The deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who was shot after hitting an ICE officer with her car according to video footage, have many asking the question, “What exactly do these anti-ICE activists think they are doing?”

The seemingly incomprehensible decision by Good, a mother with stuffed animals in the glove box of the vehicle she used to obstruct the enforcement of federal law, is leaving people scratching their heads. Reporting that Good became an activist through a peer group at her child’s progressive, social justice-focused charter school has not provided many answers. Media outlets like CNN have sought to demonstrate that the work Good was involved in was more like a side project of the local Parent Teacher Association than domestic terrorism.

But reality was something else.

As the New York Post reported, Renee Good and her significant other were actively involved with the organization Minnesota ICE Watch, and regularly attended trainings with the group. The group on social media openly promotes a manual on de-arrest tactics, a term used by activists that can include assaulting law enforcement officers to allow fellow activists time to escape. These tactics aren’t merely civil disobedience, where a protestor calmly accepts being arrested to highlight a perceived injustice. These are direct action tactics designed to impede and subvert law enforcement, including through the use of physical force.

The manual was produced by Sprout Distro, a self-described “anarchist zine distro.” A distro is a DIY print shop that produces and distributes zines, which are publications that typically focus on a subcultural topic that can be adapted for easy dissemination. Distros are popular in anarchist circles for distributing ideological tracts, strategy discussions, and technical manuals for everything from riot tactics and operational security methods to criminal activities ranging from vandalism to arson to derailing a train.

Minnesota Ice Watch previously distributed a zine entitled “Building a Midwest Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement,” which called for using a network of zine distros to build a revolutionary movement to “enable collective groups of people that can combat class enemies in a way that is militant, uncompromising, and continues to bring people into the struggle.”

The group later collaborated with the pro-antifa website CrimethInc. to celebrate an ICE vehicle being destroyed by rioters and its contents, including a rifle and ammunition, being looted. CrimethInc. is one of the most active anarchist websites and published an after-action report on the siege and burning of the Minneapolis third police precinct in 2020.

While the media has portrayed Minnesota ICE Watch as a kind of community service project, it’s really about creating a pipeline to transform progressive soccer moms into anarchist revolutionaries, fulfilling its role to “bring people into the struggle” to wage militant direct action.

And that is how one must understand these growing attacks on ICE officers. They aren’t intended as protests against a policy with which the protestors disagree, and which they hope to see reversed through legal means. Organizers view them instead as a way to draw normal Americans into joining a revolution.

That effort has gone increasingly mainstream. New York City-based Antifa militant and sometimes freelance journalist Talia Ben-Ora (aka Talia Jane) highlighted pundit Rachel Maddow sharing a CrimethInc. article entitled “Rapid Response Networks in the Twin Cities.”

The piece is the third in a series on how to organize Ice Watch groups that previously featured efforts in Los Angeles and Chicago. It notes that Good was a member of this advanced “rapid response network” that utilized surveillance and countersurveillance techniques, together with encrypted phone apps, to spread information about ICE, manage databases of suspected ICE vehicle IDs, and summon swarms of individuals ready to target ICE. The authors write:

Each chunk of the city (Southside, Uptown, Whittier, and so on) has rotating shifts of dispatchers, who admin a running Signal call throughout operational hours. Sometimes, multiple dispatchers overlap to split up the extra tasks of watching the chat, relaying reports to other channels, and checking license plates. Dispatch also helps people evenly distribute patrols across an area, takes notes, and assists people through confrontations. All patrollers in cars and on foot and [sic] stay on the call throughout their patrol. There is a constant flow of information, allowing other cars to decide whether they are well-positioned to join in, take over tailing the car, or continue searching for additional vehicles.

“Dispatchers.” Foot and vehicle patrols running rotating surveillance. Running license plates of suspicious vehicles through a database. If all of this sounds less like a protest and more like a security force, that’s because that’s exactly what it is.

There are multiple reports of the network targeting individuals for surveillance, including a Fox News reporter, and entering their license plates in databases. In another incident, a video posted online shows a man accosted for having rented an SUV that too closely resembled what an ICE agent might drive. Rapid responders forced him to open his trunk, as he was essentially detained, searched, and questioned.

At the same time, like guerrillas, anarchists seek to target where their opponents are weakest. For ICE that weak link has been the hotels and rental car companies the agency relies upon to house agents and provide vehicles for operations. Multiple hotels and rental car companies have been targeted with multi-layered campaigns aimed at forcing them to stop serving ICE officers. Similar efforts have sought to pressure restaurants into not serving agents.

The common theme is forcing a choice: you’re either with the government or with the revolution. The same logic holds for the recent storming of Cities Church in St. Paul, where parishioners were accosted for the counterrevolutionary crime of having a pastor whose name appeared on an alleged list of ICE agents. If you want to be able to eat, drive, sleep, or worship, you’d best acquiesce.

In leftist organizing language, these efforts to establish the revolutionaries as the true authority are known as “community self-defense” and “dual power.” While sounding like buzzwords, these principles are recognizable to every guerrilla and insurgent from the jungles of Vietnam to the streets of Fallujah. First, delegitimize the legitimate government by making it unable to conduct its business peacefully, and second, set up an alternative shadow government to seize and hold territory. The message being sent is that the self-styled revolutionaries are the real authority in the streets of Minneapolis.

That message has not been blunted by the irresponsible rhetoric of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who described the state as being “at war” with the federal government. Nor by Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, whose profanity-laced rants have echoed activist demands to expel federal law enforcement from the city.

This inversion of reality, whereby federal law enforcement officers are “kidnappers” and those physically assaulting them are seen as “serving and protecting” the community, creates the bizarre situation whereby activists seem genuinely confused and indignant that their attacks are met with lawful force. This can be seen in the video response of Good’s significant other. Just before the incident, she taunts ICE officers about hiding their license plates. Moments after the shooting, she can be heard screaming, “Why did you have real bullets?”

All of this has led a number of observers to conclude that the Minneapolis ICE activists are essentially LARPers, playing the role of revolutionary in a dystopian fantasy game of their own creation. To a certain extent, there’s probably some truth to this. Social media is replete with false claims that ICE is not a real law enforcement agency or that it lacks the legal authority to arrest citizens who commit crimes in the presence of its agents. Many of the anti-ICE activists have likewise been convinced that their white privilege will permit them to engage in radical behaviors at less risk than that faced by minorities.

But perhaps a better comparison would be to “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” Yes, in one sense these people are playing dress-up. But the incantations contained in these militant direct-action “spell books” are all very real. The true revolutionaries, the ones who put the books into the hands of these apprentices, know all too well what they are trying to achieve. Reproduced accurately, these techniques can produce uprisings, insurrections—and even revolutions—as they have for generations of insurgents on every continent except Antarctica.

There’s always an element of play-acting at the beginning of every insurgency. Whether it’s an ignorant campesino given a red bandana or a soccer mom given a whistle, for that hapless foot soldier it may all seem like a bit of a lark, a quaint diversion from their humdrum day-to-day lives.

But though every revolution begins as a LARP, they usually end in bloodshed.