(Photo from Don Lemon podcast, Cities Church, St. Paul, MN)
The first amendment gives no special privileges to anti-bad-stuff people.
Posted by Ed Folsom, February 4, 2024.
There is no first amendment protection for the criminal acts of the anti-ICErs who invaded Cities Church, in St. Paul, Minnesota, on January 18, 2026, or for the anti-ICErs who commit criminal acts in the streets of Minneapolis during protests, just as there was no first amendment protection for the J-6ers who committed criminal acts at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. The anti-ICErs’ antics are just the current chapter in a long-running agenda of the team they belong to, seeking to ensure that people who are illegally present in the U.S. get to stay here “by all necessary means.”
The first amendment to the United States Constitution states:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
That’s it, in its entirety. The first amendment prohibits the government from:
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- Making any law “respecting an establishment of religion;”
- Prohibiting “the free exercise of” religion;
- Abridging “the freedom of speech, or of the press;”
- Abridging “the right of the people to peaceably assemble;”
- Abridging “the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Note that the first amendment does not declare an unconditional right to speak anything whatsoever, at any time, in any place, in any manner and at whatever volume one might choose. That’s not what the freedom of speech is.
It does not declare an unconditional right of the people to assemble at all times and at all places whatsoever, or in any manner other than peaceably. In other words, it does not declare a general right to protest. That’s not what the right of the people to peaceably assemble is.
And it does not recognize an unconditional right of the people to petition the government for a redress of grievances at any time, in any place, or in any manner whatsoever. Otherwise, it would have been unconstitutional for the Biden D.O.J. to lock-up all those people for months, and even years on end for assembling, speaking, and petitioning the government for a redress of their grievances at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and for Capitol Police officer Michael Byrd to have shot protester Ashli Babbit to death that day.
But nobody claimed that those government actions violated the first amendment rights of the so-called J-6ers. Everyone, including all mainstream media outlets, seemed to understand that being a part of a mob action that violates the criminal law isn’t an activity protected by “the freedom of speech, or of the press;…the right of the people to peaceably assemble…[or]…the right of the people…to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Why then, don’t the same people and media outlets readily admit that participating in a mob action to interrupt a religious service at Cities Church, in St. Paul, Minnesota, on January 18, 2026, to harass and berate its parishioners in violation of law, was criminal activity not protected by the first amendment (even allowing for a key participant’s privileged intersectionality status as a gay Black man and a gay Black journalist)?
The categorical mind-game — the struggle of the anti-bad-stuff people against the bad-stuff people.
Many people who sympathize with the mob action against the Cities Church view it as a categorical matter of good battling evil. To the Woke leftist mind, everything is about which group you belong to. Are you a bad-stuff person or an anti-bad-stuff person?
“Oppressors” are categorically evil. They include white people, “privileged” people, “fascists,” “Nazis,” “racists,” Donald Trump, and Trump sympathizers and supporters. These are bad-stuff people.
The “oppressed” and the “oppressed”-aligned are categorically good: They include non-whites, the not “privileged,” anti-“fascists,” anti-“Nazis,” and anti-“racists.” These are anti-bad-stuff people.
You don’t need to understand much more than that to grasp the mindset that the anti-bad-stuff crowd tries to foist on you.
To them, the mob action at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 was a matter of categorically evil oppressors: Trump-supporting “fascists,” “Nazis,” “racists,” “science deniers,” “election deniers,” deniers of other leftist pieties, and “conspiracy theorists,” attacking categorically good, oppressed-aligned anti-Trump power.
On the other hand, these same people view the Cities Church invasion as a matter of categorically good people battling categorically evil people: Various anti-ICErs and oppressed people battling people connected to ICE, especially white, heteronormative, cisgender, patriarchal families gathering in a church to worship Jesus Christ.
Are you a categorically evil, bad-stuff person or a categorically good, anti-bad-stuff person?
Does the first amendment protect the anti-bad-stuff people for their crimes?
The anti-bad-stuff people would have you believe that the first amendment protects their activities at Cities Church, even though it did not protect the J-6ers’ activities. Why? Because anti-ICErs are anti-bad stuff people while J-6ers are bad-stuff people. But, as the first amendment gurus at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) explain, here, mob invasions of churches to interrupt church services, to denigrate parishioners and to frighten their children, are in fact not protected by the first amendment.
