The Unspoken Logic of the Anti-ICE Mob
Federal law makes it a crime to engage in a conspiracy to impede federal officers from performing their duties. That includes street violence. It also includes officials running "Sanctuary Cities".
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by Daniel McCarthy
January 31, 2026
A basic question all Americans should ask themselves before they draw any other conclusions about events in Minneapolis is this: when is it right to interfere with law enforcement?
The consequences of doing so are, obviously, potentially grave, even fatal. Obstructing or harassing officers of the law could put their lives in danger as well as yours, and bystanders’ as well. Law enforcement, of necessity, involves risks and the potential for violence, which officers are authorized to use and criminals — or third parties — are not.
One side in the Minneapolis turmoil does not accept these premises, or at least doesn’t accept they apply when the laws to be upheld are laws that leftists don’t like.
But that reasoning, such as it is, doesn’t go far enough: even if one thinks the laws are wrong, there are other moral considerations that apply, such as whether there aren’t other ways to fix the law that don’t involve endangering police or anyone else. Why not vote? Why not make a reasoned case to your fellow citizens that they should elect lawmakers to change the policy?
There’s no need to look to the most radical activists — people who are more or less open revolutionaries — to find an answer to those questions. Everyday commentary in the legacy media — or on social media from ordinary Democrats, NeverTrumpers, libertarians, and others who don’t think of themselves as hard leftists — will explain well enough.
These people all believe that America, and especially the Trump administration, is fascist, and so of course elections and persuasion are not enough.
What the “moderate” incendiaries don’t dare say, but their more truthful radical brethren do, is that if America is fascist, then police are the enemy. It’s always ok to cause trouble for law enforcement: there is, in fact, a moral duty and right to resist arrest as well as to assist anyone else who is doing so.
You can always yell at a cop, punch back at a cop if her or she tries making an arrest, and be ready to run over or shoot a cop in the midst of a confrontation. Alex Pretti may have been prepared to do that. His weapon wasn’t for show — he had a laser sight and plentiful ammunition.
Pretti was not simply a gun enthusiast who happened to be carrying the day he died. He went into an organized effort to interfere with police and quite reasonably expected a conflict.
Anti-ICE activists believe in a right to resist arrest all the way up to the point of using lethal violence. The Democrats, media commentators, libertarians and Trump-haters who are lionizing Pretti should be asked if that’s their principle, too. They’ve already tacitly affirmed that it is, but do they have the courage to say it out loud?
The other side in the moral conflict here doesn’t have to prejudge matters of fact. The Border Patrol officer or officers who shot Pretti might have been wrong. But the presumptions of civilization are on law enforcement’s side. If there is violence between officers and someone else, officers have the superior right to use force. The attempt to negate laws through mob actions and systematic harassment campaigns — which is what the anti-ICE activists have been conducting — are wrong in themselves. This is because, as everyone knows, America is not a totalitarian society, elections do matter, and immigration enforcement is necessary for any country. It’s a basic form of the rule of law. It is not “fascism”.
In fact, the use of mobs to intimidate designated enemies and overawe the forces of law is historically characteristic of fascism and other revolutionary movements. The anti-ICE movement may not be fascist, but if it were really so sensitive about anything that bears the faintest similarity to fascism, it would have to renounce its present tactics.
It may be Trump they hate, but it’s America they’re angry at — the left considers the country quite racist and wicked enough on its own terms, without its having to owe any debt to Mussolini, while the NeverTrumpers are cynics who are happy to ally with ideologues who aspire to revolution, as long as doing so promises to hurt the man (and the MAGA movement) they resent.
The libertarians, for their part, are just too weak-minded to recognize that whatever constraints on freedom ICE might represent, the anti-ICE coalition is much more inimical to liberty. The anti-ICE movement isn’t defending the right to keep and bear arms, of course; they’re only celebrating a right to take arms against America’s laws. The Bolsheviks wanted Russian soldiers who were released from service after World War One to keep their weapons to help overthrow the czar. Once in power, the Bolsheviks showed just what they thought about private firearms ownership.
What the anti-ICE coalition represents is a revolutionary system. That system is one in which left-wing activists decide which laws may be enforced, using mobs and harassment networks to enforce their own decrees. The choice in Minneapolis is not between law and freedom, it’s between two different versions of power and legitimacy. The old constitutional order derived legitimacy from the people’s choices in elections, and that legitimacy both authorized police to use coercion and provided legal and political restraints upon them. The radical new order derives its legitimacy from a claim that progressive morality is a superior morality, and so progressives have the natural authority to make and enforce rules for everyone, using any means necessary. The old constitutional system separated government and civil society, giving the former coercive power but subjecting it to legal and electoral limitations, while civil society was free to ignore the Bill of Rights but had little right to use force. The new system that lies behind the anti-ICE movement unites private power and government coercion, using one when the other is not available, but employing both whenever possible.
Trump’s presence in the White House is intolerable because he doesn’t defer to progressives in using the power voters have given him. Choosing not to enforce the law is as much an assertion of power as enforcing it — it’s an assertion of the power of left-wing ideology over constitutional government, in defiance of voters’ control.
