For weeks, protesters in Minneapolis have defied sub-zero temperatures to clash with federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – often with tragic, deadly results. The killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti by border agents have thrown rocket fuel on to America’s raging culture war. Liberals have hailed the pair as martyrs battling against a Gestapo-like tyranny, while the right, including higher-ups in the Trump administration, has smeared the deceased as deranged domestic terrorists. The battle lines have been drawn, but where do ordinary Americans fit into those camps?
Bridget Phetasy – host of Dumpster Fire and Walk-Ins Welcome – returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss the crisis unfolding in Minnesota and what it might mean for the right and the left. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. You can watch the full episode here.
Brendan O’Neill: Observing the ICE raids in Minnesota, it’s hard not to wonder if there’s a low-level civil war going on. Does it feel that way to you?
Bridget Phetasy: I think a lot of the chaos we’re witnessing is the result of tensions that have been in hibernation for a while. Now they’re resurfacing in time for election year.
Personally, I’m not sure that I like the optics of masked guys in vans pulling abuela off the street into unmarked cars – I don’t think it does a lot of good. But there’s a lot of complicated things that underpin what is happening here, not least that you have upwards of 20million illegal immigrants in the United States. Many of them came under the last administration. How do you get rid of illegal immigrants that are now embedded in your country? That’s not a question I have any idea how to answer.
Minneapolis is known as a ‘sanctuary city’, where local law enforcement is not cooperating with federal law enforcement. Instead of arresting foreign criminals and handing them over to ICE, police are often allowing them to enter back into the communities. This then forces ICE into situations that are objectively horrible to witness. The upshot of repeatedly seeing these scenarios play out is that ordinary citizens feel emboldened to take matters into their own hands.
There are reasons to compare anti-ICE activism with the protests surrounding BLM, because in many respects it’s a revolt of liberal white women. They act as if they truly believe they are fighting the Gestapo, or a force akin to the Iranian regime, just like they did in 2020. During the George Floyd riots, people were throwing water bottles at cops and spitting on them. They were getting away with it. The permission structure allowing them to insert themselves into proceedings has already been established.
O’Neill: Do these women really believe they’re up against an evil regime when interacting with law enforcement?
Phetasy: I was a bad kid who did a lot of drugs, so I’ve had a lot more interactions with police than the average woman will have. Around the police, people would call me a ‘boot-licker’ because I was terrified of them. I know the kinds of personalities that join law enforcement. There are plenty of instances of corruption. These are not perfect people. At the same time, I have no idea how they do their job. They’re exposed to the scum of the earth all day long, and every single interaction could be life or death. We like to strip all of that nuance away when we’re talking about cops.
I think most normal people look at these aggressively anti-ICE, liberal white women and think, what are you doing? How entitled do you have to be to think that by muscling your way into this situation, you aren’t in danger? If you really believe that you’re up against a similar force to the SS, you would assume that you might get killed every time you interact with them. At the very least, you would be wary of some very harsh consequences. But these women don’t see it like that. They will provoke law enforcement in ways that make you question which reality it is they believe. I don’t think there were many people going around provoking Hitler’s thugs back in the 1930s.
O’Neill: Both the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis have been very publicly hostile towards ICE agents. Liberal media take the same stance. Does this feed into the erratic behaviour of the protesters?
Phetasy: Of course it does. It’s easy to portray ICE agents as nameless thugs wearing masks and snatching people up – but these are still people. They have an entire extended family and often children. In cases where these agents are doxxed, everyone in their life is in real danger. Suddenly, the masks seem justified.
I don’t like the idea of a ‘paper’s please’ state. But then, how do we figure out who’s here legally and who’s not? I guess liberals are fundamentally cool with the fact that tens of millions of people, some of them already criminals, have been allowed to come into America. We also shouldn’t forget that the same liberal media now calling ICE the Gestapo were basically fine with the force when it was operating under Obama.
It’s sad what the media have become. If something doesn’t fit their narrative, there won’t be any coverage of it. They run headlines like ‘ICE shoots two’, for instance, even when it’s two gang members, or people who shot at the officers first. On the other hand, the right will cover those nuances, but fail to delve into ICE’s excesses or abuses when they occur. It’s so hard to find a balanced view.
There is the feeling of very justified anger from the parents of those who have been hurt or killed by dangerous illegal immigrants. They watch the marches for Renée Good, and they know those same people would have never marched for their child. They know that the compassion is inauthentic. Why do they care about this case, but not about the young girl who was raped and murdered and thrown over a bridge? Because in reality, it has nothing to do with empathy. It just has to do with your politics.
O’Neill: Given that these protests are happening against the backdrop of industrial-scale police violence in Iran, do you feel that the left has displayed some warped priorities?
Phetasy: Definitely. I’d say the thing that pushed me out of the left more than anything else was realising how colossally full of shit Western feminists are. They don’t care about the plight of Iranian women any more than they care about that of Israeli women on 7 October, or women who are murdered by illegal immigrants, or working-class girls in the UK who were systematically gang raped. Most probably haven’t even heard of the ‘grooming gangs’. If they have, they’ll chalk it up to anti-immigration right-wing conspiracy theories. They demand video proof of Jewish women being raped and murdered by people who have openly bragged about raping and murdering them.
Instead of focussing on situations of actual female oppression, a lot of women in the West are preoccupied with ridiculous initiatives like keeping biological men in female sports. In Western society, we have ascended to the freest place that you can be as a woman. Why don’t we put some energy into liberating other women throughout the world who don’t have a voice like we do? Why don’t we help the women who are living under an actual patriarchy, rather than the one that you made up in your head?
Iran encapsulates this liberal moral contortionism. The way leftists handle it is by just ignoring it. They disconnect from the problem and turn their attention elsewhere to, arguably, more fickle issues. Many of them have never faced an existential threat in their entire life, and therefore have no idea what it is to fight for survival. So they end up lazy, entitled and delusional.
Bridget Phetasy was talking to Brendan O’Neill. Watch the full conversation below:
