My Mayor, in a press conference, explained why he has not been able to send the Minneapolis Police Department to fight ICE agents as they enforce the law.
It's not that doing so would be an insurrection. It's because he doesn't have enough officers to fight back.
Fry fires on Fort Sumpter https://t.co/ZOsPpbZSlO
— South of 5 and 20 🇺🇸 (@Southof5and20) January 15, 2026
In a sick way, that video has a comic element: play it again while looking at the Chief of Police instead of Frey. The look of surprise when Frey suggested that deploying the police against federal law enforcement officers was on the table is actually pretty precious.
🚨 State Sen. Bobby Joe Champion (D) says last night's vicious assault of an ICE agent "is just an example of Minnesota being a place where we help our neighbors."
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) January 15, 2026
CNN: If they used weapons to attack the officer, would that change your opinion?
Champion: "Actually, no."
SICK! pic.twitter.com/eWO8fPJzpl
As I wrote earlier, it's now pretty clear that the Democrats in Minnesota are inching toward actual insurrection, but it's also pretty clear that they are doing so because they have no particular reason to fear the longer-term consequences. Trump will send in troops to do what he is already doing, and the top Democrats will get a political boost out of the chaos. They will play the martyr without being martyred, and they can do so on the backs of people who are literally martyring themselves for the benefit of violent rapists, murderers, and...Democrats.
So, if a group of Republicans throws rocks at Minneapolis, Minnesota Mayor Jacob Frey's SUV while his driver carts him around to "Protect Their Neighbors" from his dangerous policies, no problem, right @Jacob_Frey?
— Kristi L. Talmadge (@KristiTalmadge) January 14, 2026
We would like your answer on the record.
At various times, Frey, Walz, and other Minnesota Democrats have encouraged actual violent action against ICE agents, and after a riot at which a Venezuelan gang member was shot yesterday, they both encouraged more people to go out and harass ICE, knowing how volatile the situation is.
🚨 BREAKING: Minneapolis rioters successfully BROKE OPEN a weapons locker in a federal vehicle and STOLE A RIFLE and ammunition before fleeing
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) January 15, 2026
I captured the thief’s face and license plate on the getaway vehicle.
PLEASE SHARE and HELP IDENTIFY this POS.
I have forwarded this… pic.twitter.com/7rwfIsN7v6
Rioters are now attacking agents with weapons, breaking into law enforcement vehicles to steal guns, and Minneapolis police have been told to stand down until a "protester" gets hurt, and then document the incident for later prosecution of the agent, not the people attacking them.
My State Senator, Bobby Joe Champion, explained that using weapons against ICE agents is justified, and no doubt he means it. Just as Walz meant it when he said he was "at war" with the federal government.
Enough of this BS.
— 🇺🇸🎙Chad Caton🎙🇺🇸 (@ImFiredUp2) January 15, 2026
It’s time for the insurrection act.
Arrest Gov. Tim Waltz tonight.
pic.twitter.com/W2s5axXIPf
The question isn't why these politicians are egging the violence on. The real question is who the protesters are and why they are sacrificing themselves for the cause? Especially when they should know that they are defending many people who are convicted violent criminals that state and local officials let back onto the streets.
I think this essay is a good analysis that gets us closer to understanding the psychology.
Stochastic martyrdom is the encouragement of tactics that will predictably get activists hurt or killed when applied at scale, coupled with false assurances of personal safety for the people employing them
— Kitten 🐈 (@kitten_beloved) January 15, 2026
Martyrs created by this process are used as propaganda for the cause https://t.co/OfyLIT778f pic.twitter.com/Ax3Iqy0zdr
The psychology of the people who attacked ICE yesterday is not hard to understand. They were just trying to evade arrest, and their homies though, mostly rightly, that it is open season on ICE.
But what about the Renee Goods of the world? Why would a mom of three engage in what manifestly is a very dangerous activity? Why did she care more about defending illegal immigrants than ensuring her own children would have a mother?
One of the most remarkable and disturbing aspects of the ICE confrontation videos coming out is the prevalence of women physically engaging law enforcement, especially given their clear belief that they will not come to harm by obstructing and outright attacking heavily armed state agents. Renee Good lost her life in such a confrontation, and footage from four different angles documented the chillingly playful manner in which she and her wife taunted the ICE officers whose vehicle they were blocking. Right up until the moment of her fatal shooting, Good clearly believed herself to be completely untouchable by federal agents armed with deadly weapons. To look at her face mere seconds from death is to see a woman engaged in playfighting, someone incapable of imagining that stalking men with guns, blocking their vehicles, ignoring their orders to desist, to leave her car, could possibly get her hurt. Whatever you think of the legality of Good’s shooting, the fact that she seemed to sleepwalk into it, blithely oblivious to the extreme peril in which she placed herself, should disturb you. It disturbs me.
