One of my favorite pieces of mental work that I figured out in the old noggin is this piece here — the origins of memetic conflict that happens when different value systems collide. In order to completely grok it, you’re going to have to read a little about v-Memes — it’s not that hard. But the short answer is that when different societies, based on different social structures, run into each other over contested ground, how evolved those systems are will definitely decide the outcome.

The short version is that in the classic Spiral Dynamics progression of societies — Survival, Tribal, Authoritarian, Legalistic, Performance-Based, Communitarian and on into the Second Tier — misunderstanding and conflict will depend on the memetic spacing of levels between the two conflicting social structures. Two levels (e.g. between Tribal and Legalistic) will result in Incomprehension — the two systems cannot understand each other. Three levels? What I describe as the Insanity/Barbarism conflict, which is what is happening currently in the conflict over ICE in Minnesota.

Here’s the social structures from Don Beck as a refresher.

Through a complicated path, mostly committed by psychopaths seizing control of dominant foundational myths in the Lefty Noosphere, the current Democratic Party has reverted primarily to Tribal knowledge structures. That drives emergent focus on Donald Trump as some version of The Great Satan, and a pathology across Lefties of all stripes, but especially their intellectual caste, with what is called Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). The justification for TDS is honestly monotonous, and is an exemplar of how higher knowledge structures that may have been present in individuals, necessarily simplify and rigidify when downconverted into Tribal forms. Trump is evil, Trump is corrupt, Trump is buddies with Epstein and a pedophile, and so on. No amount of context can derail this myth structure, other than the Left being forced to recognize that Trump is still President.

This is powerful when coded into some form of exchangeable morality — numerous folks don’t have to know much to “virtue signal” — communicate to others in the tribe their status through ostensible piety, of these foundational myths. It IS true that most of these Tribal myths are all centered around “Trump as a dishonorable, evil man.” The problem is that the world is a more complex place than whether you hate Donald Trump or not. And to some extent, the Republicans aren’t helping much, either. The current Republican administration is hardcore Performance/Goal-Based thinking. The one thing that matters is getting done whatever the governing item is. And Trump engages in constant negotiations with his adversaries, obviously due to his background as a New York real estate mogul.

This comes off as absolutely insane to the Lefty In-group/Out-group Tribalists, who, with poor consequential thinking, cannot perceive how they’ve been co-opted by their parasitic psychopath class, who had prior to Trump and Elon Musk showing up, had established a rich vein of revenue through exploitation of face-value virtue-laden topics that the majority of their base had lapped right up. “USAID is saving starving kids in Africa!” is one of my favorites. Why? I worked for USAID in Egypt, and had the surreal opportunity of seeing how they actually worked. I was window dressing for some competing ruling faction in Egypt at the time, supposedly working on a fertilizer plant control system, which then was one of the projects providing cover for the deep political machinations going on, facilitated by political US meddling. The end result of which was the Arab Spring, one of the original Color Revolutions, which did not quite go the way we planned.

The larger Republican Party is not completely Performance-based. There are still components that have strong Authoritarian bents (the Christian Right) as well as a large institutional caste of actors, named along with their Democratic counterparts, the Deep State, occupying the Legalistic v-Meme. If the Republicans seem diffuse as far as worldview, it’s because they are. While the Democrats are spiraling out of control on pure Tribalism, the Republicans face a queasy coalition centered around less government and traditional government favors to corporations and businesses. Which is problematic, because while the Democrats can coalesce around absolutely insane myths, like gender identity is only determined by how a person feels today. And because of their simplicity, these information structures are truncated, based on emotional appeal and very viral.

And so we end up in the current disaster in Minneapolis. In the last few weeks, two “activists” have been shot and killed. Theoretically, these “activists” are somehow nonviolent Legal Observers and merely traveling around after ICE and documenting arrests made by ICE. The videos of what actually is happening, and other recent disclosures regarding their organization, do, in no way shape or form, support any of this. The activists are extremely well-organized and coordinated in a network where individuals are dispatched via the messaging app Signal to tail ICE vehicles, and upon arriving on the scene, disrupt ICE arrests of illegal immigrants. When they arrive, they act literally like insane monkeys on meth, often closing distance with ICE agents face-to-face, while blowing whistles and horns. With the recent information regarding Signal app organizing, it is my belief that they could actually be considered a criminal conspiracy, subject to Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) sanctions.

Of course, the PROBLEM is within the context of their Tribal situation, sprinkled with fragmented myths about Constitutional function, is that they don’t perceive themselves as a criminal operation. Self awareness is pathetically low. And that is deeply problematic when dealing with the outside world. The second person shot, Alex Pretti, a 37 year old ER nurse — far past the age to rationalize this kind of behavior with youthful ignorance, showed up for his round in the “chase the ICE agents and harass them” sporting a handgun — a Sig Sauer 9mm. One of the unbreakable rules in my world, when I was helping run a large civil disobedience campaign, was NO GUNS. You don’t have guns at a protest, because if things go south, and sometimes they do, LEOs can kill you legally. And then you’re dead.

