February 3, 2026
An amusing bit of Internet slang that I began hearing some years ago was the acronym "NPC."
NPC stood for "Non-Playing Character," a video-game reference to the very large number of characters who do not represent participants but are instead generated automatically by the software system itself. These constitute the background wallpaper for the humans who are actually playing the game, and are therefore always rather robotic and simplistic in their actions and responses. A classic example might be the members of a large horde of Orcs who are so easily slain by someone playing a hero wielding a magic sword.
In its broader, metaphorical context, the reference was to those individuals whose responses to the stimuli of our controlled-media are so simplistic and predictable that they function as almost mindless meat-puppets, easily manipulated by the powerful forces that quietly shape and dominate our society.
Over the last twelve months the Department of Homeland Security of the Trump Administration has deployed its militarized federal immigration enforcement agents in numerous high-profile actions around the country. These troops are widely called ICE, a loose term that actually subsumes agents of the Border Patrol as well, and their operations have attracted a great deal of public attention.
The controversial fatal shootings in Minneapolis recently raised that issue to a top national news story, and when I've considered the responses of many conservatives and right-wingers to these developments, the term NPC has increasingly come to my mind.
Last week I published an article on the politically self-destructive policies of President Donald Trump, as emphasized by leading Republican strategist Karl Rove. Although Trump had been elected based upon his promise to sharply curtail illegal immigration, the excessively harsh tactics of his ICE agents had now cost him the key support of top podcaster Joe Rogan, a crucial pillar of his 2024 presidential victory.
- Is Donald Trump Playing 27-Dimensional Chess?
- Ron Unz • The Unz Review • January 26, 2026 • 5,400 Words
The bulk of my article had been written prior to the fatal Saturday morning shooting of Alex Pretti by ICE agents in Minneapolis. So although I briefly mentioned that incident and showed a couple of the early videos carefully analyzing what had actually happened, it was only a small part of my discussion.
However, I did note some of the remarkable ironies, which had been emphasized by Glenn Greenwald in his coverage of the killing :
As acclaimed journalist Glenn Greenwald noted in his own discussion of the incident, not only were the facts absolutely clear-cut in this particular case, but it was equally obvious that all the government officials were blatantly lying. Greenwald particularly condemned the "Israelization" of American society, in which anyone killed by the government is immediately denounced as "a domestic terrorist."
One of the main excuses provided by Trump's minions was that the victim had possessed a perfectly legal handgun for which he had a permit, a handgun that he had never touched let alone attempted to draw. For many decades conservatives had always expressed their fervent support for the Second Amendment, so Greenwald noted how strange it was that so many of them had now totally reversed their position on that issue.
Tucker Carlson ranks as the leading figure in the conservative media landscape, and he expressed those same views, as did former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fierce MAGA loyalist:
I've carefully followed American politics for nearly the last half-century, and during all those years a leading element of the conservative political coalition, especially lauded by right-wingers, had been the pro-gun groups. These were always fiercely protective of the rights of all Americans to keep and bear firearms, and they sometimes even took those ideological positions to extremes.
Most of Trump's administration has been notoriously right-wing, and everyone would have assumed that nearly all its members fell into that pro-gun camp. Yet as the exact circumstances of the Pretti killing became known, an ideological reversal of staggering proportions immediately occurred. As they defended and justified the ICE killing, Trump officials seemed to be arguing that federal agents were authorized to summarily execute any American citizen who exercised his legal right to own and carry a handgun.
Judge Andrew Napolitano is a former FoxNews host, and one of his recent videos conveniently included a montage of numerous senior Trump administration officials taking that surprising position. In their public remarks, they suggested that anyone who brought a perfectly legal firearm to a protest could justifiably be shot and killed by federal ICE agents.
I was hardly the only person to be shocked by these government statements. The same day that my piece appeared, the Wall Street Journal ran an article quoting various conservative Second Amendment leaders who expressed their total dismay over the positions taken by those Trump officials:
A number of Republicans have criticized Alex Pretti-who was killed by a federal Border Patrol agent Saturday-for carrying a gun during protest activity.
They are facing pushback from an unlikely quarter: gun-rights groups that traditionally have largely sided with the GOP.
"The first thing that politicians want to do is blame the gun," said Taylor Rhodes, spokesman for the National Association for Gun Rights, based in Greenville, S.C.