If you step back a few feet and think about the situation she put herself in, it's impossible not to understand that what she was doing was very dangerous. Whether you believe the shooting was justified or not, no intelligent person should be able to believe that in the thousands of interactions between people who are harassing ICE and committing actual felonies to do so there wouldn't be violent confrontations.
Any one event will likely de-escalate, but thousands? There will be violence. It is a mathematical certainty.
So why do it? I can understand a 20-year-old single radical deciding to do it, but a mom in her 30s? I've seen moms bring their children to confrontations with ICE and get right in their faces. It is literally insane behavior, whatever the cause.
Why are so many middle-class people, and especially women, behaving with such callous disregard for their own safety, seemingly without realizing it? Yes, they oppose immigration enforcement, they consider ICE’s mission illegitimate. But most people who hold these views do not engage in direct action with armed law enforcement, and even fewer would put themselves in a position to be beaten or shot by physically obstructing or interfering with officers. Yet a critical minority of mostly white, mostly middle-class activists, disproportionately women, have been radicalized into this extreme form of activist protest in large numbers. How did this happen?
To understand why, first understand that activist groups of the kind that Good belonged to encourage their members to use the exact interference tactics she employed, as well as other, even more dangerous once. These groups publish various guides on how to prevent law enforcement from fulfilling their mission or arresting their fellow travelers. They conduct training sessions for members to rehearse these tactics before deploying them in the field. They are well organized and well funded.
The guides are quite explicit about how to incite agents and even the methods to use to commit felonies, such as helping an arrestee escape. Some of these techniques require actual assaults on officers in situations where they are surrounded by an angry, shouting mob shaking them and trying to free a prisoner.
They are TRAINED to do this. There is an entire literature on how to do it, training classes, and people paid to go around the country and recruit people—especially women—to confront officers in ways calculated to get the maximum response from the police.
The citizen-led anti-ICE operations taking place in Minneapolis and in every city where ICE shows its masked faces are better understood as a kind of militia action, rather than as a form of protest. Even when technically non-violent in nature, these operations are designed to provoke a violent response from law enforcement, thereby producing mediagenic victims to use in propaganda. The goal is to trap enforcement efforts in a double bind — either obstruction tactics disrupt immigration enforcement, so activists win; or somebody gets hurt or killed for the dozens of cameras filming every encounter, producing a new martyr to dominate media coverage, so activists win.
Activist networks encourage their members to engage in behavior that they know will result in martyr production when applied at scale in a simple equation: X activists engaging with Y officers per day with a violent confrontation rate of Z% will lead to N new martyrs per year. The logic is as predictable as it is sad. Each new martyrdom is not a regrettable tragedy, it is a tremendous boon to the movement, motivating swells of protest and inducing fresh blood to enlist so the cycle can continue.
That is the logic of the recruiters. Why the 'protesters" do it is a bit more complicated, but there are a number of factors involved. Everything from giving people purpose, creating a sense of irrational overwhelming fear, and a sense of belonging to something bigger than oneself. Renee Good, supposedly, was recruited at her kid's CHARTER SCHOOL (which means state-funded) into the movement.
It's the thing everybody around her does, or supports, including the political leaders of her state who have declared war on the feds.
Stochastic martyrdom is the encouragement of activist tactics that will predictably get activists hurt or killed when applied at scale, coupled with false assurances of personal safety for the people employing them. The martyrs created by this process are then used (quite effectively) as propaganda for the activist cause in a positive feedback loop. The repeated assurances that radically dangerous tactics are actually perfectly safe explains the preponderance of women throwing themselves in harm’s way, as well as the uncanny “we’re just playing” affect adopted by so many of the women filming themselves confronting officers armed with lethal weapons. And the importance of these false assurances explain the widely circulating myths that federal immigration officers can’t touch or arrest US citizens, that they have no authority over you to order you to (for example) stop blocking a public road, like a sort of leftist sovereign citizen movement. Obviously these ideas are dangerous lies, and I would bet money that Good had heard and believed them.
Social media—the social media feeds of the people who engage in or are attracted to the movement—are filled with videos of activists and especially women standing up to "fascism," taunting "the man," and saving their "neighbors." It is romanticized, lionized, and thrilling to a certain type of person who seeks meaning.
As we focus on the politicians and activists inciting all this violence, it behooves us to remember their victims. Women like Renee Good are recruited as foot soldiers of a cause that will get some of them killed, and in the case of immigration enforcement, they will be killed for little more than the political benefit of cynical politicians who hope to ride a wave of outrage back into power.
That's sociopathic.
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