ICE Is Not the Victim

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/amanda-marcotte/115920/ice-is-not-the-victim

ICE Is Not the Victim
by Amanda Marcotte | January 10, 2026 - 6:18am

— from Salon

snip//

The correct response came early from Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey in the hours after the shooting: Efforts to “spin this as an act of self-defense” are “bulls**t.” Trump and members of his administration lie all the time, so there is no obligation to offer the benefit of the doubt to this preposterous spin.

What is relevant here is the narrative being spun by the lies: that the same men who claim to be big, strapping defenders of Western civilization are also the most vulnerable people imaginable, under constant threat from suburban moms in SUVs, working-class immigrants fleeing poverty or gang violence overseas, hotel managers canceling reservations and liberals calling them “thugs” on social media. To create the moral authority to kidnap and kill people at will, ICE and their propagandists have framed themselves as the ultimate victims. It’s a complete inverse of reality.

The self-pitying nonsense got so out of control so quickly that, by nightfall on Wednesday, the actual victim of the fatal shooting was being painted not only as a threat to ICE agents, but also to straight white men everywhere. Jesse Watters of Fox News complained that Good had “pronouns in her bio” and “leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage,” conveniently leaving out that the husband he’s referring to passed away in 2023. (Watters himself is on his second marriage, to a woman he cheated on his first wife with, but since he’s a man, it’s OK with the Fox News audience.) Erick Erickson, who bills himself a “Christian broadcaster,” was even more explicit, calling Good an “AWFUL (Affluent White Female Urban Liberal)” and declaring, “Progressive whites are turning violent.” Good’s ex-husband confirmed that she had just dropped off her 6-year-old son at school before she was killed in a video that shows no evidence of this “violence.”

MAGA self-victimization isn’t just beneath contempt. It’s also, as we saw in this shooting, dangerous. It resembles the behavior that psychologists have long documented in abusive partners, which goes under the acronym DARVO for “Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender.” First, deny the abuse. When confronted with evidence, attack the victim to imply she had it coming. Then declare you’re the real victim here, and you were forced to hit, rape or, in this case, shoot the victim because [fill in lie about how mean she was]. The ease in which all of MAGA immediately reverted to the psychological habits of self-pitying wife-beaters should give us all pause.

It is also why, as Ganz writes, “it’s important both for one’s soul and sanity, as well as one’s politics, not to live solely among the lies.” That Trump and his team would swing into action, saying whatever they needed to smear the victim and justify themselves, regardless of facts, was a given. We all could write their lies for them at this point before they even say them. Like a battered wife, we know all the excuses and justifications for the abuse; we have heard them all a million times before. The relentlessness of the lying is about wearing us down, so that we give up on the truth and simply accede to a narrative everyone knows is false.

As exhausting as it is, we can’t give up standing for the truth. Not through annoying “fact checks” or other useless “um, actually” tactics that are beloved by the well-meaning nerds of the left but are mostly useless. We need a more emotionally robust response. One cannot “correct” MAGA liars; they know they are lying. It’s about calling them out, as Frey did, as deliberately abusive, dishonest and, above all, pathetic people, as men who want to impress everyone with how “strong” they are but whose actions reveal them, time and again, to be contemptible. And weak.

[ms liberty]

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[RockCreek]

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