When these episodes of mass outrage get going, no nuance, reasonable objection or difference of opinion is allowed. And for Americans in the educated classes — those who, in a better world, would have the social and professional power to put on the brakes — the environment becomes coercive. If you’re a nurse in New York City, for example, this week a union strike-briefing turned into a harangue by the Democratic Socialists of America on how to resist ICE, with no regard for the participants’ politics.

It’s a dismaying turn of events: woke seemed to be on the wane from 2022 to 2025, but it has come roaring back in 2026 in a new form that’s both purified and more vicious. The Leftist freedom-fighters have cut out the middle man of the oppressed subject — African Americans in 2020 — and taken center stage themselves. It’s the natural evolution of the #resistance. 

To be clear about context of the new wave of protests: Americans have democratically elected a president who promised to close the border and deport illegal migrants, especially those with criminal histories. It was a popular plank of his platform. America also has laws regarding immigration, and a democratic process for changing those laws. At no point, even when Democrats have been in control, has wholesale naturalization of illegal immigrants or a legal open border been a political possibility. 

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Thus, whether we like the tactics being deployed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol, the basic premise of the agency’s activities reflects the will of the people in a democracy. For Leftists to subvert it through direct action against law enforcement is illegal and anti-democratic. It is true that illegal migrants have died or been killed in government custody, and also true that bad things have happened to the people protesting arrests of such people — and these things are reason for criticism or compassion or distress. No one wants people to be killed with impunity in government custody, or a world in which law enforcement regularly guns down citizens for being really fucking annoying. And there is a single correct way to read the videos of the Renee Good and Alex Pretti killings — neither one appeared to be posing a danger to law enforcement at the time they were shot — but there’s no single correct view of the meaning of these events. Attempts to override democracy or the rule of law in their name are controversial at the very least.  

Yet at the moment, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. Because, just as in 2020, for an influential subset of the professional classes, it has become mandatory to signal outrage. 

In this sense, the anti-ICE protests currently roiling America look and feel very much like their Black Lives Matter predecessors. This is true in the way anti-ICE hysteria is shutting down the discourse: if you support the immigration authorities anywhere near Left-wing spaces, you will be abused at a pitch that feels newly foul. UnHerd’s own Sohrab Ahmari, for example, was called out online by a prominent labor organizer merely for talking about something other than Pretti’s death. Kat Rosenfeld, an UnHerd contributor, was called a “shitty coward” for a thoughtful Substack exploring Alex Honnald, Alex Pretti and the concept of “plot armor.” And the congregants at Catholic church service led by a Jesuit (more Left-wing than you’d think) that I attended in Brooklyn on Saturday, were told that those who failed to protest could not be expected to be admitted to the Kingdom of Heaven. 

Anti-ICE also resembles 2020 in terms of its fundamental delusion: protesters are unaware that their activities benefit them more than the people whose rights they’re supposedly championing. (Defunding the police work didn’t work out too well for low-income black communities, recall.) But this time around, the movement has burned away the elements that made its previous iterations subject to mockery and reemerged purified and perhaps stronger. Gone are the fake compassion (black lives matter); the abstruse theory (what is a woman?); the dopey therapeutic culture (training to become un-racist). Even the focus on identity is gone — notice that no one is really talking about the own-voices of the migrants, or new forms of speaking in order to show them the greatest respect, or how to actually solve their problems in a systematic, policy-oriented way. Woke 2.0 is just fighting to keep them here, undocumented. 

Put another way: woke 2.0 is eschewing both theory and institutional takeover for militant action and sheer rage, in a way that feels individual, atomized, and newly dangerous. Protesters physically interfere with law enforcement, spit and kick cars, track ICE vehicles and those belonging to conservative journalists, get phone numbers, doxx people, and send death threats. The threats are now going to phones and homes instead of social-media accounts. 

No longer “mostly peaceful,” protesters smash hotel windows without apology or disclaimer. And the internet is flooded with videos of random private citizens making grotesque threats. A Florida nurse wearing a T-shirt with a rainbow on it that says “Trump sucks” announced that “as a labor and delivery nurse, it gives me great pleasure” to wish Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary,  “a fourth degree tear” during her upcoming labor. A Virginia nurse suggests that young women go on dates with ICE agents in order to put Ex-Lax in their drinks. In other videos, she suggests carrying needle syringes in order to inject the agents with a temporary paralysis drug or filling water guns with poison ivy and aiming for their faces and hands. Baby-faced young girls in rainbow hair clips give up saying anything coherent at all, instead yelling, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.”

