Fever Dreams
A Message for Angry and Bewildered Progressives
With Minneapolis police having been ordered to stand down and let protests burn unimpeded, radicals are blocking streets and constructing barricades… and have even reportedly constructed another ‘TAZ’ (temporary autonomous zone - an anarchist protest tactic) in downtown Minneapolis. Build the wall!
In all seriousness: these things will not work. None of your tactics will. They will only result in more division and turmoil and probably violence. I want to explain why that is.
I can see your rage and your confusion, as I interact with people like you and read your social media posts and comments. You are having difficulty understanding what is happening. You’re having difficulty reconciling your ideas. Most of all you’re having difficulty finding a way forward. What is to be done? What can we do?
I don’t think the people in your echo chambers will be able to lend any useful advice. All I see is increasingly febrile and violent proclamations and exhortations: hatred towards ICE and towards Trump and towards Trump voters, fantasies of violent resistance or revolution. Most pathetic of all, I see half-hearted cries for some more conventional (and more peaceful) measure… a general strike perhaps? More protests? I can offer something that none of you have: a different perspective. Many of you have come to truly hate ICE agents. I don’t hate anyone, but I do fear people. I fear people who are so certain of their essential correctness and moral superiority that they are drifting towards political intolerance and plans of violence. Perhaps I can show you something that you have missed. I know that I won’t convince you but I am sincere.
[And this should hardly be necessary, but in the era of identity politics and ‘lived experience’ and political narcissism and solipsism I must emphasize that I am no xenophobe. I voted for Joe Biden. I lived in New York City for nearly 8 years (and not in the white parts) and my closest friends are immigrants who have at times struggled with their own legal status. My ex-girlfriend was an illegal immigrant and I teach middle school, to classrooms comprised mostly of first-generation Haitian-Americans. I love the idea and the reality of immigration, and I think it has real and compelling benefits for American society. I’ve lived in poor neighborhoods for most of my adult life and have been poor or working class myself for the duration. Whatever image you may have constructed of the Trump voter, I hope you’ll keep in mind that it’s purely a metal archetype and a negative and unfair one (and therefore technically bigoted). 65% of Native Americans voted for Trump. Most legal immigrants have expressed overall support for Trump. Most Hispanic men voted for Trump. On the other hand, let’s look at the demographics of Antifa (which is a discrete organization, although it is decentralized, and which does openly promote violence) or of the protests over the weekend.]
Antifa mugshots
According to the people above, these are the faces of white supremacy
You watch the news and you’re stunned. You’re incredulous. You’re grieving. You’re enraged. How could this happen? How could ICE launch what are essentially military occupations of American cities and end up killing a U. S. citizen without any justice? What can be done about this? How do we recover our democracy? And more urgently: how are Trump supporters okay with this? Are they just consumed with hatred for immigrants, or for progressive protesters? Aren’t they a bit hypocritical, whining about the death of (bigot!) Charlie Kirk, while celebrating the murder of a mother of three?!
Here’s the thing: Trump supporters don’t see the world the same way you do. This difference is not explained by a lack of empathy on their part. On this issue I would wager that Trump supporters have more empathy than their opponents. It’s the mark of an emotional mind to assume that opposition to illegal immigration (or support for the detention of illegal immigrants - basically the same thing) must be accompanied by or rooted in hostility towards illegal immigrants. Personally, I have no animus towards illegal immigrants. But I want a rational and beneficial border policy, and we can’t have one without arresting transgressors.
