White Minnesota Ladies Protesting ICE Really Throwing A Wrench In Right Wing Propaganda Machine
How are they supposed to pretend to protect women who hate them?
Right-wing propaganda does not, for the most part, make a whole lot of promises for a bright future. They’re not promising nice things like a more fair and equal world for all, they’re not pushing for a world in which everyone has health care, enough food to eat, a living wage, an affordable home, transportation, the ability to send their kids to college, a world free of blatant human rights abuses, etc. etc. Rather, it relies on scaring people about the present, about some group of people that is a threat to them and perhaps the reason they don’t have the aforementioned nice things.
One of the most well-used tools in the white supremacy toolbox has always been that whatever group they are currently upset about is a threat — frequently a sexual threat — to “their” women and children. We’ve seen this most blatantly in the United States, leveraged against Black men, but it was also a popular tactic in Nazi Germany against Jewish men (and, frankly, in the United States as well).
Not only does it have the desired effect of “making people scared of some other group,” it also provides a little boost for them menfolk who like being reassured of their ownership of women.
Most recently, it’s been leveraged against trans people, who they imagine are running around bathrooms with their genitals on full display, or trying to “trans the kids” for reasons unclear to us all. It’s also long been a feature of anti-immigrant propaganda, as it is today. The reason they do this is because it works. It’s not true, but it works. It works because women and children are legitimately vulnerable to both sexual and physical assault. It’s their only argument designed to tug at anyone’s heart strings, that could perhaps come across as a slightly more righteous or noble cause than, say, cutting off people’s food stamps.
Guys, guys! This is not about us being pathetic bigots who determine our entire self-worth by the amount we get to believe we are better than some other group of people! This is about protecting women and children! Didn’t you hear that, one time, one of these people hurt a woman and/or child? We’re just trying to prevent that from happening again. Because we care. After all, no one has ever been sexually or physically assaulted by a white male American citize.n That’s just something they claim when a fella doesn’t call them the next day!
You will notice that whenever an ICE agent does something horrible, like, say, murdering someone in cold blood, the very first well the Right goes to is “Well, why are you sad for Renee Good or Alex Pretti and not for Laken Riley who was murdered by an [whatever slur they use for undocumented immigrant]?!?” Now, of course we care about anyone who was murdered, but those of us capable of critical thinking are also aware that the immigration status of her killer does not have jack shit to do with anything, and that the man who murdered Laken Riley is now in prison. No one has called her a terrorist and no one has suggested that he was right to murder her or tried to suggest that maybe he was just real stressed out by people not liking him. Unlike Megyn Kelly, we’re not sociopaths who say things like “I know I'm supposed to feel sorry for Alex Pretti, but I don't” when people are murdered.
But they do this, they focus on victims like Laken Riley (whose parents have repeatedly begged them to keep her name out of their filthy bigot mouths) in order to push the narrative that we must accept this brutality from ICE and Border Patrol in order to protect the safety of white women.
The thing is, it becomes pretty tough to pull that off when said women are standing up for the group they’re trying to demonize … while being physically attacked, pepper-sprayed, and shot in the face by their would-be “protectors.” Perhaps this is why so much right-wing propaganda in recent weeks has involved seething over the large number of women — white women in particular — protesting against ICE.
On Tuesday, Media Matters published an absolutely enormous collection of right-wing pundits spinning out over these women.
You see, they know the “optics” are not on their side. They know that a mother of three is a far more sympathetic victim than the man who shot that woman in the face. But how are they supposed to convince everyone else that they’re the true protectors of women and that all of these blatantly horrible things are being done for our protection? Especially while simultaneously expressing their absolute glee over said horrible things?
Well, they do have a few ideas.
Most frequently, they’ve been trying to deride the women who have been protesting ICE as “AWFUL” (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal) “cat ladies” and “childless” and “middle aged” — so as to hammer home the “Don’t worry, these are not the sexually viable young ladies you want to fuck or the mothers we are supposed to protect! They’re probably just doing this because they’re mad about not being married to a swell fella like you!” vibes.
Via Media Matters:
On Jesse Watters Primetime, podcast host Benny Johnson: “A lot of these women are in fact what JD Vance once called childless cat ladies.” He added, “If you are a woman, you’re still created by God with a motherly instinct. It’s just when you don’t have children, that instinct moves somewhere else. And for leftists, that primary instinct has moved to the criminal alien.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/12/26]
Right-wing podcaster Steven Crowder said that “white, middle-aged, liberal women” gravitated “to wailing in the streets and acting completely irrationally.” He added, “Has there ever been a group more privileged than white women in the 21st century?” [YouTube, Louder with Crowder, 1/12/26]
Crowder singled out “white liberal women, specifically because they are the only ones with the power as a voting block to transform the fabric of our country as they have.” He continued: “They’re influenced by evil. Anyone want to watch that shrieking, that completely irrational display of undirected emotion and say that it’s anything other than straight from the pill of hell? It is narcissism pathologized.” [YouTube, Louder with Crowder, 1/12/26]
Megyn Kelly called women protesting ICE “a Karen intifada.” Kelly said: “These unhappy, empty-lived leftists are now vowing to take on law enforcement, pretending like they’re both, like a badass, cop-busting, you know, vigilante type, and also, they’re the victim because they’re already the next Renee Good.” [SiriusXM, The Megyn Kelly Show, 1/12/26]
They also refer to them as “brainwashed,” so as to drive the point that they’re not protesting because they are intelligent, empathetic beings who have come to the conclusion themselves that rounding up and brutalizing immigrants and people who look like they might be immigrants is an appalling thing, but because their dumb ladybrains are so easily manipulated. Probably by George Soros!