In this newly badass version of the #Resistance, every protester is the star of her own movie. And while the turn to sheer rage is no doubt sincere, it also represents an evacuation of content — the political cause, the political solution — and allows woke-ism to become the most perfect version of what it always in some senses was: a vehicle for the elite conception of self, and a very convenient one. If you have any doubt that it’s become all about professionals, look at who the movement’s martyrs are: not any one of the 32 people who’ve reportedly died in the custody of ICE custody last year, but Renee Good and Alex Pretti. 

And the more it’s about the protesters, the more they think they should get their own way. This is not the America we want. Indeed. And they’re ready to take it by force, and feel justified in doing so. Nevermind that, as in the George Floyd protests before this, there is no goal that will help the victimized population beyond “stop enforcing the law.” 

This, of course, was always the problem with woke, and one of the reasons why it drove its rational opponents so mad. The sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, writing in his landmark 2024 survey, We Have Never Been Woke, contended that while a loose, historical meaning of woke was “an awareness of social injustice, and a commitment to rectifying it,” the movement’s claims to be operating on behalf of the poor, vulnerable, and marginalized have long been co-opted as a way for the elite to rationalize inequality.

In Al-Gharbi’s telling, this has always been delusional. The urban-protester demographic is the middle and upper-middle class. Anyone who resides in a household that makes more than $150,000 a year, he writes, is part of America’s top quintile, which controls a stunning 71% of the country’s wealth. This group benefits disproportionately from inequality; this group is the one that hoovers up services performed by mostly black and brown low-wage workers, who are often lacking legal authorization to work and thus vulnerable to hyper-exploitation. The top quintile’s attempts to blame “the 1%” are scapegoating and an attempt to deny its own guilt. “When people are consumed by anger over a problem, but the real object of their anger is untouchable (or is in fact themselves), folks have long tried to collectively focus their rage on some other target instead,” Al-Gharbi writes. He adds that “progressive politics, in particular, seems to increasingly serve as a means through which highly educated, relatively affluent whites find purpose, transcendence and community in their lives.”

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Al-Gharbi’s book is devastating in its depiction of the ways in which the wave of wokeness that began around the 2010s and peaked in 2020 made no impact on the “bread-and-butter” crises that afflict the poor, vulnerable and disadvantaged. Inequality continued to rise, and is rising still. Despite what people believe is a sincere commitment to social justice, he writes, their devotion to it comes primarily in the form of symbolic activity that takes the place of “sustainable, viable coalitions that could achieve concrete change,” while also mystifying the problem and making change harder to accomplish.    

In other words, all the protesting, Signal chats, cruising in your vehicle making videos, delivering casseroles, walking out of work, getting pepper-sprayed, and engaging in scuffles with authority won’t, fundamentally, allow the supposed beneficiaries of the activism to live equally as Americans. To do that would require real sacrifice and compromise, things that our increasingly violent political polarization, and demonization of each other, make ever less likely to come about. On the uglier side, the casseroles and scuffles will continue to allow migrants to be low-paid service workers for the people helping them stay. 

The new wrinkle of anti-woke, which gained real power in America mainly after Al-Gharbi’s analysis appeared, serves the same cultural function as woke, he writes. Once again, it’s a form of jockeying for power amongst an elite that has no intention of real reform. Following this logic, the deportation theater may be popular with Trump’s low income voters, but it’s also unlikely to change the conditions of their lives. 

The battle between ICE and anti-ICE, thus, even as it turns real, is still mainly symbolic. What’s needed in response is not more theater, or an ever more enraged doubling-down, but an attempt to see and inhabit a shared reality, and find a compromise. Some tactics are too much. Some humans are illegal (until we legally decide otherwise). If we don’t, we all may look back some day at woke 1.0 — the dumb yard signs, the vapid DEI PowerPoints, the unserious death threats — with a kind of rainbow-hued nostalgia. 

This was Sammee’s first real action as a protester since moving to Minneapolis from Duluth a few years ago. “I just cannot in good conscience just sit home and do nothing while these people are terrorising my neighbours, my community,” she told me. On Monday, her first day picketing ICE’s local headquarters, she came unprepared and got pepper-sprayed in the face at this exact spot with only sunglasses to protect her eyes, and soon felt the pain of chemical burns on her skin. She returned the following day clad in a rainbow-striped ski suit and bright orange goggles placed over her silver-rimmed glasses for protection.

She’s tougher than she looks because of a roller derby hobby, a sport that trains you to stay upright when momentum is working against you. So when ICE agents failed to knock her down, more piled in, throwing her down into the filthy snow piled along the curb. As she lay there, they yelled at her to get back up, even as they continued to shove her back down like grade-school tormentors. The moment she rose to her feet, she received a dose of harsh pepper spray to the face that got partially deflected by her anti-ICE sign. 

