On Grievance as a Weapon:

Our Lady of Grievance, Part 3

On January 7, 2026, Renee Good was shot and killed during an interaction with ICE agents in Minneapolis. Two weeks later, ICE agents shot and killed Alex Pretti as he tried to help a woman they had just shoved to the ground.

Almost immediately, government officials branded both Good and Pretti as domestic terrorists. According to the authorities, Good intended to use her car as a weapon against ICE agents, and Pretti approached ICE officers with a semi-automatic pistol drawn, looking to cause “maximum damage”.

And almost immediately, video footage emerged proving these narratives to be complete bullshit.

It didn’t matter, though. Even though we could see with our own eyes what transpired during Good and Pretti’s murders, the government insisted that we were actually seeing something completely different. Conservatives who have spent decades misappropriating Orwell are now just telling us to reject the evidence of our eyes and ears.

The American right-wing now edits reality in real time, creating a world where killing left-wingers is acceptable—or at least, arresting those who protest, agitate, or document what’s happening. Left-wing politicians are threatened with prosecution for inciting unlawful acts. Journalists are arrested for reporting on it all.

And when I say editing, I don’t just mean insisting that our eyes and ears are demonstrating an unfair liberal bias by not perceiving their fantasies, I mean they are using generative A.I. to create conservative alternate reality porn. Images that reflect the ideological delusions rattling about in their petty little minds, confirming the justification for dehumanizing and exterminating their political opponents. Within days of their murders, a fake criminal record report circulated for Renee Good, and pictures of what conservatives claimed was Alex Pretti dressed in drag appeared on social media.

This is not a healthy body politic. How did we get here?

Well, I don’t think this is the kind of thing that happens overnight. This is the kind of thing that creeps on you, the temperature slowly rising until we realize, only too late, that we’ve been boiling this entire time. This is the result of a national attitude that we have culturally indulged for decades, if not centuries, and now it has finally metastasized (not for the first time) into authoritarian fascism.

“No matter the problem, it’s the left’s fault.”

A Speaker For the Dead

The conservative response to the deaths of Good and Pretti has been a bit disjointed. There are some who still cling to the original narratives offered by Kristi Noem and recently reassigned ICE underfuhrer Greg Bovino. But even J.D. Vance and Trump himself have backed away from the idea that these extremely normal white Americans were crazed, homicidal terrorists. It’s understandable that this belief would persist past the video evidence directly disputing it; it’s rooted in similar notions about Black and brown youth in this country who keep inexplicably “charging” at officers.

This “murder switch” mainly afflicts the unincorporated savage mind of brutes, not typical wine mom poets and ER nurses—so a new theory is needed. In this narrative, Good and Pretti weren’t intent on violence, but were led to their deaths by bad choices shaped by a destructive narrative from Democrats and leftists.

According to conservatives, Good, Pretti, and others were part of an organized effort to disrupt the actions of ICE in their neighborhood via obstruction, harassment, violent protests, and direct confrontations. Since these people are essentially organizing and putting themselves at risk to keep ICE from apprehending and deporting violent murderers, rapists, and thieves, there is likely some sort of outside influence covertly directing and funding these efforts. The conservative refrain now goes “They didn’t deserve to die, but they put themselves at risk with their own choices.”

This narrative casts the ICE agents as wild animals. Barely trained beasts with whom it is best practice to never make eye contact. These heavily armed and militarized agents of the state have no responsibility or agency to operate with a priority toward preserving life. The violence they dispense is natural and unavoidable. We don’t need to consider how much the agency has been politicized or how the transformation in appearance from blue parkas and badges to counterinsurgency junta may be driving the resistance to their operations by residents.

It’s all the left’s fault for encouraging people to fuck with them, you see.

When conservatives ask why Alex Pretti and Renee Good were out in the streets following ICE around, the answer is in what happened to Alex Pretti and Renee Good. Both were part of the legal observer movement, where citizens are trained to monitor and document law enforcement actions for use in subsequent legal proceedings. This documentation can be even more important with ICE, as they are prone to detaining people without letting their families know where they are. ICE has also detained a frighteningly large number of American citizens, not just for what they deem “obstruction” but also just plain racial profiling or being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Legal observers believe they are acting to protect their communities from what they see as an out-of-control occupying force that exceeds its legal and constitutional authority. And it seems that the prospect of being held accountable by the communities they operate in angers these ICE agents the most. Several videos show ICE agents making barely veiled threats to people who are filming them. In the wake of Renee Good’s murder, reports and videos of agents asking observers if they’ve “learned their lesson” emerged. In one infamous video, an agent tells a woman filming him that she’d been added to a list of domestic terrorists.

For filming him.

Instead of asking why this kind of behavior from people who are ostensibly civil servants is tolerated and even encouraged by federal authorities, the luminaries at the Diet Free Press blog City Journal urge both sides to turn down the temperature. What does that mean in practical terms? Well, according to Rafael A. Mangual, it means that citizens need to give up all the activities and organizing that have served to document and disseminate the crimes of ICE, while federal authorities should “stop being so provocative” in return.

Where is Midfield Again?

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were not the only people killed by ICE in the past few months. They’ve dominated the headlines because their murders were so thoroughly documented, and they didn’t fit the expected aesthetic of those who deserve to be killed by law enforcement.

Keith Porter Jr. was killed by an off-duty ICE agent when he allegedly fired a gun into the air to celebrate the new year. In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody, a 21-year high. Already in 2026, 8 people, including Pretti and Good, have died after encountering ICE, several of whom perished under suspicious circumstances. Recently, ICE was caught lying about the abuse they dole out by medical personnel in Minnesota after they brought a detainee to the hospital with skull fractures they claimed were sustained by deliberately running into a brick wall.

All this to say that it’s pretty impossible to unequivocally defend the actions of ICE and DHS right now. Even Captain ‘both-sides’ Thomas Friedman can’t pretend that what the federal government is doing right now is normal. Of course, Friedman couldn’t help but compare ICE to Hamas in the process, but he did highlight the similarities between the IDF and ICE as well, so … baby steps.

However, the center does not get to cover itself in glory for taking the bare minimum stance that federal agents should not be terrorizing communities. House Democrats still allowed their rotating villain faction to vote for maintaining the current astronomical ICE funding levels. Sin-eater Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez lectured leftists over her “strategic” vote to fund the American Gestapo. Centrist apparatchik and former Pennsylvania oaf whisperer Adam Jentleson admonished the left for wanting to abolish ICE, even as polls show that a majority of Americans are firmly opposed to the agency.

At the end of the day, the centrist Democrats in charge of the party would very much like to keep ICE and very much blame the left for Trump’s ability to wield the agency as a weapon against American citizens. After all, it was leftist voters who decided to stay home and not support Kamala over a trifling little issue like illegally funding a genocide.

We didn’t arrive here just because Democrats lost some elections. The left has been excluded from immigration debates because Democrats fear the “open borders” label. In recent decades, the “center” shifted from amnesty to deferred action to massively funding ICE and building the damn wall.

I’m not arguing for an open border here. That’s a conversation for a different time. And the time for that conversation was when conservatives were whipping up a nativist frenzy against brown people for existing next to them. But according to centrist dogma, no matter what the issue, the left is always wrong and the right is always acting in reaction to the wrongness of the left. The result of this general attitude is a “center” that consistently shifts to the right as leftist political thought is disregarded as unreasonable and conservative extremism is a problem best solved by capitulation to whatever framing they put forth.

Excluding a brief moment of peak wokeness (which was much more progressive in rhetoric than in practice), the Overton window has been moving to the right since the neoliberal revolution. We shouldn’t be shocked that we have a conservative moment that is reshaping observable reality in order to give itself permission to enforce the authoritarian hierarchy it always believed was necessary. But we should try to understand and identify the political attitudes that lead us here.

​

This Deplorable Moment

There is a well-stocked pond of Liberals, Centrists, “moderate” Conservatives, and (ahem) Classical Liberals, who are, to some degree, forced to admit that the modern popular conservative movement is, at the very least, flirting with outright authoritarian fascism. Nevertheless, these writers and thought leaders believe that “the left” bears some, if not most of, the blame for this rightward authoritarian lurch.

The “left” in this context refers to the entire range of political expression to the left of Thomas Massie. It is not a coherent conception of the general progressive political movement; it includes the last vestiges of the Third Way Democrats who made their names by rejecting progressivism, alongside the burgeoning socialist left born of disillusionment with the Obama years. But it doesn’t need to be coherent.

The “left” has radical beliefs and wants to force those beliefs on everyone. The “left” does not want to debate these beliefs. The “left” considers anyone who doesn’t agree with them to be morally inferior, a bigot, a fascist, or a bad person. If the “left” accomplishes anything, it’s driving otherwise normal people toward ever-increasingly far-right politicians and commentators.

It came up in Ezra Klein’s conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates about the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination:

“If we want to talk about writing them off, let’s start here. I’ve been obsessing, for a piece I’ve been writing, about the Hillary Clinton “deplorables” comment.”

And we all know the basket of deplorables soundbite.

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that, and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to — their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America——”

Klein went on to say about this moment:

“What Clinton was saying there came from somewhere. It came from the culture that had emerged. It got worse over time. And then I think it really contributed to us losing.”

​In case you’re reading this newsletter for the first time, we should establish that this is firmly an anti-Clinton outlet ....before pointing out how the popular conception of this clip is taken so wildly out of context as to be a parody. Anyone who has taken the time to accuse liberals and leftists of quoting Charlie Kirk out of context really needs to either issue a massive apology for how Hilary was disingenuously quoted here or admit that adding context really isn’t a universal standard for conservatives. Here is the rest of what Hillary said:

“But the “other” basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and – as well as, you know, New York and California – but that “other” basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but – he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

To summarize, we’ve spent the last decade laboring under the impression that the left is a close minded and cloistered group of elitists who despise everyone who doesn’t agree with everything they believe and the big exemplary moment for this characterization was Hillary Clinton saying that while half of Trump’s support came from far right bigots and fascists (objectively true) the other half has legitimate gripes and grievances and Trump is winning them over because liberals and the left have ignored them.

There is a disparity that is perfectly encapsulated in this Hillary quote. A disparity that I believe gets to the heart of our political divide and the reason why right-wing authoritarianism has been allowed to fester unimpeded. Because while there is abundant critique of the left and how our politics invites backlash, to my knowledge, there just isn’t any equivalent of this on the other side of the aisle.

There are no think pieces from Rusty Reno or Rod Dreher about how the unhinged and racist backlash to the mere existence of Barack Obama drove people to embrace woke ideologies. There’s no Wall Street Journal Op-Ed about how stagnant wages, unpredictable work schedules, the inevitability of gig work, and A.I. powered layoffs are driving young people toward democratic socialism. There’s no Bret Stevens piece lauding Mehdi Hassan and Sam Seder for being willing to talk to out and open far right nationalists, and in Mehdi’s case, a self-described fascist.

It seems like, for a broad swath of the political commentariat, even the most cruel and authoritarian impulses of the MAGA movement conservatism, every racist thing Steven Miller drools from his taught little mouth, every time JD Vance implies that the American identity is a genetic heritage and not a set of values - all that can be explained by liberal/leftist overreach and intransegence.

Meanwhile, things like Zohran Mamdani’s popularity and electoral success, the open embrace of socialism by younger generations, the acceptance of transgender identities, and the conscious effort by some to allow kids to develop their sense of gender on their own terms - all these things are the product of naivete, anti-Semitism, being swindled by nefarious politicians, laziness, entitlement, resentment.

Grievance.

And this view is so pervasive that Hillary Clinton, perhaps the most politically reviled left-of-center politician in recent history, was far more willing to empathize with people who ignored the very obvious bigotry and anti-democratic impulses of the first Trump campaign than she was with primary voters to the left of her, who were only supporting Bernie because they hated women.

Leaving the Left

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep this up, as Bari Weiss and CBS News’s ratings can attest. All the buy-in from centrists and selected liberals on the idea that everything is the left’s fault has lulled conservatives into a false sense of popular consensus.

In the summer of 2025, esteemed astrophysicist and veteran of the New Atheist movement, Lawrence Krause, edited and published a collection of essays from 38 other scientists and academics called “The War on Science”. The general thesis that tied these essays together was that wokeness was harming the advancement of science and impeding the education of the next generation of academics.

It’s important to note that for most of the authors who provided essays for this book, wokeness was impeding science by holding them personally accountable for racist things they’d said or being extremely creepy toward their female students. Youtuber Shawn Skull recently reviewed the book and observed that Krause was most likely compiling and editing this thing with the expectation that Biden or Kamala would beat Trump and retain the White House for the woke left.

Because it’s just really hard to make the claim that the real threat to science is students’ opposition to UPenn law professor Amy Wax for saying that America should have an immigration system that prioritizes white people and rejects non-white people, when the Trump administration was actively in the process of defunding actual science and punishing universities for political incorrectness.

If you have a spare 4 hours, I highly recommend Shawn’s video on Krause’s book, but we bring it up to illustrate one of the ways “it’s always the left’s fault” finds purchase in the discourse. Krause and his New Atheist compatriots, like Richard Dawkins and (gulp) Bill Maher, were once the darlings of the online left. When the biggest threat from the right wing seemed to be a demand for moderately theocratic governance, the New Atheists were the special forces we dispatched to the message board front lines to dismantle the enemy with facts and logic.