Jesse Watters: “These poor women who are getting hurt at ICE protests have been brainwashed. They’re being led like lambs to the slaughter.” He continued, “They’re pushing these women right into the front lines.” [Fox News, Jesse Watters Primetime, 1/7/26]
Watters: “It looks like the Democrat media industrial complex is preying on these vulnerable women. And they brainwash them into putting their lives on the line to protect illegal aliens.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/8/26]
Above a chyron about “white women taking lead in ICE protests,” Greg Gutfeld said, “White liberal females, man, they are ripe for the programming. And, man, they get programmed from the get go.” [Fox News, The Five, 1/13/26]
Then there’s the old classic “They’re just crazy, just like every one of my ex-girlfriends!”
On Gutfeld!, Heather Zumarraga: “Studies show that half of these — the majority of the younger liberal women have mental disorders.” She elaborated: “There are two reasons for these mental disorders. You probably don’t have a job so you’re dependent on state welfare. … You were talking about the women that don’t have children.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 1/19/26]
Newsmax host Rob Schmitt labeled “neurotic, psychotic left-wing women” as a “huge part” of anti-ICE protests. [Newsmax, Rob Schmitt Tonight, 1/20/26]
Oh! But maybe — maybe! — they’re just sluts who are just super thirsty for “emotional enrichment” and those sexy, sexy ICE agents. It’s really the only option other than wanting to be their moms.
Gutfeld: “It’s almost like the promiscuity of white female protesters regarding their causes tells you it’s not about the cause at all. It’s about the content, filming and posting it as a form of emotional enrichment.” [Fox News, Gutfeld!, 1/13/26]
Right-wing commentator Tim Pool mocked, “I think it’s fair to say that all these middle-aged liberal women are hunting down ICE agents because they want to be around them.” Tate Brown responded, “Yeah, ICE Tracker is like a dating app for them.” [YouTube, Timcast IRL, 1/13/26]
Al Perrotta speculated that white female protesters were suffering from a “psychic injury from the Sexual Revolution indoctrination.” [The Daily Signal, 1/27/26]
In that last essay, Daily Signal writer Al Perrotta tried to figure out why every woman he’s ever known hates him now, ultimately coming to the Principal Skinner-esque conclusion that they, and all other white liberal women, were all tragically and ironically damaged by freedom, equality, and basic human rights we fought so hard for.
Perhaps at its core the women are suffering PTSD. The psychic injury from the Sexual Revolution indoctrination, the radical mutation of the women’s rights movement, the desecration of motherhood at the altar of “abortion rights,” even the transgender usurpation of what it means to be a woman.
White, liberal women have been told, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”“Yeah,” they replied. Looked around, and asked, “But where am I?”
Did they? Or did that only happen in the imagination of Al Perrotta, much like the entire alternate universe he describes, in which ICE agents are going after “the worst of the worst” criminals — child molesters, killers, sex traffickers, and drug traffickers — and that this, specifically, is what those “white liberal women” are protesting. Because we all just really love criminals and are possibly sexually attracted to them.
This, of course, is not the case, and they know this as well when it comes up in other conversations. Indeed, whenever someone says that they thought Trump was only going to go after “the worst of the worst” and not the law-abiding, hard working people who aren’t bothering anyone and are beloved in their communities (many, many of whom came here legally), they are very quick to snap that “Anyone who is here illegally is a criminal, so it counts!”
And still, only five percent of ICE detainees have had any kind of violent criminal conviction (and that statistic comes from the right-wing CATO Institute, although on the topic they have actually been putting their “libertarian” where their mouth is, and we’re not being sarcastic).
It’s almost as if the facts just don’t line up with their feelings.
Theirs is not a righteous or noble cause. These people are not, as they repeatedly insist upon saying, “the good guys.” These are the same people who mock women for talking about consent, for coming forward about sexual harassment and assault, for talking about sexual assault on college campuses. They are the same people who claim that we are constantly lying about rape when we’re actually just mad that someone didn’t send us flowers the next day. They are the people who constantly say insulting, degrading things about women often enough for it to be about half my job.
They do not care about “protecting” women or children. They care about getting to live in a white Christian nation, they care about not having to be around people who are different from themselves, they care about getting to feel powerful and like they’re better than other people, and they use the “safety” of women and children as a cudgel in pursuit of this nonsense.
Except, once again, it’s going to be real hard to pull off while their “good guy” ICE agents are kidnapping kids and shooting mothers in the face.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Your first paragraph makes a very salient point. Republicans have nothing to offer but fear and bigotry of the “other”. Yet we don’t hear the media drag them for not offering Americans something positive.
For Democrats the media constantly criticizes them for not building us a utopia complete with flying unicorns. For republicans there is no expectation to do so.
I keep thinking about an NPR story which had interviews with Minnesotans who support the ICE raids.
One woman said she didn’t want her daughter to be raped by an illegal alien.
So, if she were told her daughter had been assaulted, her first reaction would likely be “I hope the assailant was white and native-born!”