as much as you've claimed (and it wasn't), we're seeing enough videos from the last week in Minnesota that it's clear that Gov. Walz's characterization in his statement yesterday is basically correct. We might believe that ICE until now had the purpose of good-faith law enforcement. *Trump's* purpose is to punish any and all who have rejected him, to wield every tool of government as his personal weapons. That purpose is now becoming dominant, and will be increasingly so with the hiring to come with its budget expansion.
Enabling murder with no consequence is the point. People's outrage in response is the point. Using the flimsiest of excuses to increase authoritarian reach is the point. Even if your take from not long ago of "it's not *that* bad" were true, it's not anymore.
I think this is an example of the sort of thinking this article warns against. If the most plausible explanation for Ms. Good's death is premeditated murder, then I believe it follows that premeditated murder (or at least manslaughter) is also at least a highly plausible explanation for Ms. Babbitt's death. Yet you dismiss her death in the first paragraph as an overreaction at worst.
I've avoided taking any public stance on Ms. Good's death, other than to call for consistent thinking about it. I expect there will be some form of judicial proceedings in the case (no thanks to the Trump DoJ) and that I will accept the findings of those proceedings as facts, as I did in the case of the murderer Derek Chauvin. (I was hesitant about that label until the jury verdict.)
That being said, I think your interpretation of the events is tendentious. You infer a great deal that, in my view, ought to be gleaned from investigation. Did you draw similarly aggressive inferences after Babbitt's death? If not, you may not be evaluating facts fairly.
As for Trump: oh, I agree he deliberately stoked the fire, in both Babbitt's case and Good's. He loves heightened conflict, and, as a tyrant, he does indeed aim to use every lever of power to which he has access (government or not) to hurt his perceived enemies. I just don't think his goal is civil war. That's all I intended to claim in this piece. I can see why you read my claim more broadly, though; I passed over it quickly, and was vague about what I meant because the way he stoked the fire after Babbitt died was quite different from the way he did after Good died. (Actually, now that I look, I may have gotten it wrong anyway: I thought Babbitt was shot *before* Trump's kill-Mike-Pence tweet, but it looks like it happened a few minutes later. Mea culpa there.) So I think we agree on this point, and sorry for the misunderstanding.
As for "enough videos from the last week in Minnesota", though... we don't seem to agree there. I have looked at a lot of those videos. (This is my hometown, after all.) Every time I see some alleged egregious abuse of power, when I look into it further, I discover really important circumstances omitted from the original video. The Richfield Target teens taken into custody have been wielded for a week as proof that ICE is just randomly scooping brown people off the street, but the teens followed the agents (who were trying to use the Target bathroom) for half a block, started a confrontation, and escalated it until they crossed the line into activity that was at least plausibly criminal. The man in Robbinsdale didn't just lose his ID in the car, but allegedly threw a punch (confirmed by local PD, which was on-scene). The "autistic woman just driving to a doctor's appointment" doesn't appear to have been anything of the sort. And so forth.
People who are rightly skeptical of official DHS accounts are just accepting whatever they read in an anonymous Facebook video caption (which again reminds me of J6 supporters, who exhibit the same behavior to this day). Thus, my basic view of ICE is, so far, unchanged from mid-December, both positive and negative.
My basic view of ICE Watch, on the other hand, is increasingly that they are similar to J6ers -- mostly peaceful, mostly earnest, but with an actively insurrectionist minority seeking to prevent the general enforcement of U.S. law by force, ranging from obstruction to pelting with objects to physical altercations to vandalism and sometimes worse violence. (Even on your notably outlier view that the A.G. doesn't have any duty to order the removal of illegal immigrants, I think we agree that he certainly has the legal *authority* to do so.) That's why J6 is a better comparison than any other protest movement in recent history. I don't know what specifically Gov. Walz said yesterday, so can't speak to it.
I'm not sure why you brought up "my pope," but I don't see daylight between my view and his publicly stated view. He opposes the inhumane treatment of immigrants. So do I.
I know that this is off topic, but I'm very concerned about the whole Greenland fiasco. It's one thing for there to be tensions between law enforcement and the communities in which they operate, it's another for the POTUS to threaten to invade an ally in a naked land grab. How do you see the Greenland debacle going, and what are the odds that Trump invades the island?
Sorry. Living in the Twin Cities right now, it is easy to forget that other things are happening in These United States. Greenland just doesn’t get a lot of my mental bandwidth at the moment as my entire friends list, neighborhood groups, newspapers, all of it, are blaring ICE SIGHTING ALERTS and calls for almsgiving. (The latter is good!)