But the discontent with the status quo that was shaping a nascent American leftist progressive movement was about more than just Christian apologetics in state capitals. The casual misogyny and racism that permeated certain parts of the New Atheist movement soon came under the microscope, and to put it as respectfully as I can, those big babies couldn’t handle it. Which is how, a decade later, we have Richard Dawkins calling himself a cultural Christian and Russel Brand just doing straight-up sermons at TPUSA conferences.

And seriously, this is where about 90% of “the left left me” discourse comes from. Figures who once enjoyed some amount of positive notoriety within leftist spaces, taking a position or committing some moral hazard that earns the enmity of former left-wing fans. And instead of doing any introspection or reflection on the nature of the disagreement, these people decide that the entire project of the left has gone too far and that the far right is completely justified in opposing them.

But while this attitude is responsible for a lot of why “the left is always wrong” discourse is so pervasive, it’s not the only driving force. In fact, far more interesting than the personal grievances of reactionary cranks is the tendency for the left to engage in endless self-critique.

The Undiscovered Country

The right wing enjoys a level of self-assurance that the left can never really have. Conservatism is ostensibly arguing for a return to what we already know works. Even if they are basing these arguments on misremembered, decontextualized, and outright fabricated versions of history, the goal is still more or less somewhere we’ve been before.

The left, on the other hand, is arguing for the undiscovered country. We can tell you what’s wrong. We can tell you who’s been victimized and how. What we can never tell you, with any sense of absolute certainty, is exactly how we achieve a better future or what it would look like.

We have ideas, we have just so many ideas. Good ideas, even, certainly ideas worth fighting for over the status quo alternative. We just can’t say for sure whether the ideas of the class-reductionist left are the best way to address the contradictions in late-stage capitalist liberal democracy, or whether the identity-focused decolonization movement has the best path to fully automated luxury space communism.

Since capitalism isn’t just our mode of political economy but also the social superstructure that shapes how we perceive the world and ideological conflict, the left is often in market competition with itself over the attention economy. Which ends up generating “I’m not like those other leftist” takes by erstwhile left-wing voices looking to differentiate themselves from parts of the left that they personally don’t agree with.

Intramural disagreement is good for leftist projects that are actually concerned with achieving something different and better than what we have. It’s not going to be one faction of the left that has the perfect path forward, but a synthesis of all these different modes of praxis, given that the overall goals of economic and social justice remain in general consensus. But in our cultural context, where left-punching is as American as apple pie and steroids in baseball, the temptation is just too great to try and relegate your intra-left opponents to the wastelands of rejected radicalism while preserving the space of approachable progressivism for yourself.

Which is how you get tweets like this one from OG Breadtuber ContraPoints:

And inevitably, when you see left-punching tweets like this from leftist and progressive writers and influencers, you will see tweets like this five replies below:

​

Because, no matter your intentions for building a successful left political project, no matter how earnest and good faith your critiques of other leftists are, any and all left-punching will be weaponized against you. Whatever points of agreement or constructive moderating influence you believe that the right and/or center can offer the left, be assured that the right and/or center suffer no such delusions about what the left can offer them.

We have a far right ready to seize power and institute the hierarchical authoritarianism they sincerely believe is in all our best interests. A centrist neoliberal consensus that seems more concerned about the political speech of literal children than it is about authoritarian ethno-nationalism. And a progressive left grasping at legitimacy by tearing itself down. All of these factors create an asymmetrical theater of rhetorical war. A political context where we have to actually have a discussion on whether “abolish ICE” is too risky a political slogan while they continue to abuse, maim, and murder undocumented immigrants, legal residents, and American citizens alike. The 40-yard lines of acceptable discourse start on the left with retraining ICE agents and giving them body cameras, and it ends with denaturalizing foreign-born citizens for openly holding politics that conservatives don’t like.

We’ve written a lot of words here, but it’s important to establish that this is not an argument for everyone to just agree with the left. At the same time, if we as a country and a culture truly value a free marketplace of ideas, then we have to dispel the false narrative that the left is somehow uniquely intransigent and lacks ideas worth debate or consideration. Every time someone starts writing about intolerant college kids or wokeness destroying free speech, we have to understand these as deeply unserious arguments bordering on plain dishonesty. Let us not just accept the idea that protesting a genocide is somehow more problematic than breaking the law to fund a genocide. Stop letting politicians and pundits hide behind performative disgust to avoid a debate. Stop pretending that the right is actually interested in a debate.

I don’t know how this gets better. There’s just so much money, so much emotional investment, so much generational trauma, so much fundamental culture, so much grievance in the way. A world where we don’t default to blaming the left, where we grant the right full agency over their words and actions, and hold them accountable, truly is an undiscovered country.

Considering where we’re currently at, I think we need to get to discovering it as soon as possible.

Solidarity Forever.