Democrats are brazenly open about their contempt for immigration laws, as seen not only in Joe Biden’s performance as president but also in their declaration of “sanctuary” cities and states, where local authorities will not cooperate in enforcing federal law. The Democrats can afford to be so bold because they have power bases outside elected office, in the courts, the media, and in the streets. The protesters are a wing — an armed wing, in the case of Pretti — of a para-government. This unconstitutional alternative government is what is laying claim to power in the Minneapolis tumult.
It is a larger apparatus than the federal government, in part because much of the federal government — the so-called Deep State — really belongs to the para-government. Officers of the federal government are supposed to be bound by the First Amendment. Agents of the para-government, such as the anti-ICE activists who have been invading Minneapolis churches, are not bound by such quaint popular rules. They’re bound only by their own progressive conscience, the same thing that authorizes them to brawl with police.
Because the para-government is a hybrid of bureaucratic power and lawlessness, it doesn’t suffer systemic damage if individual activists get arrested and prosecuted — though that doesn’t happen all that often, anyway.
Thinkers like Michael Walsh and Angelo Codevilla have used the term “cold civil war” to describe America’s condition today. An actual civil war is a war between rival governments claiming a single land, or a war between a government and a proto-government movement of some kind, often one seeking independence for a breakaway region. America’s cold civil war is between rival governments, one formal and constitutional, the other hybrid and unlike anything seen in traditional political science.
These opposing systems recognize different rights and different sources of authority, and they legitimize different people in the use of force — law enforcement, in the one instance and, in the other, law enforcement’s enemies.
— Daniel McCarthy is editor of “Modern Age: A Conservative Review” and a columnist at The Spectator, where this essay first appeared.
Everything occurring in Minnesota is carefully engineered divide and conquer 101, it is the oldest playbook that exists, and it is designed to burn America to the ground in a blaze of hatred of us against each other, so that the enlightenment model Constitution can be disintegrated and nothing will stand in the way of the globalists to implement global technocratic tyranny. We cannot let them get away with this:
Ten Ways the 1% - Who Owns Nearly All Media And Has Radicalized Both the Right and Left - Are Manipulating Us Right Now to Walk into the Incinerator:
1) The first manipulation is the illusion of choice. You think you have two parties representing different visions for America but both parties are funded by the same billionaires, vote for the same surveillance bills, approve the same defense budgets, and serve the same corporate interests. The choice you are given is which color tie the puppet wears, not who controls the strings.
2) The second manipulation is emotional hijacking. The news does not inform you, it activates you. Every story is framed to trigger fear or anger or disgust because those emotions bypass your rational thinking and make you easier to control. You are not watching journalism. You are being subjected to psychological operations designed to keep you in a constant state of agitation.
3) The third manipulation is tribal sorting. The algorithm learns what makes you angry and feeds you more of it until your entire worldview is shaped by outrage at the other side. You are sorted into a tribe not because you chose it but because keeping you tribal keeps you predictable and profitable.
4) The fourth manipulation is false scarcity. You are told resources are limited and the other tribe is taking what belongs to you. Immigrants are stealing your jobs. Welfare recipients are draining your taxes. The other party is destroying your healthcare. Meanwhile the billionaire class has more wealth than any humans in history and could solve most of these problems tomorrow if they wanted to.
5) The fifth manipulation is memory holing. Stories that threaten powerful interests get buried or forgotten within days. Exposed crimes result in no consequences. Historical context that would help you understand the present is never taught. You are kept in a perpetual present with no past to learn from and no future to plan for.
6) The sixth manipulation is controlled opposition. The voices you think are fighting for you are often funded by the same interests they pretend to oppose. The outrage merchant on your side of the aisle is playing a character designed to keep you engaged and angry and tuned in while nothing ever actually changes.
7) The seventh manipulation is the Overton window. The range of acceptable opinion is artificially narrowed so that anything outside it seems extreme. Ideas that were mainstream fifty years ago are now treated as radical. Ideas that serve elite interests are treated as moderate common sense. You are not choosing your beliefs from the full range of human thought. You are choosing from a menu they wrote.
8) The eighth manipulation is learned helplessness. You are shown so many problems with no solutions that you eventually give up and accept that nothing can change. This is intentional. A population that believes resistance is futile does not resist. They scroll and complain and feel superior for understanding how bad things are while doing absolutely nothing about it.
9) The ninth manipulation is identity capture. Your political affiliation becomes your identity, and any attack on your party feels like an attack on you personally. This makes you defend politicians and policies that harm you because admitting they are wrong would mean admitting you were wrong, and your ego will not allow that.
10) The tenth manipulation is the most insidious of all: you are manipulated into believing you are too smart to be manipulated. Every person reading this thinks the manipulations I described apply to other people, the stupid people, the brainwashed people on the other side. That certainty is itself a manipulation. The moment you believe you are immune is the moment you become most vulnerable
Brillaint breakdown on how the para-govenrment actually operates. The point about using mobs to overawe law enforcement being historically fascist is kinda mind-blowing when these same groups claim to be the anti-fascist ones. Saw something similiar play out at a local council meeting last year where activist groups basically tried to intimidate elected officials into ignoring standard procedures.