I used to believe in the cause of immigration restriction. I would read about serious proposals to get the undocumented population down, and they would include things like mandatory E-Verify, a more secure border, etc. Never had I heard someone propose the following plan: “Flood ICE agents into a part of the country that has relatively few illegal immigrants because you think the governor is gay and cringe and in response to a low IQ influencer making a video about immigrants committing fraud. Have them go around and demand random Americans prove that they belong in the country.”
Of course, that is exactly what has happened. This was all supposedly in response to Somali fraud, yet over 90% of Somalis in Minnesota are citizens, and many of the rest have some kind of authorization to be in the country. The surge into that state makes absolutely no sense from the perspective of achieving any rational policy goal, and it has even been self-defeating in causing Americans to turn against the restrictionist project. The war on Minnesota is a result of a word association game drawing together concepts within the confines of minds shaped by hatred towards foreigners and political enemies. Tim Walz is a cuck, uppity white women, fraudsters, daycares that won’t show children to a mentally challenged YouTuber, Jacob Frey speaking Somali. Combine all these images, and it demands some kind of vigorous response. Trump has a cult of personality in part because his thinking is at about the sophistication level of his average supporter, a phenomenon rarely seen in politics.
Yet the conservative commentariat is united in seeing the surge into Minnesota as necessary. As Blake Neff, one of the most prominent Turning Point USA representatives, puts it,
The clash between ICE and Minnesota is the single most important test the Trump Administration has faced.
If Tim Walz and Keith Ellison win this showdown, they will show that ICE is impotent, federal immigration law is a dead letter, and Democrats can get away with 4 years of open borders invasion by throwing a big enough temper tantrum that the government backs down.
The Admin must win this battle.
I like the phrase “temper tantrum” here, as it hints at what is clearly an overwhelming desire to psychoanalyze the enemy. Real men are happy about, or at least indifferent to, masked agents without uniforms roaming their neighborhoods, throwing women on the ground, and asking random people to prove that they are allowed to be in the country. When protesters show unquestionable bravery, rightists then turn around and say that these are privileged white women who think the rules don’t apply to them. As the NYT reports,
In the days since a federal agent killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, Republican officials and conservative commentators have called the 37-year-old white woman “very violent,” a “deranged lunatic woman” and a “domestic terrorist.”
Some right-wing influencers have latched onto a different word — or rather an acronym: Ms. Good, they have said, was AWFUL.
“An AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) is dead after running her car into an ICE agent who opened fire on her,” the conservative commentator Erik Erickson posted on social media. “Progressive whites are turning violent. ICE agents have the right to defend themselves.”
From a co-host on an AM radio show in Orlando, Pierce Outlaw, to an army of internet trolls, the acronym has taken off. Mr. Outlaw called AWFULs “the scourge of polite society.” The term popped up on the internet Wiktionary this month as AWFL, without the “U.”
Beyond labels and name-calling, the death of Ms. Good and the protests and anger in its wake have sparked a response from many on the right that is particularly targeted at white women in the streets, even though men have been just as involved…
If liberal academics have their theories, Naomi Wolf, who was once a liberal writer but moved rightward after the Covid pandemic, has hers. Writing on social media, Ms. Wolf said liberal men, “disproportionately estrogenized” and “physically passive,” had left liberal women sexually frustrated and eager for a fight.
“The smiles you see on their faces now say it all: white women long for all out combat with ICE — who tend to be strong, physically confident, masculine men — because the conflict is a form of physical release for them,” she wrote.
On Thursday, Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of the social media site X, jumped in, amplifying a post to his 232 million followers that asserted, “Liberal women will divorce their husband and only let him see his children once a month, then cry about how ICE hurts families.”
So we’ve already tossed individual liberty and federalism out the window. I thought conservatives were also against attacking people on account of their race, or at least not attacking white people on those grounds. The contempt shown towards Renee Good and other women involved in protesting ICE are unsurprising, as this is the way bigotry has always worked. Loyalty to the in-group does not drive sentiments nearly as much as hostility to the out-group, and there’s always a way to blame what is happening on women.
The narrative was already decided before the Renee Good shooting. America is under threat from migrants. The only way a person can have any reaction to the project to fix this problem other than complete obedience is if they are driven by hatred for their country or empathy that is both toxic and effeminate. Conservatives are manly, doing what it takes to save the nation. The white women standing in the way of achieving our aims are ugly and sexually frustrated. They probably need a man to smack them around and cure them of their sentimentality. It’s basic evolutionary psychology.
