The situation is familiar. Once again, we have a person — or now two people — killed during a confrontation with law enforcement, whose fate strikes a large number of Americans, especially those belonging to blue-city professional classes, as so morally outrageous that it threatens our national identity. All decent humans must respond … by hitting the streets in protest. The evil is so egregious, in fact, that it requires discarding previous standards and safeguards, such as cooperation between the federal and state authorities, enforcement of law, and the democratic process. It even requires that we deny common sense, such as that it’s asking for trouble to block law enforcement with your car, or showing up armed to confront federal officers in a chaotic, police-free environment.
When these episodes of mass outrage get going, no nuance, reasonable objection or difference of opinion is allowed. And for Americans in the educated classes — those who, in a better world, would have the social and professional power to put on the brakes — the environment becomes coercive. If you’re a nurse in New York City, for example, this week a union strike-briefing turned into a harangue by the Democratic Socialists of America on how to resist ICE, with no regard for the participants’ politics.
It’s a dismaying turn of events: woke seemed to be on the wane from 2022 to 2025, but it has come roaring back in 2026 in a new form that’s both purified and more vicious. The Leftist freedom-fighters have cut out the middle man of the oppressed subject — African Americans in 2020 — and taken center stage themselves. It’s the natural evolution of the #resistance.
To be clear about context of the new wave of protests: Americans have democratically elected a president who promised to close the border and deport illegal migrants, especially those with criminal histories. It was a popular plank of his platform. America also has laws regarding immigration, and a democratic process for changing those laws. At no point, even when Democrats have been in control, has wholesale naturalization of illegal immigrants or a legal open border been a political possibility.
Thus, whether we like the tactics being deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the basic premise of the agency’s activities reflects the will of the people in a democracy. For Leftists to subvert it through direct action against law enforcement is illegal and anti-democratic. It is true that illegal migrants have died or been killed in government custody, and also true that bad things have happened to the people protesting arrests of such people — and these things are reason for criticism or compassion or distress. No one wants people to be killed with impunity in government custody, or a world in which law enforcement regularly guns down citizens for being really fucking annoying. And there is a single correct way to read the videos of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings — neither one appeared to be posing a danger to law enforcement at the time they were shot — but there’s no single correct view of the meaning of these events. Attempts to override democracy or the rule of law in their name are controversial at the very least.
Yet at the moment, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Because, just as in 2020, for an influential subset of the professional classes, it has become mandatory to signal outrage.
In this sense, the anti-ICE protests currently roiling America look and feel very much like their Black Lives Matter predecessors. This is true in the way anti-ICE hysteria is shutting down the discourse: if you support the immigration authorities anywhere near Left-wing spaces, you will be abused at a pitch that feels newly foul. UnHerd’s own Sohrab Ahmari, for example, was called out online by a prominent labor organizer merely for talking about something other than Pretti’s death. Kat Rosenfeld, an UnHerd contributor, was called a “shitty coward” for a thoughtful Substack exploring Alex Honnald, Alex Pretti and the concept of “plot armor.” And the congregants at Catholic church service led by a Jesuit (more Left-wing than you’d think) that I attended in Brooklyn on Saturday, were told that those who failed to protest could not be expected to be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven.
Anti-ICE also resembles 2020 in terms of its fundamental delusion: protesters are unaware that their activities benefit them more than the people whose rights they’re supposedly championing. (Defunding the police work didn’t work out too well for low-income black communities, recall.) But this time around, the movement has burned away the elements that made its previous iterations subject to mockery and reemerged purified and perhaps stronger. Gone are the fake compassion (black lives matter); the abstruse theory (what is a woman?); the dopey therapeutic culture (training to become un-racist). Even the focus on identity is gone — notice that no one is really talking about the own-voices of the migrants, or new forms of speaking in order to show them the greatest respect, or how to actually solve their problems in a systematic, policy-oriented way. Woke 2.0 is just fighting to keep them here, undocumented.
Put another way: woke 2.0 is eschewing both theory and institutional takeover for militant action and sheer rage, in a way that feels individual, atomized, and newly dangerous. Protesters physically interfere with law enforcement, spit and kick cars, track ICE vehicles and those belonging to conservative journalists, get phone numbers, doxx people, and send death threats. The threats are now going to phones and homes instead of social-media accounts.
“Woke 2.0 is eschewing both theory and institutional takeover for militant action and sheer rage.”