It’s important to emphasize that empathy is not a purely emotional response. Using the supposed (undefined) pain and struggles of groups to validate your own worldview is not empathy. Empathy is being able to understand the way that others see the world (cognitive empathy) and being able to understand why they feel the way they do, and to put oneself in the place of someone feeling that feeling (affective empathy). So now let’s try to practice some empathy for Trump supporters. Don’t worry: empathy is not a risky or a limited quality. You can try to earnestly put yourself in the shoes of any number of deranged and objectionable people (ISIS fighters, Nazis) without deforming your moral sensibilities. In fact, despite what you’re probably told repeatedly in your cultural spaces, this kind of empathy is necessary to be a fully integrated and discerning person. The only alternative is to assume the ideas and motivations of other people, or to attribute bad motivations to them in order to make them easier to hate and to fight. That might be tactically useful but it’s not empathetic. So I will tell you how Trump supporters see the situation. (And the fact that the feelings around this issue break down neatly along pro- and anti-Trump lines should be a clue. Lots of black people and ‘queer’ people and poor people and immigrants are with the Trump supporters on these points. Virtually no anti-Trump partisans are. This is not a moral matter… it’s a partisan one, and that means that we are all being manipulated. I would argue that the left is being manipulated much more, as indicated by the fact that their attitudes largely mirror class affiliation and occupation. In other words, members of the professional managerial class are usually anti-Trump and anti-ICE, and citizen members of the working class rarely are. It’s very possible there are elements of class bias here, as I will explain further below). Here is my brief synopsis of the anti-protester perspective. See if any of these claims are definitely false. I believe that every sentence here is objectively and verifiably true:
President Biden admitted many millions of immigrants. These policy changes were never democratically approved (he certainly didn’t run on them) and they were never popular. They caused huge policy problems, including increases in crime and violent crime and sexual slavery and child trafficking, etc. President Trump achieved record popularity, for a Republican candidate in the past two decades, partly by running on a closed-border and pro-deportation platform. When he took office he set about trying to deport as many illegal immigrants as he could, focusing especially on criminals. Something like 60% of ICE detentions have been of criminal suspects or those with convictions in U. S. courts.
‘ICE detentions of immigrants without criminal convictions spike’; ICE detentions of immigrants WITH criminal convictions are still substantial.
So ICE is serving a legitimate law enforcement function, right?
Blue cities and certain federal judges and organizations and many media figures didn’t like that and began trying to stymie and resist these moves. Activist groups (funded by foreigners, and partly comprised of paid protesters and bussed participants, and affiliated with labor unions and city and state governments) began to organize protests. On the more extreme wings of leftist politics, certain people began doxxing ICE agents and threatening them and trying to block them with their vehicles and even ramming them and ambushing them and attacking them with handguns and sniper rifles.
On January 7, 2026, an ICE agent and one such protester (who had been trained to resist ICE using illegal methods and who had been harassing ICE agents for much of the day) had a tragic interaction. The ICE officer in question had been badly injured months before when an illegal immigrant fled from a traffic stop, dragging the agent for hundreds of feet and requiring days of hospitalization and dozens of stitches. That immigrant had been convicted of sexually assaulting a minor and ICE had filed an immigration hold, but Minnesota authorities ignored it and released the man onto the street.
Try finding that detail in any of the legacy news articles regarding this case. That is the reigning policy in blue states and cities and has now resulted in thousands of recidivist and violent offenders without legal status being released directly into American communities. This is from NBC News:
The ICE officer who fatally shot a Minnesota woman Wednesday was previously dragged by a car during an immigration enforcement operation in June, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said.
During the June incident, ICE officers in Minneapolis attempted to arrest Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala during a traffic stop. He was in the country illegally, DHS said in a news release, and was previously “arrested for domestic assault and convicted of sex crimes against an underage teenager.”
When the man refused to comply, the officer broke his car window and reached inside, getting his arm stuck, according to court documents. When the man attempted to drive away, he dragged the officer, which was captured on video.
The officer suffered multiple lacerations and needed 33 stitches to close his wounds, according to court documents from the June incident, which identified the agent as Jonathan Ross.
Post by a Texas mother:
I seriously don’t understand what it is about this process that you guys don’t get. Ice is out there getting hammered by citizens who don’t know anything about what they’re doing. All while trying to get violent child molesters child rapists off of the streets of your damn neighborhoods! Because your own governor and mayor will not allow your police to do the job of getting them off your streets for you.
You are defending perverts, rapist, murderers, drug dealers, thieves, and abusers. Why is that so hard to understand? And what does that say about you that those are the people you’re defending and that you’re attacking the people trying to keep you safe…
Renee Good was a mother of three (a detail which has been included in nearly every news story for some reason).
‘Rest in power’ has been decisively withdrawn from Renee Good. As a white woman, according to progressives, she is not entitled to a ‘#sayhername’ or a ‘rest in power’ memorial tag.
