MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER: The left is getting people killed
A Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minnesota shot a second person dead on Saturday. Most of the debate since then has focused, understandably, on whether the ICE agent acted in what he perceived to be self-defense.
Whatever the case, it’s clear that, by encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations, the left is getting people killed. Videos show both victims, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, impeding law enforcement operations, which progressive nonprofits, Democrats and liberal influencers have been encouraging for months.
Good drove her vehicle perpendicular to block traffic while her partner taunted ICE officers. Pretti intervened at least twice, first by waving traffic through on the street and again as an ICE officer sought to subdue another person interfering in the operation, triggering the agent to use pepper spray against him.
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In saying this, I am not defending the decisions and behaviors of the ICE officers or anyone else. The killings are a tragedy. And there is a worthwhile debate underway over ICE tactics, separate from the specific behaviors of Good and Pretti.
We don’t know what was in the minds of Good and Pretti specifically, but Democrats, progressives, and anti-ICE activists have for years called ICE and the Trump administration fascist and compared them to the Nazis.
On January 19, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz called ICE "Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo." Last year, in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation to block ICE from hiding its identities. The Los Angeles mayor called them a "reign of terror." And a few days ago, the lieutenant governor of Minnesota urged citizens to "put your body on the line" to block ICE protests.
Walz and other Democrats have blocked state and local law enforcement from working with ICE, which has contributed to increasingly risky behavior by anti-ICE activists like Good and Pretti, and thus growing danger to everyone involved. There were no Minneapolis police visible in the videos of the Good and Pretti deaths.
And many of America’s largest progressive cities and states are all openly defiant of federal law, declaring themselves "sanctuaries" that protect illegal migrants from the federal government.
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California, New York, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and others are "sanctuary states." At the same time, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, San Diego, Sacramento, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Madison, Milwaukee, Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Newark, Jersey City, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Chapel Hill, Durham, Asheville, Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Reno, are "sanctuary cities."
The underlying problem is that for decades, schools, Hollywood, and the media have made clear that we should risk and even sacrifice our own lives to stop fascism and Nazism. And yet neither ICE raids nor Trump are fascist, and it is offensive to compare them to the Nazis.
The Nazis rounded up Jewish citizens and shipped them to death camps. ICE, by contrast, is detaining foreigners who the government believes committed criminal offenses beyond coming to the U.S. illegally. No nation in the world has allowed more people to enter illegally. Nor has any treated them with greater due process than the U.S. is doing.
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The American people elected Trump president, like it or not, and the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause in Article VI establishes that federal law prevails over conflicting state or local laws. It ensures the Constitution, federal statutes, and treaties are the "supreme Law of the Land," binding state courts and governments. The ICE raids may be bad politics, but there is no question that they are constitutional.
While some Democrats and progressives know their language is hyperbolic, half of the individuals surveyed told pollsters last year that Trump is a fascist. Such radical beliefs appear to have partly motivated two assassination attempts against Trump and the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
While the radical left has for decades called its political opponents fascists, these views were until recently marginal views, even within the Democratic Party. Moreover, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton all spoke out against illegal migration until 2016. So what changed? Why did so many Americans come to view a democratically elected president and law enforcement operations as equivalent to fascism? What radicalized the left?
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Part of the answer is bad information. Many progressives believe ICE is simply sweeping up hard-working and law-abiding immigrants, and do not know that 64 percent of immigrants detained since Trump took office in January 2025 had criminal convictions or pending charges, in addition to having broken the law by entering and working in the country without a visa.
For some, labeling Trump as a fascist was simply a political tactic and not something they believed. But many others believe it, as the polling data shows.
Many people, both liberals and conservatives, believe progressives like Good and Pretti are acting out of empathy and sympathy for migrants. But if they are, it is purely ideologically driven, not from any real-world understanding of migrant communities. Few of the White progressives protesting ICE have ever spoken more than a few words to, much less gotten to know illegal immigrants, even those who work for them as cleaners, cooks and gardeners, much less come to understand their lives.
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Many on the left view all migrants, a priori, as political refugees, without knowing anything of their specific circumstances, since Europeans ostensibly stole Indigenous land. And where White Americans are ostensibly heirs to those European oppressors, Latino migrants are heirs to the oppressed; serving justice requires mass migration.
Trump’s often brash and aggressive language sounds racist to many people on the left, many of whom do not view entering the country illegally as a crime. In that sense, the left’s view of Trump’s criticism and rhetoric around illegal migration as racist stems from a radical left victimhood ideology, which was created not by people fundamentally concerned with improving the lives of the downtrodden, but rather by a string of left-wing intellectuals who were anti-civilization and who characterize history as a story of evil oppressors versus good victims.
Behind this ideology is a story of European settlement of the Americas, and civilization itself, as illegitimate, because it supposedly rests upon violence and genocide.
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The moderate left, or establishment liberals, since World War II, have promoted increasingly open borders and more migration as part of a broader push for what the post-war philosopher Karl Popper called "the open society." Elites after World War II promoted the open society vision to increase growth, open foreign markets to U.S. firms and products, and establish peace and security.
Over time, but particularly after 2016, the moderate left radicalized, joining the radical left in its view of Trump as fascist. Democrats had been moving to the left well before that, with the media showing clear increases in reference to racism and white supremacy after 2011.
Various causes can explain most, if not all, of the radicalization, making it overdetermined and thus impossible to reduce with much certainty to one or two causes. The news media became increasingly one-sided as it sought to appeal more to its core audience for economic reasons, as its overall audience shrank due to the rise of social media. And social media itself appears to have intensified certainty and intolerance by reinforcing existing views and prejudices.
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And behind all of those factors lies man’s need for meaning and purpose, which fighting fascism, real or fake, offers. There are few ways for anyone to be a hero anymore. Both Good and Pretti were 37 years old when they died, and millennials, more than Gen X before and Gen Z after, are very progressive and are "heroes in their narratives," researchers find.
The deaths of Good and Pretti are thus the result of a collision of forces that have been building for decades. After World War II, fighting Nazis and fascists became the number one heroic fantasy for Americans and others in the West. And Baby Boomers taught their own revolutionary heroic values to their millennial children, who see fighting Trump and ICE as an opportunity to achieve a form of transcendence.
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For a brief moment after Trump’s 2024 re-election, it appeared that Democrats were rethinking their radicalism across a range of issues. A majority of voters had rejected not just Vice President Kamala Harris but the Democrats’ handling of the economy and immigration, and rejected the Democrats’ agenda on race, trans and climate change.
One year later, that’s all changed. The Democrats have clearly decided to disavow moderation and instead focus on attacking what they view as a major vulnerability and overreach. Sixty-eight percent of voters support closing the southern border, but 63% of voters and 70% of independents disapprove of the ICE raids. Fifty-eight percent of voters say they disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration. Disapproval of Trump on immigration rose from 39% in April to 48% today.
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Trump thus finds himself in a bind. If he continues the ICE raids, his approval ratings could worsen, thereby increasing the likelihood that Democrats will take control of one or more houses of Congress. If he calls them off, he hands Democrats a major political victory and will embolden their radicalization further.
It’s clear what the left wants. "You have the Minnesota National Guard troops," wrote Keith Olbermann on X to Gov. Walz. "Deploy them. Arrest the ICE agents. Enforce the laws and defend your people against Trump’s Terrorists."
What Olbermann is proposing is nothing short of civil war. Like many others on the left, Olbermann views Trump’s supporters as "Nazis" and "fascists."
We will soon learn much more about Pretti, as we did about Good. But already we know enough to know that they are victims of the left and its radicalization.
This essay was first published on Public which is available on Substack.