Rhodes said he has attended hundreds of protests and rallies over the years, always with a gun. He said a thorough investigation is needed, but judging from videos of the shooting, "I don't think it looks good on the ICE agents."
For Second Amendment activists, the conversation around Pretti's shooting intersects with an argument they have long made: Gun owners have a constitutional right to carry their firearms in public.
Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse, was filming federal officers on a street before he was shot and killed...
The NRA struck a different tone the same day when Bill Essayli, a Republican and first assistant U.S. attorney in California, posted on X: "If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you."
The NRA condemned his remarks as "dangerous and wrong."
Many other news stories and interviews reinforced the same stunned reaction to that sharp and totally unexpected ideological reversal:
FBI Director Kash Patel magnified the blowback Sunday on Fox News' "Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo." No one, Patel said, can "bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It's that simple."
Erich Pratt, vice president of Gun Owners of America, was incredulous.
"I have attended protest rallies while armed, and no one got injured," he said on CNN.
Conservative officials around the country made the same connection between the First and Second amendments.
"Showing up at a protest is very American. Showing up with a weapon is very American," state Rep. Jeremy Faison, who leads the GOP caucus in Tennessee, said on social media.
Trump's first-term vice president, Mike Pence, called for "full and transparent investigation of this officer involved shooting"...
"You remember Kyle Rittenhouse and how he was made a hero on the right," said Trey Gowdy, a Republican former congressman and attorney for Trump during one of his first-term impeachments. "Alex Pretti's firearm was being lawfully carried.... He never brandished it."
Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who has studied the history of the gun debate, said the fallout "shows how tribal we've become." Republicans spent years talking about the Second Amendment as a means to fight government tyranny, he said.
"The moment someone who's thought to be from the left, they abandon that principled stance," Winkler said.
Indeed, just as that former Republican Congressman had mentioned, one of the most famous cases of a civilian who brought his legal firearm to a public protest was that of Kyle Rittenhouse, who even crossed state lines to do so during August 2020.
In Wisconsin that 17-year-old Illinois resident used his AR-15 rifle to shoot three antifa who attacked him, killing two of them, and was greatly lionized by conservatives and right-wingers for doing so.
But due to the circumstances of the current case, all that celebrated history has now been entirely flushed down the memory hole. Several years ago in a different context, I noted a passage from George Orwell's classic dystopian novel 1984:
There's that famous scene in which an orator is giving a lengthy wartime speech at a political rally, praising the heroic ally of Eurasia and denouncing the arch-foe of Eastasia, but then is quietly handed a note partway through and completely reverses himself, vilifying the former and hailing the latter. "We have always been at war with Eurasia."
Most government officials probably have such little personal integrity that we shouldn't be too surprised when they completely reverse their ideological positions as political circumstances warrant. But the reactions of so many right-wing Trump supporters fell into a different category.
Our very lightly moderated website attracts a wide range of extremist or eccentric commenters, most of them on the right.
Their views are usually about what I would expect. But I was really quite surprised to see that a large fraction of those fervent right-wingers had suddenly thrown overboard their decades of fierce commitment to gun rights and the Second Amendment, and instead fully endorsed the contrary position taken by the Trump Administration. They now all agreed that federal agents could justifiably kill-summarily execute-anyone who had the audacity to bring a fully legal firearm to a protest demonstration or perhaps even merely carry it on the streets.
It was at this point that the slang acronym of NPC came to my mind, exemplifying how these dim-witted right-wingers were so easily manipulated into suddenly reversing what had supposedly been their deepest personal convictions.
Indeed, that reversal was so stark that some more thoughtful right-wingers even suspected that many of the others might literally be NPCs, namely AI-constructs generated by Palantir or some other government contractor to flood the Internet and pretend that the new firearms policies of the Trump Administration had far more support than they actually did.
I've never owned a gun and I'm not sure I've ever even handled one during my entire life except as a child when I fired pellet guns in the shooting galleries of local carnivals. But for the last couple of generations I've read countless news stories in which conservatives and right-wingers praised the Second Amendment as the most important part of our Bill of Rights because it protected all the others against governmental tyranny. Yet now many of them seem to have suddenly thrown overboard all those decades of deepest commitment.