It appears that allegations of her abusing her children or losing custody are unsubstantiated, but she seems to have been a confused woman, leaving her marriage to a military serviceman and forming a relationship with a gay woman, then moving to a progressive neighborhood specifically in response to Trump’s election. In other words, she was ideologically committed and probably prone to the kind of hysterical monomania that exists on the right and (especially) the left these days, a byproduct of our hyperreal and manipulative media complex. She had been trained in protest and obstruction tactics (through an organization accessed at her children’s charter school, apparently) and she was, at the time of her death, something like a full-time anti-ICE gadfly. On the day in question, her and her partner were at the scene, blocking the ICE convoy. Her partner was goading ICE agents, and when the agents ordered Good to exit the SUV her partner exhorted her to flee (‘drive, baby, drive!’ in the memorable and endlessly memed recording). Good hit the accelerator, turning sharply on the slushy street and striking the ICE agent, who shot her through the windshield.
The only legal question here (regardless of what you believe happened or should have happened) is whether the agent was in reasonable fear for his life and safety at the time he pulled the trigger. He was under no legal obligation to dive out of the way or shoot the tires or to stand elsewhere. He stood where he stood and he had to make a split-second decision.
Of course, many people are essentially arguing in bad faith. They are simply anti-ICE (as a kind of emotional default) and so they embrace any fact or interpretation or narrative which validates this prejudice. They have also embraced a kind of weaponized victimhood. They are determined to annoy, harass, and threaten law enforcement and then cry foul when harsh measures are taken in response. Regardless of what ICE is doing, these kinds of passive aggressive tactics are off-putting and uncompelling to normal people.
Keep in mind (and this is really the crux of the issue, isn’t it?): ICE is a legitimate federal law enforcement agency, serving the president as agents have done for decades now. ICE agents are simply following orders. So are all police and soldiers, and that cultural similarity helps explain why so many veterans join ICE. The shooter of Renee Good was an Iraq War veteran, for example. Trump’s policies are popular and have been democratically validated and are legal. This is the fact that many leftists refuse to grant, and this reveals the real nexus of their opposition: it’s not about the poor or immigrants or democracy. It’s about a worldview which considers resisting ICE to be more important (ultimately) than any of those things. I will illustrate what I mean.
Hypothetical #1 - The Poor
What if a community full of poor black residents is tired of immigration and its cost to their benefits programs and housing stock and police resources? Would leftists support the electoral decision by this community to cooperate with ICE? No… probably not. The priority is not the poor or their wishes or wellbeing. It is resisting ICE.
Hypothetical #2 - Immigrants
I know plenty of working immigrants. They tend to be more patriotic than average (and far more patriotic than the leftists I know) and they generally support Trump. If a community of immigrants wanted to assist ICE, would leftists assent to their wishes? Keep in mind: this isn’t a hypothetical. There are many small towns along the Texas border full of immigrants who are firmly against illegal immigration.
‘Why did Trump win Texas Latinos?’
But leftists would stand in their way, and resist their efforts. The priority of the left is not about immigrants or their wishes or well-being. How many working-class legal immigrants do you know who are supportive of or participating in the Minnesota protests right now?
Hypothetical # 3 - Democracy
Let’s say a country voted to restrict immigration and to deport illegal immigrants. This is democracy. It happened in the United States. It’s happened for more than 20 years in Great Britain, and those voters have been consistently ignored and demonized (and are now being arrested by the thousand, simply for expressing legal and peaceful political opinions). Which side does the left take in these matters? If democracy was their polestar then they would accede to the wishes of the electorate.
The left has a higher calling (which is moral, even though many of them identify as ethical and cultural relativists) and is expressed in the language of empathy. Illegal immigrants deserve our sympathy and accommodation to such an extent that this prerogative must, in practice, outweigh the wishes and beliefs of the poor and immigrants and the limitations of democracy. I cannot phrase this any other way. If you disagree, please comment below. (I plan to send this to leftist commentators and post this in leftist discourse spaces. I welcome your feedback).
Bewilderment
Here’s the thing about democracy: it doesn’t always go your way. You can lose elections. The voting public can turn against you. You can end up being wrong about ethical suppositions or policy benefits. The left assumed for so long that their ideas were equivalent to progress and to the democratic will that they have struggled to integrate the data of this new world, in which the working class has firmly turned against them and they have proven to be patrician (and often ridiculous) neurotics, bled of masculine energy and wary of objectivity or compromise. It remains to be seen whether a political movement comprised comprised heavily disproportionately of wealthier, single, white women who see the world through a binary and emotionalized lens can succeed but we can say with certainty that one never has before.