This particular type of Sig Sauer also has a handling misfire problem, and if dropped, can go off. It’s also no surprise to me that it was an ER nurse who made such a bad judgment call. ER staff were the worst of the COVID alarmist crowd, and there’s also no question that trauma can stack up and cause erratic reactions in stressful situations. Immediately, the propaganda side on the Left seized on the notion that Alex had a legal concealed carry permit, and in the classic distortion of thought that is haunting the Left nowadays, put that in the blender and came out with “ICE needs to adapt their tactics to support Legal Observers’ Second Amendment rights to carry hand guns into violent situations and conflicts with ICE officers.” Are you kidding me?

Even while they’re acting like meth-crazed monkeys. I watched the videos involving the incident where the gun went off (my guess is likely a misfire) and then what happened is what can happen in any LEO arrest scenario. Once the cop thinks either he or his buddy is under threat from a firearm, the cop will proceed to empty their clip into the suspect. Which usually means a dead perp. Much was also made in this Lefty propaganda round about how he was defending a woman “activist/Legal observer.” The clip I saw didn’t include the prior where she got into it with the ICE agents. But I’ve been in enough situations to know that a certain subset of women will fly off the handle, and believe they are the reincarnation of an invincible Valkyrie, and aggressively attack even LEOs. Call it the Mama Bear Social Control response. I even trained my two sons, now ages 25 and 27, when they were 16 and 18, what to do in a situation with potential law enforcement involvement (say a fight at a party.). They are both strapping young lads, and they both know that they are supposed to grab their girlfriends and run like hell, preferably before the cops show up. And if the girlfriend is dancing on his arm, screaming about her honor, and won’t leave — then ditch her. Cops will always threat-assess, and my two sons are 6’3″ and 6’5″. Which means one is going on the bumper with the bracelets, and the other is going in the backseat of the cruiser. The cop is not going to care about any dancing fairy princess.

Once again, the arguments from the Left to support their position are the result of projection and supposition — perceived moral order. Not validity grounding with anything resembling reality. I think it’s hard to understand this completely. I think a lot of the people involved in the obstruction of ICE in MN are likely middle-class, and have little to no experience with law enforcement. So they view themselves as White Knights, endorsed by their communities, and encouraged by local and state leadership in these actions. They view that because these various state and local officials have endorsed their moral position, and said they are brave and courageous, that somehow these ostensibly powerful people will rescue them. Little do they realize that their distorted sense of morality has no real power in a federal courtroom. And the other key fact is that they also are patsies ripe for disavowal by exactly those same individuals.

And what to think of the state and other government officials encouraging the insurrection? They’re locked in a deal with utter personal destruction once all is revealed. There’s tons of Somali daycare and medical service fraud that it is simply impossible to believe local and state officials either ignored, or were directly on the take. Fraud in Blue States is going to be an emergent issue in the coming New Year. While the Minnesota cabal, including Tim Walz and his lieutenant governor, Peggy Flanagan, seem to be mostly passively raking in the cash, and NOT involving the crazy gangland violence on the US southern border, it still means that this will be certainly the end of their political careers and inflated standard of living (Walz has already stepped down from running in the next election.)

But there are larger implications nationally. It’s through a glass darkly on what has been going on in our western southern tier, whose political caste is thoroughly intertwined with far more malevolent actors than the displaced Somali pirates in Ohio and Minnesota. You don’t have to stretch the Overton Window too far to see how the CIA facilitated Somali immigration, starting in the ’90s. But most of what came across the southern border during Joe Biden’s disastrous presidency came courtesy of the Sinaloan and other cartels. Walz and his crooked cohort may just end their lives in the big house. But that’s not the same for the various political forces across California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. The cartels are fond of torture and execution. And the Pandora’s box of inflated human trafficking revenue that happened through the betrayal of the Biden administration, and in particular Alejandro Mayorkas, has collapsed. No real natural born killer is going to take that lying down. The cockroaches are going to eat themselves.

Getting back to the primary point of this piece — the Left has left itself open to destruction in the context of memetic understanding by viewing the current administration as insane. They’re not. The problem is the flip side of the memetic conflict is that the Right views them as barbarians, which is decidedly not how the Left views themselves. The Left better get over its fascination with its self-generated moral order, and quick. The federal government, as well as most of the country, is nowhere near the point of collapse. And while the Left may not view themselves that way, the Trump administration, especially in the context of its goal-oriented focus of clearing out illegal aliens doesn’t give a shit about their moral order. They possess the reins of law and order on their side. And in the end, law and order are popular with the general population.

And as the effects of brainwashing using permission structures, started by David Axelrod and Barack Obama, wash off, my bet is no one is going to give a damn about the ginned up Lefty moral order that was potentially not created, but certainly accelerated, during the fractured COVID years. And grounding back to reality is brutal. It involves arcing.

And that means someone is going to get severely burned.