What I would like to happen: It would probably be objectively good for U.S. defense if Greenland were a U.S. territory. I’m not sure how good exactly, but, if Greenland *wanted* to be a U.S. protectorate, I’d be all for it. If they don’t (and it seems like they don’t, especially now), then it doesn’t seem like we should go to the mat over it, but maybe we could make them a really good offer that would change their minds — without the insane and evil threat of military force.
What I expect to happen: Trump will continue to burn goodwill, alliances, and trade for no benefit to the United States or to himself personally. We will not gain control of Greenland. We may lose considerable influence in Greenland and ultimately damage our defensive capabilities there, as we have damaged so many U.S. diplomatic assets in the last twelve months (usually also for little reason and little gain). I don’t think his threat to invade is real. The tariffs he imposed as blackmail seem fairly obviously illegal and make SCOTUS even less likely to uphold his tariff authority than they already were. So maybe that’s the one practical positive outcome from all this: Trump’s Greenland madness could be the decisive factor that gives tariff power back to Congress.
Unlikely outcomes:
I give a 1-3% chance Trump actually takes kinetic military action in some kind of Greenland campaign. This is obviously insane and is 1-3% higher than it ought to be. Our presidential election system is broken.
I give a 10% chance that Trump acquires Greenland by some means (including the smaller chance of military force). I don’t think whatever price he pays in this outcome is likely to be worth it, but he does have a talent for acquiring things he sets his mind to (like the Nobel Peace Prize).
Needless to say, if we seized Greenland by force of arms, this would be a grossly unjust war. NATO would and should activate Article V against us, its founding member. NATO would end immediately, with devastating long-term geopolitical consequences. In the short term, Americans would be morally forbidden from voluntarily supporting the war effort. I don’t advise treason, in the sense of cheering for America’s enemies in a live war, but we certainly couldn’t cheer against our European allies in such a conflict. They would be within their rights to attack us, including by killing our president. Given how abysmally the Greenland thing does in polls, it’s hard to imagine many people would shed a tear if it came to that.
But, as I say, I don’t think that’s probable. Trump is a bully and an idiot but he is not suicidally insane.
Any US defense interest in acquiring Greenland is a lie because the US already is in control of the defense of Greenland under the existing arrangement. This is about Trumps covetousness and nothing else at all. The US would for example be entirely free to bring their military presence there back to cold war levels but actually have reduced them because there just isn't much of a strategic reason to have a bigger presence there.
Also, I really hope "but maybe we could make them a really good offer that would change their minds" is just a brainfart. Consider for a moment of what you would think about, say, China offering the population of Puerto Rico a sufficiently big bribe to make them change colonial powers.
I am of the old-fashioned view that sovereignty over a territory your country needs for defense is always better than treaty-based or agreement-based access, so I think it would be good for the U.S. to acquire Greenland. Again, I'm not sure how good. Perhaps only very marginally good.
As for "really good offer": my understanding is that Denmark's view is that Greenland should determine its own destiny, and that they are fine with Greenland going into U.S. hands if we give them enough. Everyone's happy there: the U.S. is happy because we get Greenland, Greenland's happy because they get whatever we paid, and Denmark is happy because they don't mind a U.S. presence on their doorstep, Denmark no longer has to pay for Greenland (I understand Greenland is a net fiscal cost to Denmark), and Denmark satisfies honor by allowing Greenland its self-determination.
That is not the U.S.'s view of Puerto Rico, especially re: China. On the other hand, if Canada really wanted to acquire Puerto Rico for some reason (Canada sucks in the winter and they want a summer territory? just spitballing here), and they offered P.R. a huge sum of money and promises of development, and P.R. said with a clear voice that they want it, I'd be delighted to let P.R. go into Canadian hands. (But if Canada invaded an unwilling P.R., I'd fight the Mounties on the shores of San Juan, because the U.S.A. is their sovereign and that's our duty as long as we hold sov there.)
So, yeah, not a brain fart, and tbh I'm surprised by the strong view you take against a theoretical acquisition of Greenland where nobody's arm gets twisted and everybody is happy with the outcome.
One problem with the first paragraph is that territory the US "needs for defense" covers a lot more of the Earth than you would want to acquire unless your ultimate goal is some kind of world government. For example then you would also need the Rammstein airbase but that isn't usable without most of Europe's airspace which in turn isn't defensible without the ground under it...
Anyway on the rest:
Being ok with local democratic destiny-decision is very different from being ok with foreign powers influencing local democratic destiny decision. For example Americans are usually very down on foreign political donations though that too got a little blurred in the current bananification.