I will offer my last main point here. I’m not trying to rile you up or troll you. I have laid out the situation as I and many other chastened liberals and skeptical independents and working class men of all kinds see it. If empathy is truly your calling card you will perhaps be able to credit my sincerity. You could attribute dark or hateful motives to me at this point. You could veer off onto the preferred avenue of whataboutism (How can you say you care about immigrants when you voted for TRUMP? Don’t you care about the corruption? You pretend to respect law enforcement officers? WHAT ABOUT JANUARY 6TH?!). I could address all of those objections and more, but our time is limited.
Now I will tell you why (aside from the fact that your organizational energy is mostly coming from radicals and your ideas are broadly unpopular… for they are) your protests aren’t working and will not work. I will give you some insight into why this might be.
You feel powerless. You feel inauthentic. You feel silly. I visited a Sam Harris fan message board and Reddit and the comments section of a progressive Substacker last week and observed the anguished ruminations, the accusations and the surreal attempts to plan and to do something meaningful.
These people (above) sound reasonably intelligent and well-informed (even if the information they’ve received is incomplete). Yet they also sound ridiculous. They’re living a Weimar-era simulacrum fantasy, full of Nazis and dictators and resistance fighters. Then they leave their computers and attend graduate sociology class, or go to work in medical offices.
These are not serious people.
Perhaps a general strike? Bigger protests! Political violence! These are the reflections of people too sheltered and immature to understand political tactics.
Furthermore, they are people who fail to grasp the central fact of our age: their class (the professional managerial class, or PMC) has worked for 50 years to build a world in which money and status are everything, and in which the individual and community action are impotent. They have further weakened their movement by draining away almost every vestige of masculine vigor, making the current assemblage a strange and historically unique and unimpressive creature. Let’s take these points one at a time…
Money and status are everything for the PMC. This might sound incorrect, or counterintuitive to many. What about climate justice? What about racial equity, or multiculturalism, or feminism? But how are these values pursued? Through corporate initiatives and budget items and social media posts and academic studies and careers. In other words, all of these (nebulous) concepts are nested firmly in a world of money and status, and the PMC use them to gain more of each. This class never sacrifices money or status for these objectives.
Our Ruling Class
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An essay in which I strive to describe the characteristics of our ruling class (which is increasingly incestuous and cloistered and disconnected) and the reasons why it might be failing our country.
The members of the PMC might sacrifice individually (in the form of taxes or lost opportunities or higher energy costs) but the class itself always benefits. Who writes and administers the environmental regulations? Who runs and profits from the operations of the NGO’s and nonprofits? Who benefits (collectively) from the imposition of invisible racial and sexual quotas and hiring requirements?
(Above) Diversity officer demographics. ~75% of these respondents are professional women, from privileged backgrounds.
It’s not poor or working-class black people or women who benefit from equity, and the establishment of these rules always seems to be accompanied by an increasingly expensive and byzantine administrative apparatus… which is staffed and overseen solely by PMC members. Climate justice and equity and feminism aren’t values that the PMC sacrifices money or status for - they’re the levers that it presses to gain more of these things, from corporations and universities and government agencies. As soon as these constructs are less profitable for the PMC (as defunding the police became, and radical gender ideology is in the process of becoming) in terms of power and money and status they will be discarded. This pattern can’t be acknowledged by PMC members of course. For an ideology to be an optimal vehicle for securing class privilege it must be credible and earnestly believed by many of its adherents, but the hypocrisy is clear: most PMC members never voluntarily, on an individual basis, sacrifice or risk anything for these values that they’re supposedly devoted to. Do they abstain from commercial air travel to reduce carbon emissions? Do they willingly step aside and women of color take their positions of authority? Do they choose to live or send their kids to school in immigrant-dense or nonwhite neighborhoods? Do they spread their privilege around by granting rent holidays or surrendering their college admissions to marginalized people? No… they do not. They do none of these things. They simply support policies which will collectively bring them more money and status. Despite being, in many cases, anti-capitalist they live lives devoted to career and consumption and credentials and reputation. That accounts for a great deal of the bitter defensiveness of this group: on some level they know themselves to be hypocrites.
There are only so many fundamental values upon which a civilization can be built: money, status, family, religion, tradition, community, honor & martial valor, ascetism & altruism (often religious), purity (often religious), egalitarianism. If you pay attention to the deeds and lifestyles of the PMC you will quickly discover that money and status are not only the most important values for them; they’re the only values. Furthermore, their transparent and largely uncontested political and cultural program has sought for generations to erode and erase the influence of the other values: family, religion, tradition, community, honor & martial valor, etc. In the name of secularism and social justice (not something that they support in their personal lives in any meaningful way) and a managed, indulgent, post-national and multicultural society they have continuously diminished the agency and independence of families and religious institutions (unless subordinated to their class priorities) and individuals.