“Do it again!” she responded in a fearless taunt. The agent who sprayed her looked nervously at his colleagues for guidance on how to respond. “If you look in their eyes, a lot of them look fucking scared,” Sammee told me. “I think they’re just genuinely afraid of the crowd, even though they’re the ones being violent toward us.”

She expected to be handcuffed and detained inside the federal building, but ICE instead escorted two of her fellow picketers past the gates and into detention; they’d likely be released back onto the street in a matter of hours. Minutes later, Sammee and her fellow protesters returned to screaming obscenities at unmarked black trucks full of masked ICE agents, who sometimes cursed at them, in turn. 

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Most interactions between protesters and federal agents in Minneapolis play out this way. By and large, they aren’t a matter of life and death. They’re more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon pitting an outmatched-but-fearless provocateur and a mean-but-incompetent bully. But since another white female activist who sought to observe or impede agents, Renee Good, was shot and killed by agents last week in a similar scenario, there’s an ominous cloud of danger hovering over these encounters. Yet Sammee managed to keep an unwavering smile on her face while recounting the story about how she just been assaulted by ICE.

But for how long? These days, the happy-go-lucky Midwestern demeanour that defines this place seems like the exception rather than the rule. What’s clear in my time touring the southern part of the city is that the weight of five years of stressful events, including the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge, a targeted deployment of ICE and border agents to Minneapolis, has taken an enormous psychic toll. 

Federal officials have billed it as the largest deportation operation ever undertaken in America, and have characterised last week’s deadly encounter with Good as a self-defence shooting, a version contested by local leaders and eyewitnesses and many Minnesotans who’ve watched the video of the incident.

Residents I spoke with also insist that Trump is employing ICE to sow chaos here to provoke a violent reaction and footage dramatic enough to justify escalation. One longtime local described it bluntly after showing me a video taken by his neighbor of ICE agents throwing gas and flashbang grenades on his block from out their car windows: “They’re trying to provoke people into confrontation,” he said. “They want the bad stuff to happen so they can send in more people, call it a civil war.” For his part, Trump has encouraged political protesting in Iran — “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!” he posted on Truth Social — but demonises it in Minneapolis, dismissing it as “unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing.”

Collectively, Minneapolis is pissed and scared. But most of all, the city’s tired in a world-weary way. Even the signs hung on houses or held in protesters’ hands reflect this attitude. The gentle virtue signaling of “In This House” signs of the early 2020s are gone, replaced by blunt or angry ones reading simply “Fuck Ice,” “Ice Out Now,” or “No Trespassing.” What this city really needs right now is a cigarette or a drink, preferably both.

This feeling is most pronounced in south Minneapolis’s leafy Powderhorn neighbourhood. The street where Good was killed by ICE and the intersection where George Floyd died sit at the heart of a cluster of largely residential blocks a few miles south of downtown that took shape in the early 20th century as a streetcar suburb of single-family homes, duplexes, and low-rise apartments. It’s home to institutions like the Minneapolis Institute of Art. 

Over the decades, this area evolved into one of the city’s most economically and racially diverse neighbourhoods, drawing middle-class artists, working families, and immigrants, while anchoring a vibrant local culture around Powderhorn Park. But it’s not a place historically accustomed to being the center of the universe. “Minnesotans generally like things quiet — shut up, get to work, get things done. It’s a very German Lutheran mindset,” said John Davis, a resident who embraced that low-key lifestyle when he moved here from New York City three decades ago.

Yet, Powderhorn is now a living-history museum of the current decade. Walking here as an outsider feels like an act of dark tourism, a term that describes sightseeing of destinations known for death, disaster, horror, or misery. Within a few square miles, you can trace nearly every pressure point of the 2020s. Five years ago, the neighbourhood became globally recognisable, almost overnight, when George Floyd’s killing at 38th and Chicago transformed an ordinary intersection into a hub of protesting and riots, and a pilgrimage site. Streets were closed, helicopters circled, and fires burned close enough that people kept hoses ready, just in case. Residents adjusted as best they could. Some embraced the transformation, but others merely tolerated it or were disgusted by it. “I was so distraught about (the Floyd protests),” said an elderly woman who asked not to be identified. “We shopped at places where people were stealing TVs and burning buildings, and we said this is not what Minnesotans do!”