That you would be happy about some ways to get rid of Puerto Rico is a refutation of the better to own point, but otherwise a red herring. The US doesn't have a territory where it would both allow secession and regret if that option was actually taken, so there is no perfect analogy to Denmark and Greenland. But my China example is getting close enough to make my point: "They can determine their future" and "Foreign powers can influence them to determine their future in the foreign powers' self-interest" are very different propositions.
"That you would be happy about some ways to get rid of Puerto Rico is a refutation of the better to own point"
Is P.R. important for our defense?
"One problem with the first paragraph is that territory the US 'needs for defense' covers a lot more of the Earth than you would want to acquire unless your ultimate goal is some kind of world government"
If everyone were happy to join the U.S. (and I could trust their voters not to be insane), I'd love to have the world join the Union. (If we can't trust their voters, they can at least all be protectorates.) This is, perhaps, the final neoconservative dream... and I am still basically a neocon at heart, albeit a deeply-humbled and reconstructed one.
So, yes, I do think sovereignty is better than not-sovereignty when talking about territory important for our defense, even if that leads to U.S. global government. I just don't think it's better enough to be worth going to very much effort, especially not in the face of opposition, and certainly not by waging an unjust war of conquest.
Anyway, we seem to be arguing about a completely hypothetical situation: a purely theoretical world in which the U.S. makes Greenland a non-coercive generous offer that Greenland and Denmark both accept. We may have principled disagreements in that world.
But I want to emphasize that I think we are on exactly the same page here in our world, where Donald Trump's actions on Greenland have been deranged, dangerous, and deeply counterproductive to not just our Greenlandic foreign policy, but our foreign policy all over the world. It's nuts. It needs to stop. I think we're sympatico on that.
I'm reserving thoughts on the main subject of the article (except to say that Ms. Babbitt's, Ms. Good's, and now Mr. Pretti's deaths are tragedies) for a while longer; I'm just chiming in here to say that if we really wanted a summer territory, we'd be more likely to negotiate with the UK and the Turks and Caicos: https://www.visittci.com/nature-and-history/history/canada-proposed-union
(Or any of the other British Overseas Territories located in the Americas, though I don't know if there's ever been substantial local support for such a union outside the Turks and Caicos Islands. Also, given current tensions between the US and Canada--Donald just broke out the "Governor" epithet again for Carney, which amusingly would have been accurate at some points in his career when he was Governor of the Bank of Canada and later the Bank of England--I wouldn't be interested in adding territory to Canada where transit between those areas and the main part of the country requires either substantial diversion or crossing sovereign US airspace and/or territorial waters, since we can never again trust that the US will be friendly. This would of course also rule out any attempts to acquire Puerto Rico or the US Virgin Islands.)
Also, as for not counselling treason, here's one US veteran outright stating "I would commit treason if the US invaded Greenland or Canada": https://substack.com/@wesodonnell/note/c-204510374
(In Afghanistan, Denmark had a higher per-capita casualty rate than any other NATO member--Georgia's was yet higher--and as I recall, as a percentage of the size of the country's armed forces, the highest such rate at least among NATO members there was incurred by Canada, starting with a friendly-fire incident which saw a US pilot bomb a Canadian position, killing four. I suspect that a lot of US veterans of Afghanistan or Iraq--Denmark sent troops to Iraq, and Canadian soldiers on military exchange in US units sent there were not recalled--either had their own asses pulled out of the fire by a Canadian or Danish soldier, or know someone who owes their life to a Canadian or a Dane. That Donald's harshest rhetoric is directed against these two countries, therefore, is grievously insulting, and while I don't think it would be justified at all absent actual military aggression, at this time I think a Canadian-Danish operation to kidnap Donald and Melania Trump would be less unjustified than the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro: https://substack.com/@dpareja/note/c-195790209. Everyone from human rights lawyers to Marine Le Pen were going WTF over that one; see also https://www.uncommons.ca/p/its-in-our-collective-interests-when.)
Also, here's a largely economic analysis of why any offer to buy Greenland (which, as isn't noted in the article, would almost certainly also have to come along with a massive ongoing cash subsidy, since my understanding is that Greenlanders oppose independence at this time largely on the basis of their living standards decreasing without the current Danish subsidy) would have to be astronomically huge to have a hope of being accepted: https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-price-of-greenland-and-the-cost-of-attacking-sovereignty/
(Another interesting thing to note: the current government coalition in Denmark currently only enjoys majority support in the Folketing because it is supported by all four members representing the autonomous territories of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland. So there is in that sense a base political motive for the current government not to wish to lose sovereignty over Greenland.)
