The organized nature of the demonstrations has not been lost on President Donald Trump.
“These people are professionals,” he wrote on Truth Social on Tuesday. “They are highly trained to scream, rant, and rave, like lunatics, in a certain manner.” Speaking to reporters that same day about the scene at the death of Renee Good in Minneapolis, he described a protester who was “so loud, like a professional opera singer … These are professional agitators that want to see our country do badly.”
This month, assuming a role similar to that which it played in fomenting BLM chaos, unions, including United Auto Workers, have taken leading roles in coordinating the nationwide march.
“No work, no school, no shopping — only community, conscience, and collective action,” the ICE Out For Good website reads. Those outside of Minnesota are encouraged to “take action on January 23 in solidarity by organizing or attending a non-violent solidarity event, demanding corporations stand up to ICE, and calling on Congress to act now to rein in ICE.”
An “ICE Out for Good” rally—organized by a conglomerate of large and small unions as well as left-wing political groups such as Zohran Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America—is being held in Manhattan’s Union Square late Friday afternoon.
The unions, which once championed the BLM cause, have since rechanneled their energies toward resisting ICE and Border Patrol officers, perhaps seeing an opportunity to rebuild solidarity and passion on the left in the face of the MAGA movement. Friday’s strikes and protests, for example, resemble the nationwide “Strike for Black Lives” that took place in July 2020 at the behest of 60 unions and social justice groups, the San Diego-based outlet KPBS reported. Essential workers from Boston to San Francisco ditched their jobs to “rewrite the rules so that Black people can thrive, that corporations dismantle racism, [and] white supremacy.” In June of that year, researchers around the world promised a strike to #ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia in support of BLM.
Flashback: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same. “One year, statues are toppled and the next, Jews are bullied, but it’s amazing how the far-left treats such wildly diverse issues with the same small toolbox. It has ever been thus. As one radical wrote for a Students for a Democratic Society publication in the 1960s, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’”
Incidentally, Worst Hitler, Ever: Church-Invader Nekima Levy Armstrong Rushes to Democrat-Friendly CNN After Release by Activist Judge.