the government is telling you not even unarmed nice white lady moms surrounded by stuffed animals are off limits, and I’m sorry but: that is an extremely terrifying.
— Asawin Suebsaeng (@swin24.bsky.social) January 8, 2026 at 2:32 PM
And Michelle Goldberg wrote this (emphasis added):
Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, told me that since ICE ramped up its operations in Minneapolis, it’s felt “like we are being inundated with a hostile paramilitary group that is mistreating, insulting, terrorizing our neighbors.” And the residents of Minneapolis have responded: “People have got their whistles, and they’ve got their little alert system to tell people ICE is in the neighborhood. They’ve been protesting. They’ve been out there trying to protect their neighbors.”There's a fairly widespread belief that Trumpism is racism and it's no more complicated than that. According to this view, Trumpism is a backlash specifically against Barack Obama: America elected a Black president and Republicans (or white America) went crazy.
Many of these people probably believed that even in Trump’s America, citizens still have inviolable liberties that allow them to stand up to the jacked-up irregulars who’ve descended on their communities. The civil rights of immigrants have been profoundly curtailed; even green card holders are on notice that this government may detain and deport them simply for protesting. But Americans — particularly, let’s be honest, white Americans — might have thought themselves immune from ICE abuses.
The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a [white] mother of three and widow of a military veteran, tests that assumption.
But the right has always hated white liberals, white leftists, and white countercultures. The right hated anti-war protesters and hippie longhairs in the 1960s and early 1970s. The right has always hated feminist whites and LGBTQ whites. When Boomer counterculturalists entered the political mainstream, the right treated Bill and Hillary Clinton as history's greatest monsters, at least when they held power or seemed to be on the verge of returning to power.
The right hated John Kerry and tried to destroy his good name. They hated (and still hate) Nancy Pelosi and cheered when her husband was beaten with a hammer. They hated Joe Biden. They hate Tim Walz right now.
Some of this hatred, obviously, is deeply linked to racism. Bill Clinton was a politician from what was briefly seen as the New South, a region where the dust had supposedly settled on desgregation and a political coalition could be built combining people of color and liberal and moderate whites. Tim Walz is hated for continuing to insist that Somalis are humans.
But we shouldn't underestimate how much hatred is in GOP base voters' hearts. They also hate LGBTQ people (trans people most of all), and they also hate Walz because his state's bill mandating the availability of menstrual products in school bathrooms is deliberately non-specific about the gender of those bathrooms. Some menstruating people don't identify as women. Walz accepts that, so the right mocks him as "Tampon Tim."
Tampon Tim is hands down the best political nickname ever. It’s so… savagely effective. In one word tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about Tim Walz’s dangerous radicalism. He put tampons in men’s bathrooms! He’ll trans kids. He took away parental rights. He’s woke & creepy.
— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) August 7, 2024
The Republican base is as racist as you imagine. But the racism of the right is part of a larger belief system in which people with certain attributes -- white, right-wing, heterosexual, Christian, anti-feminist, pro-gun, and pro-fossil fuel -- are seen as better than everyone else in the world and deserving of a homeland in which no other people exist, or at least none have power, including mere voting power.
I don't think many of the anti-ICE protesters expected to be immune to ICE violence -- less susceptible, clearly, but certainly vulnerable. These people hate everyone who disagrees with them to at least some extent. Their core hatred might be racial, but they have plenty of rage to go around.
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