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Like they say about robbing banks, because that's where the money is. Blue-voting cities are the ones with the most visible levels of "we're a sanctuary city! we have all these activist organisations for undocumented persons!" If I'm going to be looking for easy finding of illegal immigrants, where do you think I'll head to first? Tom Johnson's produce farm out in the boondocks (where indeed there's likely to be undocumented workers, same in meat processing plants, but it's also probably going to be tougher to identify/arrest them), or the George Floyd Memorial Centre and Legal Aid Provision for Persons of Irregularity?
Gosh, how very reassuring it is to know that the people who created the category of "domestic terrorist" never, ever, used it to slander people! It's all a lie, yeah maybe sure something in the letter could be interpreted that way but really now, are you going to believe us or them?
Was Good a domestic terrorist? Ask the people who created the term. I don't think it was useful then or now, but it's been put into use and you really can't complain if the tools you created to bash your enemies then get used in turn to bash you when your enemies get their hands on them. I think she was a damn fool who fucked around and found out, she didn't deserve to be killed, but neither did the ICE agent deserve to be put in that position by someone thinking she could larp as the Maquis and nothing would happen because she was one of the Good Guys fighting the fascist nazi tyrant's stormtroopers, and every movie assured her that bad things don't happen to the Good Guys fighting the nazi fascist stormtroopers.
I mean to me the biggest hole in her hagiography is that nobody to my knowledge has ever tried to explain how the wonderful mother who dropped her kid off at school on her birthday ended up in her car blocking traffic and accosted by ICE agents to the point where she is trying to drive away. She clearly put herself there for some reason, and did so understanding that something was going down. So where is she getting that information? Why did she think she personally needed to be there? Why did she think to block traffic?
I suspect she’s a part of some larger group, one that sees itself as “the resistance”. And I think this is the real story— that a lot of people on all sides of the political spectrum are being radicalized and weaponized by groups of political activists pushing fear porn and the idea of them as “the rebellion” as in Star Wars. And until the swamp of radicalization is drained, there’s always a reserve army of ideologically possessed people ready to act on that perception of reality they’ve been fed in their echo chambers. It’s hard to do because the groups are generally smart enough to stay just inside the lines of acceptability while heavily implying the things that would drive people to actually go do something about the “bad guys” of choice. That’s what the fascism narrative is about — every child over four knows Nazis are evil, and has heard the hagiography of those who “resisted” — often with the costs removed. Calling someone a Nazi in the post WW2 era is like telling a bunch of medieval peasants that someone or some group desecrated the host at the church. The point is to create the hatred and ultimately the violence while keeping their hands clean by not saying “attack those people”.
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