Renee Good, the left-wing woman who was fatally shot after accelerating her vehicle toward an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis last week, was a member of the local chapter of activist group ICE Watch. Conservative commentator Matt Whitlock published excerpts from an “MN ICE Watch” training manual on X that suggested tried and true ways of “de-arresting” comrades who have been detained by law enforcement officers.
According to the manual, “each de-arrest is a ‘shaking off’ … a micro-intifada which can spread and inspire others until we may finally shake off this noxious ruling order all together.”
For example, if a comrade is caught in the grasp of law enforcement, the manual suggests “using a secure grip like the Gable grip that’s illustrated above, hug the arrestee and pull them out of danger.”
Another goes a bit further, instructing comrades on how to pull and push “an officer off of an arrestee and/or break their grip on an arrestee.” Users are warned of the risks associated with this tactic because “it requires physical contact with an officer, which could lead to assault on an officer charges or escalate the LEO response.”
The least risky of the suggestions involves “pressuring police to release the arrestee(s).” Activists should “totally surround the officers who have the arrestee … chanting ‘Let them go!’ and the like until the LEOs cave to the mounting pressure.”
This is just one small group that few had ever heard of until now. There are many such activist organizations that have a sole purpose of training people to defy laws they disagree with.
How long can a nation endure when millions of its citizens, and even members of Congress, feel justified in interfering with federal agents’ enforcement of the law?
As one X user rightly noted, “There is a vast swathe of people on the activist left who either explicitly or implicitly deny the legal authority of ICE to exist and do what it does — either out of ignorance but more often simply because they believe it to be ‘unrighteous.’”
These individuals equate ICE with the Gestapo and President Donald Trump with a dictator for the simple reason that his administration is enforcing laws enacted by Congress. One can only imagine how different the political climate would be if his predecessor had enforced those laws instead of opening the borders to millions of unvetted illegal immigrants. And it raises a stark question: How long would such defiance be tolerated in a truly authoritarian state?
In a Sunday op-ed, Hot Air‘s John Sexton likened the Left’s reaction to the shooting of Good to the Black Lives Matter riots that erupted after George Floyd’s death, arguing they are following the same playbook. They are certainly trying.
As Sexton described it, following a shooting, “usually involving a white police officer and a black suspect, they would quickly nationalize the outrage and demand justice for this individual. Activists would rush to television cameras … and then there would be organized street protests against law enforcement, often making some demands.”
While Good’s death has prompted a wave of protests, the familiar BLM playbook no longer appears to carry the same force. Perhaps part of that is because Good was white, but a more compelling explanation may be that the Black Lives Matter playbook has lost much of its power, especially as the organization behind it has been exposed and discredited in the eyes of many.
In other words, it’s no longer working. The protests sparked by Good’s death have felt manufactured and performative, lacking the organic energy that once fueled similar movements. The public has already lived through the excesses and the sheer lunacy of the so-called “summer of love,” and many have emerged far more skeptical as a result.
However, that skepticism will not deter activists from continuing to resist laws they don’t like through intimidation and disruption, or from recycling straw-man claims that ICE is “disappearing” or otherwise law-abiding citizens whose only crime was entering the country illegally.
Even if BLM-style protests no longer generate the same impact, the Left’s broader formula for stoking national outrage remains very much intact. As Sexton noted, Democrats moved immediately to circulate a “misleading” version of events — one carefully crafted to make the shooter appear culpable and the victim blameless. He pointed to the now-familiar pattern seen in the Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown cases.
By the time a full investigation is completed, and the facts emerge, often revealing a narrative that places some or even most of the responsibility on the person who was shot, the false version has already taken root in the public consciousness.
ARRESTS OF VIOLENT FELONS DEMONSTRATES ICE’S VITAL WORK IN MINNESOTA
What the Good case ultimately reveals is not a spontaneous uprising or a moral reckoning, but a well-worn strategy: delegitimize law enforcement, distort the facts, and inflame public emotion before the truth has any chance to surface. Even if the protests feel hollow, the underlying machinery of outrage remains operational — and dangerous.
A society cannot long endure when organized activists are trained to physically interfere with law enforcement, elected officials echo their distortions, and large segments of the public are conditioned to view the rule of law as optional. At some point, the question is no longer about immigration policy or policing, but whether the law still commands authority.