The individual and community action are impotent. Under the all-expansive administrative state that impotence is the dream (and the class endowment) of the PMC. Families and individuals and religious organizations and communities can’t have too much agency. How could they? They would want to administer their own affairs (which would be bad for the PMC) and the families and communities in question would want their members to be happy and healthy and stable and therefore not requiring the endlessly intricate complex of programs and services and mandates and regulations and set-asides offered by the administrative state (which would be worse). Most of all, independent control would establish loci of resistance and dissent to the regime. Do progressives want city governments that are able to resist equity initiatives, and maintain corps of male-only firefighters and prison guards? Do they want public schools (and schoolboards) which validate patriotism and skeptical, morally-complex history lessons, and the sexual and cultural norms of 1970’s America? Do they want hospitals able to set their own billing practices and universities able to set their own curricula? Do they want families that are able to see and comment upon the class lessons of their young children? (In dozens of publicly-reported cases, including some state lawsuits, it seems that they do not.)
The people against allowing parents to opt their children out of controversial lessons have a substantial overlap with the people who don’t want individuals or families or communities to be able to opt out of administrative state control. This is the dogma of our age.
Do they want regions and communities able to decide what resources to exploit (fracking, ranching, hunting, logging) and how, or which people to hire or promote, or which values to endorse? The dream of the managerial class is a country (and eventually a world) completely dominated by a managerial bureaucracy, which is to dictate cultural priorities and set directions and have veto power over all important decisions.
Protests are an artifact from an earlier and more resilient and independent age, one in which families were uniformly intact (with rare exceptions) communities had local autonomy and people could affect the policies which touched their lives through elections and debate and civic action. The bureaucracy is completely insensitive to these inputs. It’s partly designed to resist these very influences and to disperse responsibility in order to ensure that no one person can usually be said to be responsible for a decision. It’s an organic organization, in which personal agency and belief is almost totally marginalized… the exact opposite of the social deliberative bodies of 2-3 generations ago.
Progressives console themselves with the idea that the bureaucracy is benevolent but of course that’s not always the case and it completely discombobulates them when the bureaucracy gains an executive like Trump. Suddenly they find themselves fighting the very organism which they’ve devoted their lives to growing and protecting. They fall back on the tools and avenues of a more independent age, but they destroyed that age and fought its ideas and values. Now they find themselves in a bureaucratic, administered world, with therapy and DoorDash and OnlyFans and green energy initiatives and inclusive language… and they wonder why they feel so powerless. They feel powerless because they are. We all are. That was the point all along.
Progressives have drained away from their movement almost every vestige of masculine vigor. Of course normal working class men very rarely participate in these protests or even endorse the goals and ideas of the organizers, but the disconnect goes much deeper. These activist initiatives are psychologically alien, in tone and assumption, to normal men. Let me explain.
A Letter to the Nice White Ladies
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I’ve had many exchanges with ‘No Kings’ protesters, so I thought I’d write a kind of general address. If you’re NOT a rich(er) older white lady, I apologize. It’s just that every person I’ve communicated with regarding the protests has been. Perhaps some introspection as to why that is is warranted?
Have you ever seen a woman get arrested? Most of the time everything goes normally. The police approach and the suspect quietly submits, and is taken in for booking. But when things go awry, the behavior of the sexes tends to diverge. Men will leverage their size or their speed or try to argue or twist away from the arresting officer(s), (often twisting away while arguing, as if police who are in the process of handcuffing a suspect will be so impressed by the merits of his appeal that the police will relent and let him leave). This is the entitlement of people who live in a free and orderly society, people that are so used to arguing with and lying to and manipulating teachers and bureaucrats and social workers and (less often) employers that they feel certain that their recitation of facts or expressions of indignation or victimhood must have some automatic value. Of course, in far more than 9/10 cases the suspects are lying and in most cases the lies are so shoddy and nonsensical that only an idiot or a narcissist could think they could prevail. In many cases the suspects are simply desperate, but they nurture a feeling of grievance and entitlement, making invalid claims about the law or repeated vows of honesty and forthrightness or trying to convince the police (and themselves) that what they’re doing - the searching or hassling or detaining - is somehow illegitimate.
