What we are seeing across the country as organized gangs of wine moms use Antifa tactics to harass and impede Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents is not civil disobedience. It isn’t even protest. It’s just crime.
The word “civil” in civil disobedience refers to the fact that the protester is allowing themselves to be arrested in order to emphasize just how important their cause is to them. It is also generally done in a context that threatens minimal harm to police and bystanders.
Today, across the country, but especially in bastions of democratic socialism like Minneapolis, Portland and Seattle, we see something entirely different: bands of people following, harassing, doxxing and sometimes engaging in direct assault against ICE agents.
What these ICE Watch groups across the country, of which Good was reportedly a trained member, do is entirely different. They are trying to impede federal agents from carrying out democratically enacted laws, not sending a message, and importantly, they are trying to evade capture.
Sorry, that is crime, not protest.
Further, we need to ask ourselves, quite seriously, if groups of people training and then executing missions that put law enforcement and the public in harm’s way may, in fact, be criminal conspiracies.
If one’s job is to be a neighborhood lookout for a street drug dealing operation, that is a crime. It’s not entirely clear why doing the same thing to protect illegal immigrants, including many of whom are vicious criminals, isn’t a similar activity.
According to a recent poll, only 24% of Americans believe that it is acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement. But among White women 18-44, that number leaps to an astounding 61%.
Maybe they are listening to too many true crime podcasts, but we have to ask ourselves, how on Earth did this become acceptable behavior in our society?
The short answer is that for most of this century, our law enforcement agencies and courts have just let it happen. They have decided that some criminal activity is just fine so long as your cause is just.
Yeah:
Then they came for the wine moms ….
One might think that the brutalizing and killing of white women would be a bridge too far even for the bloodthirsty, racist MAGA cult but I’m afraid not. Sure, they love a trad wife, a Mar-a-lago Botox babe or a hard-core wingnut female scrapper. But consider what happened to Marjorie Taylor Greene when she dared to cross Trump. He actually called for an investigation into her.
Obviously, they’re misogynists (many of them outright incels) who resent women who dare to defy them just as much as they resent people of color and immigrants of all stripes. It’s just that they used to generally keep their violence against them behind closed doors. The masks and the costumes and the get-out-of-jail-free card dispensed by the president of the United States have given them permission to let it all hang out.