Then came the long tail. The pandemic dragged on. Schools went remote, then hybrid, then back again. Teachers went on strike for multiple weeks in 2022. Businesses closed or limped along. In October 2025, a gunman shot through the windows of Annunciation Catholic Church during Mass, killing two children, ages 8 and 10, and injuring 17 other people, including 14 children. The neighbourhood began to resemble something like normalcy when the ground shifted and Trump announced on Jan. 6 that he’d deploy as many as 2,000 federal agents to the area for a sweeping crackdown tied in part to allegations of fraud involving Somali residents.

Residents here — immigrants and activists, along with everyone else — have been under the constant threat of low levels of violence, random catch-and-release-style kidnapping, tear gassing, and other forms of lawlessness from federal law enforcement for more than a week. You can walk down Powderhorn sidewalks and sometimes spot what looks like blood marking the ice, but is actually leftover reddish-hued chemicals from non-lethal weapons discharged by ICE. 

Federal officers are also sending agents into the parking lots of churches and schools; they’re marching into Targets to detain people. It often feels improvisational, reactive, and thin-skinned. Locals here were already on edge, but the slaying of Good has escalated those nervous feelings into a kind of existential dread. “Y’all, they’re shooting white ladies in the face in the street! What’s going to happen next?” exclaimed a black pastor to his flock at an evangelical church. Some churches, schools, restaurants, and other institutions have spent the last week closed or partially closed, and others are alerting their patrons or members when federal agents are nearby.

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Peter Vircks, a professional saxophonist, described Powderhorn as an open wound that cannot heal. “Everyone’s feeling like they’re in limbo, waiting for the next thing to happen,” he said. For Vircks, that next thing happened on January 9 after the killing of Good. He was walking his dog on 28th Street, where his teenage son goes to Roosevelt High, when he stumbled upon the aftermath of an incident in which armed US Customs and Border Patrol officers entered school property during dismissal, roughed up people (including students), handcuffed two staff members, and fired pepper spray and pepper balls on bystanders. 

“It’s really beyond the pale,” Vircks told me. “It’s not a suburban campus. It’s a neighborhood. Grandmothers and grandkids.” Former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura, a Roosevelt graduate, agrees. He arrived at the school shortly after Vircks to condemn ICE. “We’re a third-world country now,” he told a Fox News affiliate. “You want to know why? Because in third-world countries, they have the military doing their police work in the cities.”

Vircks’s son was not involved in the Roosevelt clash with ICE and hasn’t talked much about it — or about anything, really. “My wife is convinced he’s angry at adults for screwing up his world. Between riots, the strikes, murders, a kid can’t do anything about it — he can’t even vote.” Vircks is an adult and a voter, but even he feels exhausted and helpless in the new status quo. He has trouble sleeping because of the bright stadium lights illuminating the park across the street from his house since last week, and the constant din of helicopters hovering overhead. During the George Floyd protests, he was worried about his property, to the point of regularly dumping water on his woodpile to keep rioters from setting it ablaze. But the ICE invasion feels different because there is no end in sight, he says, and no authorities to appeal to.

“They say to email or call your representatives. But that seems like screaming into the void. You try to live your everyday life, pay your mortgage, and then you add this on top of it?” he said. Today, for his job as a professional musician, he’s supposed to write an upbeat pop song. But how?

Not everyone I encounter is as open as Vircks or as chipper as Sammee. Multiple Minnesotans tell me they aren’t talking to anyone, much less the media. Can you blame them? This city has already served as a battleground once this decade — symbolic and literal — and understands how quickly local tragedy can be nationalised, flattened into content, and weaponised by people who don’t have to live with the consequences. When this season finally passes, the deeper question will linger: how much cumulative strain can a neighbourhood absorb before something essential gives way? Not a riot or a revolution, but a collapse of the quiet civic trust that binds communities together.

Minneapolis will certainly endure the winter of ICE, but the deeper, more permanent damage may not be seen until the season’s deep freeze melts away and spring arrives.

The New York Times defined “Dark Woke” last year as “an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing.” In the Gray Lady’s telling, it “requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.” Examples range from Gavin Newsom’s meme warfare to Jasmine Crockett’s alliterative insults (“Will a vindictive, vile villain violate voters’ vision?”). GQ, meanwhile, observed that the objective is to “subvert the qualities that people think made wokeness cringe — the virtue policing, the polite ‘when they go low, we go high’ posturing — and go Joker mode to make Democrats cool again.” 

These aren’t mutually exclusive definitions. Dark Woke is a meme with amorphous contours. Sometimes, it’s merely rhetorical; other times, it offers serious strategies to challenge MAGA with a dose of its own post-liberal medicine. Either way, it’s rooted in the same demand posed by grassroots Democrats to the party establishment: throw some punches, or we’ll primary you into oblivion.

