REPUBLICANS HATE SO MANY PEOPLE THEY SOMETIMES LOSE FOCUS

The War on Minnesota wasn't supposed to be about misogyny, but what Michelle Goldberg describes sounds a lot like mission creep:

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.”

... 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.

Remember, the point of all this was supposed to be rounding up and expelling immigrants. Then the right-wing propaganda machine decided to link the immigrant roundup to fraud in Minnesota -- white-collar crimes that weren't committed by the random blue-collar workers the administration has been seizing off the streets in Minneapolis and other cities. Fraud is best fought by people in offices poring over spreadsheets. It was being fought that way, long before Donald Trump returned to the White House -- the FBI began its investigations in May 2021, a few months after Joe Biden became president.

But Republicans in Washington, at Fox News, and elsewhere in the GOP propaganda community decided that demonizing Somalis in Minnesota -- many of whom are citizens -- was the best way to generate hate content for the GOP base. And then, after an ICE agent murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis, the right switched gears again and decided that white female activists are the real enemy.

No wonder the public, which began 2025 broadly supporting Trump's immigration crackdown, has turned against the administration on this issue.

Republicans hate so many people that they can't keep their focus on enemies they share with normal people. It's completely understandable that normal voters want a crackdown on murderers, rapists, and drug dealers who are here illegally. It's completely understandable that they want a crackdown on fraudsters.

But Republicans don't just hate immigrants who engage in criminal conduct. They hate the ones who bust their humps at difficult jobs for low pay. They hate immigrants here on student visas who don't have the conservatively correct views on Israel and Gaza. And they're so blinded by hate that they indiscriminately shipped immigrants to a foreign torture prison on the basis of innocuous tattoos they misidentified as gang signs.

And now, the same people who brought you the end of Roe v. Wade, then boosted the careers of influencers who argue that career women are history's greatest monsters and maybe only men should be allowed to vote, have decided that normie women who've been radicalized by Trump's immigrant crackdown are the real enemy.

Fox News' Will Cain: “There's a weird kind of smugness... in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority”

[image or embed]

— Media Matters for America (@mmfa.bsky.social) January 13, 2026 at 2:54 PM

Republicans are usually good at message discipline, and they're still good at one form of it: agreeing on the same narrative and banding together to push that narrative through every media channel possible. But discipline also means avoiding messages that exceed what the public is willing to hear. Republicans can't seem to do that anymore. They can't keep their hatreds in check, and because they live in a right-wing bubble, they think the country agrees with them.

On Renee Good's murder, it's not working, as CNN's Aaron Blake has noted:

The [latest] CNN poll shows 56% of US adults said the ICE agent’s use of force was “inappropriate,” compared to just 26% who said it was “appropriate.”

Similarly, Quinnipiac University and Yahoo News-YouGov polls released Tuesday tested whether people thought the shooting was “justified.” The former showed registered voters said it was “not justified” by 53%-35%, while the latter showed Americans said it wasn’t justified 52%-27%.

So three polls, all with margins of between 18 and 30 points against ICE. That’s a pretty decisive verdict in public opinion.

... it’s worth emphasizing that the Trump administration didn’t just say the ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, was justified in shooting Good.

It went quite a bit further, immediately casting Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism” and saying she intentionally targeted the ICE agent with her car.

It’s looking pretty clear that that is out of step with the public’s interpretation of events.

The Yahoo-YouGov poll shows just 24% of Americans said Good was committing domestic terrorism. Only 52% of Republicans agreed with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on that.

Normal Americans don't hate Renee Good. Republicans are bizarre, hateful freaks who do. They've lost normal America with this. It was all supposed to be about legitimate targets for law enforcement. But Republicans can't control their hatred.