feigned (?) reading comprehension issues
Well, you know how it goes: Someone who doesn't know the meaning of a word, nor the law that applies to it, will always have a legit opinion about what they find dodgy as long as they have the right politics.
Anecdotally, once upon a time I knew some people who worried about suppression of free speech, so they set aside basic expectations of integrity and even literacy on the grounds that
if certain arguments are obliged to facts and reliability,
then political opinions are being suppressed. I knew some of them for decades, and it was never clear which arguments and behaviors were exempt from the expectations others were expected to meet.
The moral of the story is that some arguments, opinions, and outlooks are unsustainable in an environment requiring even the most basic of integrity. But, of course, morals of stories have no meaning in amoral-relativist solipsism. Neither do words.
It's like the practical difference between, say, "free speech" and the First Amendment. Or, as such, the difference between what someone wants the law to say and what it actually says.
I will give you this advice, though: Certain lines you and I know how to parse are not so immediately apparent to those who do not understand the meaning and history of those thresholds.
Doxxing public employees, if done correctly, isn't really doxxing. Moreover, doxxing isn't implicitly illegal. Furthermore, in a circumstance when both civil disobedience and open perjury are in play, certain disclaimers become useful. Confusion about those disclaimers, however, is virtually inevitable in situations countenancing an argument or outlook that cannot sustain itself according to even the most basic of integrity.
And what might be hard for people to see, either from abroad or according to their time, is how the feelgood tough talk of yesteryear fell into disrepute because of the people who liked it. It's a classic American example of selective incomprehension, and as you're aware, that sort of behavior is both predictable and unbelievable.
†
Anecdote on incomprehension: So, one day, at the pub, someone starts doing this bit advocating mass murder, but the thing is that everybody at the table kind of gets the joke. Still, at a time when mass violence is coming unhinged, there is a reasonable question whether the people he's making the joke about would actually get the joke. And as it happens, the one is determined to make his point, doubles down, triples down, playing a hard line. Maybe someone else might take him wrongly, but we at the table get the joke.
By contrast, one day someone else at the table did a line about stochastic violence, and ordinarily we all get the joke. But there was this dude, from overseas as it happens, who didn't get the joke. And, sure, as much as he opined on American culture, politics, and history, he apparently missed the whole American societal episode about stochastic violence. What was strange, though, was the Americans at the table who suddenly forgot. Even the guy pushing mass murder tried to wag moral like he didn't have a clue.
For them, it wasn't a matter of the ignorance or incomprehension being believable or not, but, rather, whether it was convenient.
†
Here is a conundrum: The public record is not doxxing. Try to imagine an individual arrested, but by nobody. We have reason to actually expect this outcome; law enforcers are observably not attending regular procedure and process. Compared to the number of crimes committed by law enforcement and the prospect of what to do about the prosecution of their victims, the easiest way to break the culpability chain will be to detach the law enforcer from the act. The record of who arrested who for what is already known to be unreliable; what are the chances that the Masked Icemen meeting arrest quotas are writing and filing proper incident reports? When it is time to seek justice for those abused in our pogrom, we might well find it impossible to figure who actually arrested them in the first place.
Given that most Americans don't know "immigration court" isn't part of the judiciary, and pogrom supporters have every reason to pretend such ignorance, the note for internationals is hard to fashion.
As it is, Americans should be able to find out, right now, in the moment, who arrested that person for what. That's not happening in catch-and-release harassment, because a proper incident report for that behavior would describe a crime by law enforcement officers. Additionally, the "papers, please" demand leading to the immigration-related detention of American citizens is itself illegal; proper incident reports would describe crime by law enforcers.
History will likely show us thousands of people ostensibly arrested and detained, even to the point that government custody is not in dispute, by nobody.
†
Comparatively, it really is hard to believe pretenses of ignorance failing to recognize that DHS snatchers are either public employees or felons for pretending. Nobody pretending basic comprehension of a free society should, at this point, be utterly ignorant about transparency. Just for instance.
Compared to believability, though, it would take a special kind of stupid to think a resource for helping people comply with the law is some sort of illegal internet page. I guess it depends on how one defines illegal. Presently, for instance, the snatchers and their bosses consider naming public employees some kind of illegal. (It's a novel thesis, as such, of the sort we were never supposed to imagine our law enforcers attempting, but individual values vary, and in increasingly global discourse, expectations of even such basic comprehension are almost dangerously unreliable compared to the value of ignorance.)
The idea of feigning ignorance or incomprehension has always seemed something of a gamble, but individual values vary, and if Sartre suggested they fear "to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side", then, sure, an appeal to ignorance as omni-syndrome commonality might look like a calculable gamble, and is certainly a choice.