Since Good’s demise on the icy streets of Minnesota, videos of enraged anti-ICE protesters are proliferating on social media. In one clip posted by the Fox News reporter Matt Finn, an ICE agent goes up to two shiny SUVs blocking traffic, warning the women in them not to “make a bad decision.” The women, both of whom appear to be Millennials, aren’t intimidated. “I think I’m making exactly the right decision,” one says. When the officer signs off with, “Thank you, have a good day,” she replies with a grin: “I hope you have a terrible day.” In another viral clip, a gaggle of whistling women surround a reporter; one gleefully taunts him as another screams, “Nazi!” 

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Or there’s the TikTok video circulating on X, in which a blue-eyed, salt-and-pepper-haired woman who describes herself as a 42-year-old single mother and “relationship anarchist” slips sexily into her Carhartt overalls while spelling out a “dating-profile request” for a man whom she can “call, right now, and say, ‘Hey, get in the passenger seat and let’s go fuck some shit up.’” 

These street soldiers aren’t the antifa types torching cars or the rioters looting stores. They are, like Good, Millennial moms in the Midwest. They’re people from normal quarters of American life who are spending time during the workday putting their bodies and vehicles on the line to protect illegal migrants, some with serious criminal records, from deportation. And they see ICE as a neo-Gestapo that calls for more than rhetorical condemnation.

The Washington Post this week wrote about the growing activist coalition: “As the Trump administration deploys thousands of federal immigration officers and agents around the nation, a loose-knit but increasingly organized network of activists is tracking their whereabouts and documenting arrests.” With whistles and messaging apps, these ICE “watchers” or “verifiers” are often trained by nonprofit groups, according to the Post article, which adds that they are “dispatched to spot arrests, record interactions, and, where possible, get contact information for family members of those arrested.”

This partly explains why Dark Woke is growing amid President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Tracking ICE supplies a sense of agency and community at a time when people feel powerless and atomized. It is also a clue as to why there are so many upscale white women in the ranks of the Dark Woke army. 

Last fall, the GOP pollster Alex Tarascio “asked likely voters if they agreed that it’s acceptable to go beyond peaceful protest in response to ICE enforcement, even if it breaks the law,” as he put it in an X post. “Overall, just 24% of Americans agreed. But among white women, 18 to 44, who identify as liberal? The number shoots up to 61%.” Half that number, only 30%, disagreed. Among all liberals, the number was nearly 20 points lower, at 42%. And among all likely voters, the number dropped to less than a quarter of the population.  

Why are white liberal women especially eager for battle? People like Good are motivated by a sincere commitment to social justice, to be sure. Good was so moved by the prospect of ICE deportations in Minneapolis that she joined a midday protest after dropping off her 6-year-old at school.

However, there is also no shortage of research in recent years showing that young women on the Left struggle more with mental health than do other cohorts. In 2024, Times columnist Thomas Edsall dug into studies on the “happiness gap,” noting “one of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the Left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.”

In 2025, a study published by Zach Goldberg at the Right-of-center Manhattan Institute found that “females and liberals tend to rank higher than their male and conservative counterparts in certain personality traits that are associated with greater susceptibility to internalizing symptoms. These symptoms are characterized by inwardly directed emotional distress, including feelings of sadness, worry, and fear, which can manifest as conditions like depression and anxiety.” 

Research from the Institute for Family Studies has likewise found that “when we control for education, race, age, and income, …  liberal women ages 18 to 40 are over three times as likely to report frequent feelings of loneliness compared to their conservative peers.”  

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Renee Good, of course, was married and — at least in the tragic record of her final minutes — cheerful in demeanor. Unhappiness and lapsed agency may or may not explain her personal decision. However, it’s fair to speculate that rational disapproval of Trump is not the only explanation for why more and more young progressive women are training as “ICE watchers” and joining physical protests. Tellingly, the Institute for Family Studies found that “a large part of [the] loneliness gap comes from different rates of marriage and church attendance. … Adding controls for marriage and church attendance, ideology becomes less important, with marriage being the strongest predictor of feeling less lonely.”

Feelings of misery and powerlessness, especially acute on the young female Left, will ensure Dark Woke lingers, and reemerges as opportunities for catharsis present themselves. These opportunities will be especially compelling when they offer a perceived sense of community, or of self-sacrifice for the common good. 

Satisfaction, though, will prove illusory, because the source of the young women’s pain is not really injustice, except in the sense that a grave injustice has been committed against happiness in the destruction of our communities, social bonds, and overall humanity.