Billboard Chris 🌎@BillboardChrisDrunk woman plays all the victim cards. She’s non-binary, indigenous, has generational trauma, PTSD, is oppressed by white people, and triggered by being called ma’am. Well, intersectionality doesn’t reduce blood alcohol and you’re still going to jail.4:40 PM · Nov 9, 2023 · 2.19M Views1.05K Replies · 2.5K Reposts · 14.9K Likes(Above) The best bodycam arrest video of all time, probably.
When women get arrested, the entitlement increases. Vulnerability and professions of ignorance (“oh…I didn’t know that”) and innocence are followed by displays of emotion. Crying is common. If the police move to restrain the suspect (because she won’t leave the premises or won’t stop reaching into a a bag or refuses to leave a vehicle, for example) the indignation and disbelief is total. How could a big, strong man do this to a woman?! If a boyfriend or male companion is nearby, this is the point at which the woman might start shrieking for assistance, wailing piteously and desperately entreating her chivalric chaperone to intervene.
Nicole Solas, Sued by the Teachers Union@Nicoletta06023/ Veronica Hannan, "champion of diversity in STEM" & friend of "I'M AN AG Devon Hogan Flanagan," went bananas during arrest. She escaped cuffs, growled, hissed, kicked, screamed, "NOOOOO!" All they had to do was leave. Police: "What's wrong w you? You're acting like a kid!"3:24 PM · Aug 18, 2025 · 649K Views751 Replies · 1.22K Reposts · 5.77K LikesTo do what exactly is something I’ve never been sure of: is the man supposed to attack police, allowing his damsel to escape? This behavior is common among young and old women, and rich and poor. Getting arrested is an unpleasant experience, certainly, but only a fool would think that these kinds of dramatic displays (or physical resistance) are viable strategies. But it’s the entitlement that I want to explore here. Women (especially educated, professional women) tend to have a deep feeling that “Big Mommy” will come to save them, and that if they appeal and cry out and make nuisances of themselves (or entice male companions or onlookers to intervene) they will surely triumph.
This is the result of a lifetime of conditioning of people who’ve been so over-socialized that they’ve always been safely nestled within some feminized institution or another. They’ve never not been in a setting where complaints, passive aggression, appeals to authority (asking for the manager), and emotional manipulation have been ineffective.
Explaining the constant and crippling tendency of progressives to seek victim sympathy and to appeal to national hall monitors and sympthetic media organizations, Freddie de Boer writes: “liberals never stop looking for Big Mommy, the nurturing maternal force that turns pain and fright into happiness and confidence, the serene and benevolent authority that will restore order if only the righteous ask. The inescapable cry of Democrats in 2016 was “This is not normal!” I still sigh when I think about it. “This is not normal.” As if there was ever any such thing as normal; as if it was normal when George Bush slaughtered Iraqis and fiddled while thousands of Black people drowned in the street in New Orleans; as if it would matter, in any way, if we were to somehow collectively decide that what was happening was in fact not normal. There are no refs! It doesn’t matter how much you beg. There are no refs. Big Mommy is not coming to save you. There is no transcendent force out there that will restore justice for you if you beg. The people who believe there are mostly went through life as anxious, endlessly-striving Type A children of helicopter parents, which engendered in them a faith in an orderly universe that I’m afraid does not exist once you find problems your parents can’t fix, once the rotors are no longer egg-beatering above you. You don’t have to succumb to seeing all of politics as selfishness and fear of the other. You do have to show people that their own best interest and the best interest of the worst off are one and the same. Liberals should be really good at that. But the Democrats are hamstrung by their dogged commitment to Clintonism and Third Way politics. Yet somehow when they lose, their supporters revert to “This is not normal! Big Mommy, why is this happening?”
Men have an instinctive grasp upon the dynamics of force and violence that many Western women seem to have lost. Like a vestigial limb, that deep human understanding of the necessity and inevitability of organized violence as a means of fighting evil and maintaining social structure seems to have withered away. With it has gone the comprehension that settings of violence or potential violence do not follow the exquisite and delicate social rules of feminine society. As James Reece memorably said in The Terminal List, “now you’re on the battlefield.” We can set aside the wisdom or propriety of ICE operations in suburban neighborhoods (although we must remember that if there’s less suburban ICE operations there will be more suburban criminal activity by illegal immigrants, although how much more is an open question). We can sidestep the convoluted and casuistical debates about Renee Good’s shooting, or the attempted ambush of ICE agents in Chicago earlier this year, or the details of the possible attempted vehicular assault against ICE last week in Portland, or the mob attacks and assaults of ICE agents and their responses.
