Matthew Sample II

What you see happening with the ICE Floyd situation is the Left capitalizing upon a sufficiently ambiguous tragedy to advance a dialectical campaign. A dialectical campaign is more powerful than other kinds of campaigns because it affects two targets, not just one, who can be set against one another. The ambiguity of what happened in Minnesota allows that by effectively allowing for "the Left" to see it one way and "the Right" to see it another way. What this enables is for "the Left" to rally around one perspective while "the Right" rallies around another perspective where the facts are the same but their interpretations (both literal and moral) are different. This causes both sides to split, entrench, polarize, and to turn off their critical thinking in favor of tribalized positioning. The energy of that split is what drives the dialectic, which relies on creating side-to-side or circular motion in one plane (say, the horizontal plane, Left and Right) to advance an agenda in an orthogonal direction (say, vertically). The energy of the fight drives a meta-narrative, perhaps of intractable division, civil war, meaning of law, reach and capacity of the Constitution, etc., and not necessarily in the same way. This is the political operating system of what we call "Leftism," which is intrinsically dialectical. The only way to beat it is not to participate in it and to "get above it" and call it out for its operational nature. The ambiguity of interpretation of the situation is what provides the energy, and ICE Floyd is basically perfect for that. In fact, the operation of the dialectic in a case like this is a little worse than just what I described above because while "the Left" will all see it the same way for many different reasons (solidarity, media frame control, etc.), "the Right" is less monolithic and won't. That is, you'll get reasonable people on "the Right" who don't agree with each other about the interpretation of the event, and they'll fragment while the Left consolidates. You'll often also see this destructive logic happen in a struggle session that targets a group through an individual who made some kind of mistake. The group is put into a dilemma of standing with their member or admitting the mistake honestly. The point isn't what the group does, though; it's that, being composed of individuals with their own thoughts and minds, it will do both. Some people will side with the target, perhaps even looking illegitimate and tribal in the process, while others will say the target made a mistake and should "eat" it. This division inside the group is part of the point. The Left, which operates much more effectively on the logic of friend-enemy, which is totalitarian and execrable on its own merits, is extracting this advantage against "the Right" here too with ICE Floyd. While most of "the Right" tends to agree that the ICE officer was at least mostly justified, some don't. Now they're disagreeing, if not fighting in some cases. Again, this is only possible because of the ambiguity in what happened. If the woman in Minnesota was unambiguously trying to charge the officer with her car, there would be no friction or debate, and whatever the Left did initially, the story would "go away" really quickly afterward. If the officer had been clearly way out of line, most or all of "the Right" would have denounced him, and there'd be no friction, fighting, or division. And so the dialectic progresses. A key purpose of this dialectical attack is to create fragmentation through entrenchment, and so a central way to defeat it is not to get hellbent on one interpretation or another, especially if you're just an everyday citizen (just having an X account doesn't make us pundits, and our reputations aren't really that "on the line" over how we read these things). It is possible to counter the Left's narratives, drives, and agendas without having to get into deeply entrenched positions about what specifically happened or how it should be interpreted. For example, the Left is pushing hard for ICE to leave Minnesota and all Democrat-run states, for Kristi Noem to be impeached, and in some cases for far worse things, like the doxxing and murder of federal law enforcement, or even just to more homegrown impediment actions against them. All of this can be easily denounced and the focus of most commentary whether or not this officer was justified in the specific action of engaging with deadly force in that instance or not. All of ICE, Trump's immigration agenda, Kristi Noem, other officers, etc., are not impugned by the actions of this one agent, right or wrong. I'm also not saying to abandon making the case. Justice should be done, and debating the justification of the officer is therefore warranted, but at the same time, there are bigger fish to fry here: the Left's narratives. Prioritizing is key, as is admitting that there's enough ambiguity in the situation as it is visible to us not to get so entrenched we lose our heads (as the Left wants us to). My purposes in this post, though, are mostly to point out to you that the ambiguity in situations like this are in fact the magical ingredient that advances Leftist agendas. I hope to help you to understand that it's those that will generate the most strife, and that strife and division is a product of their dialectical thinking and operation.