"Also, as for not counselling treason, here's one US veteran outright stating "I would commit treason if the US invaded Greenland or Canada":"
I confess to having phrased what I said very carefully, because it occurred to me at the time that I wrote it that, if I plainly stated what was *really* on my mind, it was conceivable that some future court could construe it as a capital crime, and I wanted to think it through more carefully before committing to it.
So I don't advise treason, in the event of a U.S. war of aggression against Denmark! I also don't advise against it. I express no advice whatsoever at this time on the subject of undermining U.S. war efforts in the event of an unprovoked war with Denmark, for example by acts of sabotage at the Fort Snelling military base near me.
(I'm probably being overcautious, since U.S. treason law is pretty clear that you can't be tried for supporting the enemy before it was a declared enemy.)
It's so hard to tell with Trump whether he's bloviating or if he really is hell bent on getting Greenland by whatever means necessary. Given what Miller and Bessent have said I'm leaning towards it being the latter. Hopefully cooler heads in Congress, the Military and the Admin will be able to prevail and talk Trump out of it, because God help us if they don't.
As for the tariffs, I've heard that the recent delays in the verdict could be signs that they're gonna side with Trump. Do you think that's the case, or are there other reasons?
"because God help us if they don't."
I certainly agree with that.
"As for the tariffs, I've heard that the recent delays in the verdict could be signs that they're gonna side with Trump."
I've been unplugged from the chatter, so maybe I'm out-of-date, but I don't think that the tariff case has been even slightly delayed. My baseline expectation for any major SCOTUS case is that the opinion will be issued in June. There was a lot of chatter last week about the tariff case coming out on January 9... but that was the *very first opinion day* of the entire term. (Several preceding opinions had been simple per curiams, none of them longer than 5 pages with huge margins; Jan 9 decided Bowe v U.S., the first meaty decision of the year, and not a major one.) The possibility that we might get tariffs on the earliest possible date was tantalizing, because it was possible to imagine SCOTUS rushing that decision out as quickly as possible. But I thought it was kinda nuts when people started talking like it was expected.
Now, to be fair, tariffs were argued quite early this term, with orals in early November, so it's reasonable to bet that the decision will be out before June. Last term, there were 7 oral arguments in November (of 2024). None were major cases. Two got dismissed as improvidently granted (oof), so I'm not counting those. The first of the cases decided was indeed in January: EMD Sales v Carrera was decided unanimously on 15 Jan 2025.
But the *last* of the cases from November 2024 were not decided until the end of April 2025 (Velazquez v. Bondi, on Apr 22; Advocate Christ Medical v. Kennedy, on Apr 29).
So I don't think people should consider the tariff case late until the end of April.
Trump could still win it, of course. I still think he's likely to lose, but he could still pull it out. But I don't think the timetable provides evidence one way or another. Sounds like anxiety seeking validation. We've all been there, of course.
I could be wrong, of course, especially since I've been unplugged from the conlaw feeds lately.
I think the idea here is if the tariffs are illegal the damage currently keeps compounding. On the other hand if they are legal there is no hurry. So what the Supreme court thinks of the actual question should correlate with how urgent they think it is.
I like to think that SCOTUS will be very hesitant to rush any major cases after the dog's breakfast they made of the insurrection case. Even people who agreed with the outcome thought the reasoning in that was an absolute pile, and it required a good deal less nuance and finesse than tariff law.
I do see your point, and, yes, it was fair for people to wonder whether SCOTUS might see tariffs as SUCH an emergency that they'd make it their A-1 top priority case and rule on it first thing in January. But it was always (in my view, anyway) a pretty low-probability outcome, so no reason to update our expectations yet.
On the specific topic of tariffs I would just note this:
In 2024, following the lead of the United States and to support North American auto manufacturing, Canada imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle imports.
Due to recent trade tensions (and pressure from Manitoba, against pressure from Ontario), Canada agreed to allow 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles to be imported yearly at the previous tariff of 6%. (The Beaverton noted that this is tantamount to choosing lawful evil over chaotic evil.)
This so incensed Donald (he recently told Conservative MP Jamil Jivani, an old acquaintance of JD, to say "Tell the Canadians I love them", which I can only interpret as the sort of "love" a domestic abuser has for their partner; this may also be the only sort of "love" that Donald knows) that he threatened a 100% tariff on all imports into the US from Canada.
Here's just one problem with that: the US gets most of its potash, a necessary component in agriculture, from Canada. The other major producers are Russia, Belarus and China (which is a net importer). A 100% tariff would essentially cut off that supply.
(I will note that another necessary component of fertilizer, whose name I can't recall at the moment, is mostly produced in Florida, and we import quite a bit from there, so this is an issue for trade in both directions.)
I will completely reserve my thoughts on what the resulting spike in food prices would do to the US economy, and to families across the US.