No longer “mostly peaceful,” protesters smash hotel windows without apology or disclaimer. And the internet is flooded with videos of random private citizens making grotesque threats. A Florida nurse wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow on it that says “Trump sucks” announced that “as a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great pleasure” to wish Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, “a fourth degree tear” during her upcoming labor. A Virginia nurse suggests that young women go on dates with ICE agents in order to put Ex-Lax in their drinks. In other videos, she suggests carrying needle syringes in order to inject the agents with a temporary paralysis drug or filling water guns with poison ivy and aiming for their faces and hands. Baby-faced young girls in rainbow hair clips give up saying anything coherent at all, instead yelling, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”
In this newly badass version of the #Resistance, every protester is the star of her own movie. And while the turn to sheer rage is no doubt sincere, it also represents an evacuation of content — the political cause, the political solution — and allows woke-ism to become the most perfect version of what it always in some senses was: a vehicle for the elite conception of self, and a very convenient one. If you have any doubt that it’s become all about professionals, look at who the movement’s martyrs are: not any one of the 32 people who’ve reportedly died in the custody of ICE custody last year, but Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
And the more it’s about the protesters, the more they think they should get their own way. This is not the America we want. Indeed. And they’re ready to take it by force, and feel justified in doing so. Nevermind that, as in the George Floyd protests before this, there is no goal that will help the victimized population beyond “stop enforcing the law.”
This, of course, was always the problem with woke, and one of the reasons why it drove its rational opponents so mad. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, writing in his landmark 2024 survey, We Have Never Been Woke, contended that while a loose, historical meaning of woke was “an awareness of social injustice, and a commitment to rectifying it,” the movement’s claims to be operating on behalf of the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized have long been co-opted as a way for the elite to rationalize inequality.
In Al-Gharbi’s telling, this has always been delusional. The urban-protester demographic is the middle and upper-middle class. Anyone who resides in a household that makes more than $150,000 a year, he writes, is part of America’s top quintile, which controls a stunning 71% of the country’s wealth. This group benefits disproportionately from inequality; this group is the one that hoovers up services performed by mostly black and brown low-wage workers, who are often lacking legal authorization to work and thus vulnerable to hyper-exploitation. The top quintile’s attempts to blame “the 1%” are scapegoating and an attempt to deny its own guilt. “When people are consumed by anger over a problem, but the real object of their anger is untouchable (or is in fact themselves), folks have long tried to collectively focus their rage on some other target instead,” Al-Gharbi writes. He adds that “progressive politics, in particular, seems to increasingly serve as a means through which highly educated, relatively affluent whites find purpose, transcendence and community in their lives.”
Al-Gharbi’s book is devastating in its depiction of the ways in which the wave of wokeness that began around the 2010s and peaked in 2020 made no impact on the “bread-and-butter” crises that afflict the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged. Inequality continued to rise, and is rising still. Despite what people believe is a sincere commitment to social justice, he writes, their devotion to it comes primarily in the form of symbolic activity that takes the place of “sustainable, viable coalitions that could achieve concrete change,” while also mystifying the problem and making change harder to accomplish.
In other words, all the protesting, Signal chats, cruising in your vehicle making videos, delivering casseroles, walking out of work, getting pepper-sprayed, and engaging in scuffles with authority won’t, fundamentally, allow the supposed beneficiaries of the activism to live equally as Americans. To do that would require real sacrifice and compromise, things that our increasingly violent political polarization, and demonization of each other, make ever less likely to come about. On the uglier side, the casseroles and scuffles will continue to allow migrants to be low-paid service workers for the people helping them stay.
The new wrinkle of anti-woke, which gained real power in America mainly after Al-Gharbi’s analysis appeared, serves the same cultural function as woke, he writes. Once again, it’s a form of jockeying for power amongst an elite that has no intention of real reform. Following this logic, the deportation theater may be popular with Trump’s low income voters, but it’s also unlikely to change the conditions of their lives.
The battle between ICE and anti-ICE, thus, even as it turns real, is still mainly symbolic. What’s needed in response is not more theater, or an ever more enraged doubling-down, but an attempt to see and inhabit a shared reality, and find a compromise. Some tactics are too much. Some humans are illegal (until we legally decide otherwise). If we don’t, we all may look back some day at woke 1.0 — the dumb yard signs, the vapid DEI power-points, the unserious death threats — with a kind of rainbow-hued nostalgia.
