Goldberg: The right wants ICE to crush the wine mom insurgency
If you read conservative media, you might have heard about a new danger stalking our besieged country.
This week, Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the “greatest threat to our nation” is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’ who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women.” (The acronym is wrong, but never mind.) The Canadian influencer Lauren Chen — who had to leave the United States in 2024 after the Department of Justice accused her of working for a Russian propaganda operation, but was allowed back in by the Trump administration — wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.”
It’s as if the right is speedrunning the Martin Niemöller poem that begins, “First they came for the Communists.” ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis started with the demonization of Somali immigrants. It took only weeks for conservative demagogues to direct their venom toward the middle-class women of the Resistance. We’re now seeing an outpouring of misogynist rage driven by both political expedience and psychosexual grievance.
One reason Renee Good’s death was such a shock is that we’re not used to seeing law enforcement violence against middle-class white mothers. The citizenry has broadly recoiled; her killing, in addition to being a human tragedy, has been a public relations disaster for the administration. According to an Economist/YouGov poll, most Americans have seen videos of the shooting, and only 30% believe it was justified. A plurality of Americans say ICE is making cities less safe, and more people support than oppose abolishing the agency.
Mass disgust
In the face of such widespread public revulsion, the administration and its enablers have been trying to invent a terrorist threat to justify their increasingly unpopular siege of Minneapolis. That’s why the Justice Department pushed for a criminal investigation of Good’s partner, Becca, leading six federal prosecutors to quit in protest. For authoritarian leaders, lying itself isn’t enough; they must act as if their lies are true. And the lies go far beyond Renee and Becca Good to smear the entire movement of which they were a part.
Conservatives aren’t wrong to see furious women as an obstacle to their dreams of mass deportation. During President Donald Trump’s first term, many outraged women protested to their members of Congress. They put their faith in prosecutors like Robert Mueller, in investigations and impeachment. They thought the system could constrain a man they regarded as inimical to American values. They now know they were wrong and that no one is coming to save them. So many have turned to peaceful direct action, particularly against ICE, which they view, with good reason, as the tip of the authoritarian spear.
I have more ICE whistles in my house than I can count, because my neighbors are constantly handing them out, most recently at my daughter’s dance recital. Similar bourgeois mobilizations are happening all over the country. CNN reported that Renee Good served on the board of her son’s charter school, which provided links to guides about opposing ICE. ICE watches are being organized in churches and neighborhood associations. In many ways they are manifestations of local civic health.
They’re also a problem for the right. These activists both document ICE’s brutality and are often subject to it, demonstrating the casual violence that Trump’s paramilitary forces are bringing to American communities. Just this week, a woman named Patty O’Keefe described agents surrounding a car she was in, spraying chemical irritants through the vents, breaking the windows and dragging her out. She was thrown in the back of an ICE vehicle, where she said the driver taunted her: “You guys got to stop obstructing us. That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.’” After eight hours in detention, she said, she was released without charges.
Anti-ICE insurgents
To defend such treatment of activists — many of them women — right-wingers need to cast them as enemies of the state. The editor of the conservative National Review, Rich Lowry, wrote a column headlined, “The Anti-ICE insurgency,” describing Good almost as a suicidal militant. “She went out of her way to confront ICE and created the predicate for the tragedy, which has been used to propagandize against ICE and mobilize more people to do what she did,” he wrote. “Insurgencies feed off their martyrs.” His language seems designed to rationalize ICE agents storming through Midwestern streets kitted out as if they’re headed into battle in Fallujah.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Trump has now threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. If he does so, some of his defenders might point to scattered instances of real violence by anti-ICE forces in Minneapolis. On Wednesday, Homeland Security claimed that an agent was assaulted with a snow shovel and a broom handle while trying to arrest a Venezuelan man; during the altercation, the agent shot the man in the leg. That led to an angry confrontation with about 200 protesters, some of whom threw fireworks toward ICE agents.
But no normal administration would contemplate a military response to such small-scale disorder. Trump doesn’t want to crush just criminal defiance, but the civil defiance that he wishes he could criminalize.
It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like “White Fragility” seriously. So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy. But it also makes sense, because everyone hates an apostate. In the right-wing imagination, these women are acting like harpies — an epithet often seen online — when they’re supposed to be helpmeets. Fox News’s Will Cain described a “weird kind of smugness” in the way “some of these liberal white women interact with authority.”
For MAGA, ICE’s eagerness to put women in their place might be a feature, not a bug.
Michelle Goldberg is a columnist for The New York Times.