Nick Sortor@nicksortor🚨 BREAKING: Police and leftist rioters actively clash outside ICE Portland after Border Patrol shoot a Tren de Aragua gang member who tried to RUN THEM OVER Democrats DOUBLING DOWN on their support for foreign gangs Run this as an AD for 2026!7:48 AM · Jan 9, 2026 · 231K Views436 Replies · 4.68K Reposts · 15.4K LikesWhat we should observe, as a trendline that runs through all of these incidents and indeed through the whole debate about immigration, is the unprecedented preponderance of upper-class female entitlement. Many people disagree with what ICE is doing. Some smaller number are willing to go out and protest. Some smaller number than the previous group are willing to obstruct operations and follow officers around and throw things at them. A violent splinter group amongst that latter cohort (and it’s impossible to tell precisely who is who) is willing to use violence against ICE. That means: ambushes, vehicular assaults, sniper attacks, and threats against agents and their families.
None of that is up for debate. So why is there such a disconnect when it comes to attitudes about these activities? Even Black Lives Matter didn’t see months of violent confrontations between demonstrators and police (partly because dozens of police departments around the country were ordered to stand down). The disconnect originates in female entitlement, which is a quality that has so thoroughly saturated progressive activism that it’s largely invisible to the activists themselves now. The people who are out menacing and obstructing ICE agents really believe that they are in the right and because they are in the right nothing bad will happen to them. It can’t. They can always appeal to some vague administrative entity, as they’ve done their entire lives. They cherish the fantasy of risk, but they abhor risk in every area of their lives. They beg for people to use resolute resistance and even violence against ICE, but they’ve never been resolute or violent personally. They are fueled purely by emotion, and it shows.
Brandon@LibOrNormal⚠️@FBI⚠️ This woman is telling people who have 🔫s to shoot ICE Officer's!! Repost!! Make her famous!! TICKTOCK name is in the comments.12:43 PM · Jan 10, 2026 · 69.7K Views932 Replies · 6.02K Reposts · 5.74K LikesGetting pushed would be assault, and a human rights violation (even if they’re inserting themselves into riotous areas, or blocking official vehicles). Getting arrested would be exciting, and shouldn’t result in any real consequences (since many blue areas have had a decades-long policy of essentially absolving all progressive activists of any rimes but the most serious). Getting killed won’t happen. It can’t. People simply don’t get killed in their world, and certainly not by police. This is the great irony here, and across the progressive activist space as a whole: they pretend to be radicals and antigovernment and antipolice, but they have lived their entire lives in the shadow of the most pure bubble of official safety in human history, and they don’t understand violence. When they’re confronted with the reality of migrant violence they have no answer. When they’re confronted with the messy but necessary reality of law enforcement rules of engagement they are dumbfounded. They simply don’t understand that ICE is in the business of rounding up people who are, individually, fairly indeterminate. ICE might have a file with an address or an employer and some photos and a rap sheet, but a large number of these targeted people have been convicted of crimes and some smaller number are truly dangerous. This is not a matter which can be debated. Hundreds of citizens have been killed and a larger number of children raped by illegal immigrants in the United States during the past few years. The numbers of illegal immigrants in our country (20 million? 30 million? More?) make that an inevitability. Someone has to find these people and use force to apprehend them, and ICE agents are the men who have been given that particular job. (One interesting note: isn’t it curious that very few women seem to be involved in these operations, compared to the numbers of beat cops or firefighters or CO’s?). They could be picking many of these people at county lockups and state prisons, but many blue jurisdictions have made an intentional policy choice to hide their existence from the federal government and therefore release them onto the street. Men with arrests for raping children, men with dozens of burglary convictions, men who’ve credibly threatened to kill their girlfriends and their children - all are effectively concealed from ICE and released onto the street.
