Ladies, It’s Your Duty To Resist Anti-ICE Blackmail On Instagram

In the wake of the shootings of anti-ICE agitators Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in Minneapolis, social media moms and those whose highest goal in life is to end up on the so-called “right side of history” have once again taken to Instagram and X to share their outrage.

It’s no secret that the toxic repost culture of Instagram and other social media is leveraged by the uninformed to engage in virtue-signaling and selective political activism. For roughly the last five months, I have not logged onto Instagram once and have been the better for it. But after hearing about how countless users mindlessly reposted debunked anti-ICE fearmongering propaganda, I had to take a look at this “2020 all over again.”

After a federal agent shot Pretti in a messy confrontation, a quick scroll through Instagram at the beginning of the week revealed unending posts and reposts of clickbait vilifying immigration enforcement, memorializing Good and Pretti, and regurgitating “abolish ICE” rhetoric.

The anti-ICE virtue-signaling on social media has obviously been going on much longer than the last few days. Take this video, posted more than a week before Pretti’s death, which has been liked 157,000 times, reposted more than 54,000 times, and is still in circulation. It depicts headshots of multiple people who allegedly “died in ICE custody” — a claim made without any context or sourcing — over the musical theme from Schindler’s List. The questionable (at best) history lesson was originally posted by an account with around 3,000 followers named “foodandstuff420.”

As Christian conservative commentator Allie Beth Stuckey noted last week, “Women, including many, many Christian women,” on Instagram were “completely duped by the anti-ICE propaganda” that federal agents “detained” a 5-year-old boy. The debunked incident unsurprisingly generated endless clickbait featuring photos of the boy in an oversized hat, who, as DHS later revealed, was actually abandoned by his illegal immigrant, law enforcement-fleeing father. An ICE agent remained with the boy “for the child’s safety.”

[READ: Let’s Track Every Lie Dems And Media Invented To Demonize Immigration Agents]

Nonetheless, the Instagram users who posted uninformed, toxic empathy-fueled content like this haven’t taken it down.

The most disturbing part about social media outrage isn’t the clickbait, the missing details, or the hoax peddling. It’s the ease with which Americans on social media — primarily women — not only blindly accept and amplify left-wing propaganda, but seemingly orient their lives around it.

Reel after reel depicts some variation of the same narrative: A woman supposedly going about her everyday life — but pausing to film herself and/or her children doing an activity like coloring or driving. The video is then overlaid with a fearmongering caption or clips of ICE operations and set to the same exact soundbite from a Mumford and Sons song about “swelling rage” — over and over.

“Trying to play with my kid like I didn’t watch another public execution this morning,” one user wrote over a video of a woman sitting on the floor playing with a toddler.

“I may not be a perfect mother, but I will burn bridges before I let my child grow up thinking I tolerated hatred, corruption, or cruelty from this administration,” another said on top of a video of her running alongside a young girl on a scooter.

And then we have the videos of women saying they will “never forgive” Trump voters. Or this viral audio attached to countless reels — supposedly the voices of anti-ICE protestors warning of an impending raid — that Instagrammers are convinced “will play in museums someday.” The only problem is, it’s effectively impossible to determine while scrolling on social media the context of this audio, where it came from, whether it has been edited, or even if it is real.

As Stuckey wisely noted in light of Pretti’s death, it’s important to take a step back and recognize that multiple things can “simultaneously” be true. First of all, Pretti’s death is tragic, and all of the details and circumstances surrounding the shooting are not yet clear. Second, just as it’s right to point out that social media moms are mistaken for immediately labeling ICE as authoritarian, state-sanctioned killers, it’s also fair to question whether the administration’s messaging (such as calling Pretti a “domestic terrorist”) “has been completely accurate or helpful.”  However, it is also undeniable that the entire chaotic environment in Minneapolis has been exacerbated and enabled by Democrat leaders refusing to work with federal law enforcement while painting them as an enemy to be fought. And none of this changes the fact that Trump was elected on a mass deportations platform.

Virtue-Signaling Is Self-Righteousness

Americans on social media certainly have the right to post about how their lives have seemingly been upended by these events. But they also have the right to resist the pressure campaign and recognize it for what it is: emotion-driven self-righteousness.

Posts like the ones above featuring viral, fear-inducing audio or strategically filmed snippets of “everyday life” — they are crafted to make the people who post them look unquestionably virtuous. Look, I am in turmoil over world events. Are you?

Another genre of apparent anti-ICE rage bait in circulation following Pretti’s death involves social media users invoking their favorite “good versus evil” books or movies, claiming The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars and The Hunger Games are what “radicalized” them. How could you ever question whether Katniss was the good guy?

All of this reveals a population increasingly detached from reality, increasingly unable (or unwilling) to hold things in tension. A population obsessed with metaphor and symbolism to the neglect of important context and facts. A population willing to condemn ICE full stop without considering the child abusers and murderers federal agents have removed from the street, or the fact that the agency also operated under Biden and Obama.

Stuckey has done quite a bit of reporting on why women in particular so often feel the pressure to join the so-called “empathetic” virtue-signal mob. God created women with motherly instincts, a disposition to compassion and warmth. That is a good thing. But just as with all of God’s perfect design, it is something Satan seeks to exploit.

“It’s good to have compassion,” Stuckey noted. “We should always feel sad about loss of life. But we cannot allow our compassion to suspend sound judgment.”

You are allowed to remain calm. You are allowed to log off. God has placed each of us in a specific place. A certain neighborhood. A designated city or state. Get involved there first. If you disagree with the laws in place, you have the power to call your representatives or get in touch with policy groups. Serve the people, the church God has placed in your immediate path.

If you are a Christian woman bombarded by all the “what would Jesus do” messaging, it’s time to pray. If you are in turmoil (Jesus promised we would be), it’s time to do what God has placed in front of you to His glory and trust His sufficiency. It’s time to actually open your Bible and seek Christ. If you do feel led to post on social media, use discernment, fact-check claims, commit to Godly conversation, and ask for guidance from the Spirit — He can lead us in even that. Our efforts at obedience will not be perfect, but that’s the whole point — Jesus made it very clear what He thinks of self-righteousness.

Christ calls us to humility and surrender of self — to trust in His eternal reign rather than ourselves. In His perfect righteousness, earthly virtue-signaling mandates have no power. They may have an “appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility … but they lack any value in restraining sensual indulgence” of self-obsession (Colossians 2:23).

Maisey Jefferson is a staff editor at The Federalist. She graduated from Gordon College in the greater Boston area with a degree in English and Professional Writing.