Details that fit this narrative are emphasized, anything that doesn’t is ignored. The actual effectiveness of the policy, legality, or whether it makes sense on cost-benefit grounds, cannot be allowed to complicate the story. In the past, conservatives who disagreed with whatever the supposedly masculine position of the day was were called cucks, but all the cucks are long gone from the coalition, and the need to psychoanalyze leads to a focus on white women instead.
The rightoid mind fetishizes loyalty and action. In Mussolini’s Italy, you could hold almost any position you wanted as long as you praised the leader. Likewise, good standing in the MAGA coalition depends exclusively on your attitude towards Trump, migrants, and liberals. Rightist intellectuals cite Schmitt’s concept of the “friend-enemy distinction” as a way to understand how their opponents operate. In reality, modern liberals adhere closer to the rule of law and democratic norms of fairness than perhaps any other group of elites in human history. The friend-enemy distinction approach to politics, in contrast, works to explain MAGA, as the entire federal government and conservative media apparatus exists as a well-integrated machine translating Trump’s instincts and erratic thought patterns into policy, or at least spectacle. The machine isn’t completely subservient to the leader, as it can still push back against him when he doesn’t show enough hostility to foreigners who would like to live and work in the United States. Loyalty to Trump is not absolute, but if you combine that with an understanding of who they hate, you get the essence of right-wing politics at the moment.
The optimistic story here is that a political tribe driven more by instincts regarding whom to submit to or harm rather than careful thought about how to achieve its goals has a good chance of self-destructing in the long run. Alternatively, being able to lie without shame and having a movement that can move in lockstep towards its goals, even if many of the incremental steps don’t make sense, are natural advantages. There’s no going back to normal politics on the right. Whoever is coming next will be, by necessity, smarter than Trump, and the question is only whether the fact that the successor won’t be able to invoke the same passions will outweigh his greater ability to work consistently towards right-wing ends, however poorly defined or understood.
The purpose of ICE is what it does. It doesn't stop Somali fraud; it doesn't stop employers from hiring illegals; it doesn't make the country even 1% whiter. It creates violence in the streets for the Schadenfreude of MAGA. That is its purpose.
The right-wing believes that it is the left which is throwing a temper tantrum in response to ICE. But the ICE deployment is, itself, a temper tantrum. As you note, a combination of e-verify, welfare reform, and high-tech border patrol would result in millions of cheaper self-deportations.
But MAGA doesn't want that. They aren't mad at Trump for ignoring those *logical* policies, because being anti-immigrant is just an excuse to slam people on the ground and shoot protestors in the face. That's the real goal.
Hating immigrants is just a justification for a wider all-inclusive underlying sadism directed at "elites" and "public school teachers" and "lesbians" and "rich women." It's circular reasoning: they hate immigrants because immigrants vote Democrat; they hate Democrats because they let in the immigrants. The rationality of a 5 year old biting and kicking at his mom, but with the adult danger of a loaded gun.
Years ago my libertarian mentor argued that forcing races together via mass immigration often creates friction and this is what we see. To be clear, I’m not arguing it’s remotely as bad as many conservatives claim (i.e., we do not see Balkanization), but the fact that it’s an important political issue across the West proves his point well enough. Woke folks react to this racial friction by declaring that racism is “immoral” and commit to endless social engineering and moral browbeating to (finally!) bring it to an end. In this regard they are like conservatives who want to stamp out porn.
Hanania says he’s fine with “personal” racism but, oddly, also argues, like many woke folks, that racism is stupid because it’s based on “superficial” physical traits; yet, he will also defend women who choose mates based on “superficial” traits like height, so his argument is plainly contradictory. He probably doesnt see the contradiction because he likely thinks personal choices are different from banning immigrants; therefore, elites need to enforce their preferences as a form of paternalism in the name of immigrant rights. However, this ignores the fundamental question: Who owns the streets/roads?
Although Hanania is libertarian adjacent, he tends to think in collectivist terms when it comes to what national policies should be pursued under statism. Therefore, the question of who owns the streets is neither here nor there for him, as “liberal” values/anti-racism supersede such concerns when you are not fully libertarian. This opens the door to imposing one’s own policy preferences in the name of “liberalism” without regard for property rights. In this sense, he is like liberals who talk about a “right” to healthcare, state-enforced equal opportunity, etc. without seeking to square it with a coherent view of liberty overall.
Hanania will no doubt argue that of course you can control who enters your home/yard (in order to exercise your superficial and stupid personal racism), but doesn’t explain why property rights don’t include the streets/roads. Being a statist (even a neoliberal one) means you can bypass such concerns to impose your own preferences while morally browbeating others.
This is no defense of ICE but the anti-immigration cause is not without merit within a libertarian framework.