There have been violent protests and radical political movements for centuries in this country, from Shays’ rebellion to the Weathermen Underground. But never have these actions been under the tactical control of professional women. These women are so besotted with a kind of reflexive sympathy for the entire group of “immigrants” (forgetting or unaware that most legal immigrants actually have a pretty favorable view of Trump’s immigration reforms) that they are unwilling to countenance any compromise or policy reformulation, even when these things would be aimed at violent and predatory men. They simply won’t consider the reality that there are evil illegal immigrants in this country, and if you make schools or churches inalienable sanctuaries from ICE you will be incentivizing these evil men to concentrate in schools and churches. The reality of evil, and the necessity of violence are precluded by their worldviews. Gad Saad has called this “suicidal empathy” and it’s suicidal (in his telling) for civilizations, not necessarily for individuals. This is an emotional approach to politics. Illegal immigrants are a group which has aroused the feelings of sympathy of progressive professionals, and therefore a group which has been granted every right to defense and aid (but never of any personal assistance - professional women prefer to keep their distance from the hoi polloi). ICE agents (being now avatars of the hated Trump administration, unlike Obama’s ICE agents or Biden’s, despite the fact that many of these people are actually the same men) arouse the feelings of hostility (and even hatred. Therefore ICE is now a group against which harassment and demonization and obstruction and even aggression are permitted and encouraged. If this obstruction or aggression should go awry, the participants will bleat indignantly and claim to be victims of authoritarian overreach or brutal repression.
But of course, if authoritarianism or repression were really in play activists would not need to ambush ICE agents or block their convoys or surround their facilities in order to provoke a response The fact that these kinds of acts have been occurring on a daily basis throughout 2025 indicates that if this is repression it is an uncommonly weak form. More likely, it indicates that the activists involved are hoping to provoke forceful responses, to legitimize all immigration detainment operations. Here’s another way to see it: if the activists were trying to provoke forceful and overreactive responses from ICE they would behave exactly as they are now. They would dox agents and trail them and block their vehicles and threaten them and, at times, even attack them.
We’ve come a long way, culturally and tactically, from the sober and mythological days of the Edmund Pettis bridge confrontation in Selma, Alabama in 1965.
What do you notice about the activists in the photo above? How many strapping, well-dressed, dignified men do you think you’ll find at an anti-ICE action? Why might this be?
There are times when the state must be confronted with civil disobedience and there are instances in which tactically provoking the forces of order to violence will pay extraordinary political dividends. That is not the case here. These days we have a gaggle of older, white women operating purely on emotion and (falsely) secure in the knowledge that Big Mommy will be there to step in if things get too hairy. These are not serious people. They are engaging in the rhetoric and even some of the tactics of violence because it’s emotionally satisfying for them, but they haven’t given real thought as to what that entails… or to who they’re defending. They are soft and neurotic creatures of modernity, playing the self-appointed role of guardian angel to the unwashed, foreign masses. They are shocked when it doesn’t go the way they imagined it would. They are shocked when it proves ineffective (as if harassing law enforcement officers and annoying commuters would be a winning propaganda strategy) and they are shocked when their constant escalations cross the boundaries established by decades of rules of engagement convention and they are injured or killed.
What they have forgotten, in all of this emotional turmoil and activism and exciting, feminine drama, is that the first major function of a protest is to publicize a grievance and to win sympathy. That will require communicating with and convincing many people who are now broadly supportive of immigration restrictions. It truly appears that this has barely even occurred to them. And why would it? There’s nothing exciting or emotionally satisfying about making reasoned arguments to sober independents. It’s much more fun to drive around in expensive winter coats and SUV’s, playing revolutionary.
But never forget: revolutionary is a risky role. Only a fool would believe that thousands of trained (and often paid) malcontents could confront a brutal, fascist (in their telling) regime… and still whine to the referee when things get bloody. It is that lingering odor of entitlement and fantasy which makes these protests so off-putting to working class men (even ones who are uninformed about the ins and outs of immigration policy). But entitlement and fantasy are now the only energizing factors the activist left in this country has available.
Perhaps this strange movement can serve as a lesson for future waves of activism: your movement should always be based in reality, it should involve active and masculine men (especially where the threat of violence is concerned). And if you tussle with law enforcement officers wielding assault rifles you risk deletion. No amount of sympathy or indignation will avail you then.
Thanks for reading. Take care of yourself.
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Great analysis. Pulls no punches. Feeble creatures of modernity. Love it.
Another thought-provoking article. Here you provide a portrait of Renee Good as an activist. I have been attempting to find verifiable sources for these characterizations. The mainstream media outlets do not provide such information. Given our partisan news environment I'm looking for straight, unbiased , factual reporting. Can you provide your sources? Thanks for the info.