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There are plenty of complaints that our politics have deteriorated over the past decade. One of the biggest culprits remains the normalization of riot culture by the Democratic Party, where scores of activists are convinced that they can block traffic, assault law enforcement, and that their violence is a justified form of resistance. The result has been dangerous for everyone involved.
This has come to a boiling point in Minneapolis, where two anti-deportation “protesters” got themselves killed in interactions with federal immigration officials. The first was Renee Good, who parked her car in the middle of the road, purposefully obstructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. Good operated as if it were a game, and then tried to speed off from the scene when ICE officers moved to detain her. This led to her (accidentally or not) driving her car directly at an ICE officer, striking him with it. The officer returned fire, fatally wounding her.
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The second was Alex Pretti. Pretti was also blocking traffic on the day he was shot, standing in the middle of the road, according to a witness. When Border Patrol agents moved to clear the road, one agent shoved a woman. Pretti rushed in to involve himself in this, leading to agents moving to detain him. He fought them frantically, agents learned he had a firearm in his waistband, and he was shot and killed. Two weeks earlier, Pretti had damaged a federal vehicle and again fought to resist officers trying to detain him, again with a gun on his person.
In both cases, Good and Pretti got themselves killed. They bought into the idea that roads were not meant for cars but for lawless “protests” where they stalk ICE officers or Border Patrol agents in the streets to harass them and inhibit their operations. And thousands of other Democratic protesters are putting their lives in danger following this same mindset, thinking they have the right to harass and interfere with federal law enforcement.
That is not just dangerous to the protesters. The legitimatization of lawless “protests” relies on the delegitimization of federal law enforcement agents, and Democratic politicians and pundits are doing exactly that to fuel these street mobs. Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) has called ICE “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.” Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) has called ICE “Nazi-coded,” and Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) has compared the United States to Nazi Germany over immigration enforcement.
Pundit “comedian” Stephen Colbert, who represents the hysterically deluded Democratic activist base, said that the Nazis were actually preferable to ICE. That is how far Democratic politicians and mouthpieces will go to justify the street violence of people like Good and Pretti.
As a result, there have been multiple targeted attacks against ICE and Border Patrol agents, committed by people who buy into Walz’s and Colbert’s rhetoric about enforcing immigration law being just like the Holocaust. In July, a shooting at an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, resulted in an injury to a police officer, and another shooting occurred at a Border Patrol facility in McAllen, Texas, a few days later. In September, a man shot at ICE officers in Dallas. He killed two people, both illegal immigrants detained by ICE, and then killed himself. In November, Border Patrol agents were shot at in Chicago.
These shootings become more likely by the day, as mobs of activists braying about ICE and Border Patrol being Nazis surround them in the streets. Those activists yell and scream and obstruct traffic and blow whistles, the purpose being to make the situation as chaotic as possible. This puts officers in a position where they can become a target of any lunatic with ideas of activist grandeur in his or her head. It degrades their ability to assess safety risks in real time and inhibits their communications, making them more vulnerable.
This puts the lives of the officers at risk, which means it also ramps up the tension in these interactions. If officers are constantly having to worry about safety in these public mobs, they will act more quickly to handle threats, real or perceived. This was all on display in the shooting of Pretti, who was fighting Border Patrol agents while having a gun on his hip. The heightened tensions and the fact that Pretti was armed meant agents had to make a snap life-or-death decision, knowing that people were trying to kill them. It resulted in Pretti being shot.
It is not just dangerous for federal law enforcement and the activists who harass them, though. As evidenced in Dallas, where two illegal immigrants were shot and killed (and another was wounded) for being in close proximity to federal agents, the normalization of violence harms people who do not work for ICE or Border Patrol and are not in the streets antagonizing them.
There are more examples. Social media videos have shown activist mobs harassing random private citizens based on the car they drive or how they look, demanding identification from them to prove they aren’t ICE officers. Three TSA workers were swarmed and harassed while trying to eat at a restaurant in Los Angeles, which those activists justified by claiming they thought they were “potentially” ICE officers. The leaders of the mob then tried to pressure restaurant workers into not commenting on the incident to the media.
This is happening because these activists have created a database system designed to track ICE officers so they can harass them at all hours of the day. This has resulted in mobs showing up at hotels and blocking roads (and ambulances). It has also resulted in random people driving SUVs being added to ICE license plate tracker lists, and random TSA agents being harassed while trying to grab a bite to eat.
The accidental harassment of random civilians and the purposeful harassment of federal law enforcement officers are both inexcusable. Even worse if the purposeful harassment of random civilians. A particularly depraved mob of activists decided to storm a church service in Minneapolis, claiming that the church’s pastor was an ICE official. The mob disrupted the service, terrified a bunch of children and their families, and then justified it because, in the words of former CNN pundit (and mob member) Don Lemon, that is “what protesting is about.”
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These activists have given themselves permission to do whatever they like and harass whoever they want. They have done so because they have been convinced by prominent Democrats that they are at the forefront of a fight against evil personified, and because Democratic city and state leaders have shown that they will not arrest people who engage in lawless mob activities. That was the lesson from the summer of Black Lives Matter in 2020.
That is the result of normalizing mob culture. Democrats have whipped their activist base into a hateful frenzy and have refused to call for, let alone enforce, order. That puts people’s lives at risk, whether they are law enforcement officers, innocent bystanders, or the activists themselves. It also strips society of the expectation of a functional political discourse, creating a situation where the loudest, angriest mob wins. That is a place our politics won’t recover from, and that is where Democrats are driving our politics right now.
