What a braindead take.

By calling out ICE as masked thugs you’re calling them exactly what they are thereby stripping them of any legitimacy they may have in people’s eyes by being part of the government. As for caling them gang members, that’s exactly what they are. They’re members of the biggest gang - the government.

Only a racist person who believes in race would automatically think of non white people when they hear “masked thugs”. Anyone who isn’t racist and doesn’t believe in race just pictures thugs with masks.

The counter to racism is to realise that race doesn’t exist, not joining in believing in this arbitrary social construct. Once you adopt this view you stop seeing race everywhere. If you’re anti-racist but you believe race exists and you see it everywhere in everything then you’re part of the problem.

100%, thank you. We can not be handwringing every little thing because people like this just want to “be part of the conversation”. The only good point here is that this IS just cop shit, but that’s the thing, it’s on a whole other level where it actually threatens the police themselves, and rhetorically that’s useful for once.

Please pick and choose your battles here in 2026 instead of falling for this faux-intellectual college kid bait discourse I’m begging you. ICE are thugs. That term comes from India and refers to a class of dudes who were so hard up under British Imperialism they would just kill people in the road by sneaking up on them. The US govt us debt trapping white supremacist goons into killing for them (no I am not making excuses for them) I’d say it etymologically fits the bill. And if it doesn’t okay, I get that you want to make world better and Always Say The Exact Right Thing, but these people are hurting us NOW and when they’re down the fucking street taking my neighbors I need everyone to be on the same page with me and not moralize at me about my choice of words! This bullshit is fedposting whether accidentally or intentionally, it’s like when CHUDs make fun of us for our best impulses and we can’t argue back or else it looks like we’re abandoning principles to assholes who are moving the goal posts they control around us to present us as idiots.

“Gang” I more strongly see the argument for… but they ARE that, they ARE organized criminals, and they wouldn’t be the first mix-race-yet-white-supremacist-fascist-organized-criminal outfit. See also LAPD and the Proud Boys, etc etc. You cannot just retcon language into being race-based because CNN used it a certain way in the 90s when running urban crime stories. You cannot let the Neoliberal racist world order be the weather vein for what literal words you are and aren’t allowed to say, because before those words were forcibly associated with racialized crime reporting THEY WERE REAL WORDS. We cannot do this to all language or we’ll be talking like “Orange Man(bad) uses COP ARMY (ACAB, almost forgot heh) to distract us from the fact he grpd and unal*ved Persons of a Younger Persuasion.” Please defend our language and our right to express what we’re seeing in real time, do not automatically self-censor with no wider consensus based off merely seeing a post. PLEASE.

Did you respond to the wrong person? I fail to see how any of what you said could be directed at me.

do not automatically self-censor

grpd and unal*ved

lmao pretty sure you can say raped and killed here