The anti-bad-stuff people would also have you believe that all actions of the anti-bad-stuff people out in the streets in Minneapolis are categorically good, noble, and protected by the first amendment. As long as they are denouncing bad-stuff people (ICE) as “fascists,” how can anything else they’re doing along with that possibly be wrong, or criminal, or unprotected by the first amendment, right?
All necessary means.
After all, the anti-bad-stuff people tell us that “fascist,” “Nazi” ICE agents, are running amok, “kidnapping” and “disappearing” brown and Black immigrants who are absolutely the best of the best (the noble oppressed). All of this is “illegal,” they also tell us, and requires them to battle ICE and drive ICE out by all necessary means. Those necessary means evidently include mob invasions of the bad-stuff people’s church services, which serve to alert the bad-stuff people that the anti-bad-stuff people know who and where they are, and that there’s no sanctuary for them or their children.
Another necessary means of letting ICE agents know that the anti-bad-stuff people know who they are, where they live, and that there’s no place they or their families can hide, is to dox them.
When ICE agents cover their faces to make doxing more difficult, that just provides the “antifascists” more grounds to denounce them. Covering their faces to frustrate doxing makes ICE a “secret police” force, hiding their identities as they demand that people show them their papers, like Nazis — or like traffic cops who demand “license, registration and proof of insurance” every time they pull you over in your vehicle.
To quote Arizona v. United States (2012), “Once here, aliens are required to register with the Federal Government and to carry proof of status on their person… Failure to do so is a federal misdemeanor.” But how could the anti-bad-stuff people let another opportunity to spout emotive hyperbole about “Nazis” pass?
Chaos is the point, and the worse the better.
When the categorically good “antifascists” surround ICE agents, block them in traffic, blow whistles, scream, throw things, and physically resist them, it becomes much more difficult, maybe impossible, for ICE agents to do their job. That’s the point. It also serves to make ICE agents fear for their own physical safety, which benefits the anti-bad-stuff people too.
The more chaotic the street scene, the more ambiguity there is about what will happen next. This ambiguity multiplies the instances when ICE agents fear being shot, run into by a vehicle, beaten, bitten, etc.
The more such instances there are, the greater the chance that an ICE agent will respond to a perceived threat with deadly force. When that happens, another ICE agent ends up shooting another “peaceful protester,” because all mob actions of the anti-bad-stuff people are always characterized as “peaceful,” or at least “mostly peaceful,” no matter how destructive and violent they get. For the anti-bad-stuff people, when it comes to disorder and chaos it’s, “The worse the better.”
The chaos makes it extremely difficult or impossible for ICE to remove from the country the people who are here illegally. One of two things has to happen. Either ICE continues trying to enforce the immigration law, which requires ratcheting-up their numbers, causing the “antifascists” to shriek louder about “illegal,” “unconstitutional,” “fascist” “secret police” tactics, or ICE is forced to abandon its efforts, in which case people who are here illegally will get to remain here. For the “antifascist” mob, it must seem like a matter of, “Heads we win, tails you lose.”
The anti-bad-stuff people will continue to call ICE “fascists” no matter what ICE does. “Anti-fascists” need “fascists” as a foil. Without bad-stuff people, the anti-bad-stuff people don’t have the moral high ground to rationalize their mob actions. They just look like an unruly leftist mob.
The bottom line: The anti-ICErs will do everything in their power to make sure the people who are in the U.S. illegally get to stay here.
The bottom line is that the anti-bad-stuff team that routinely wields the “fascist” epithet wants the people who are in the country illegally to stay here. It’s why they have chosen not to remove people who are here illegally whenever they’ve had the power to. It’s why they do everything possible to block everyone else’s efforts to remove people who are here illegally. It’s why they allowed the country to be flooded with millions upon millions of people entering illegally between 2021 and 2024. And it’s why they are using the results of the chaos they have recently created to try to cut-off ICE enforcement funding now.
Allowing people to enter the U.S. illegally and making sure they get to stay here is a longstanding policy of the anti-ICErs and their political soulmates. Their current efforts to obstruct immigration enforcement are just part of a long-term pattern that has little to do with anything happening recently.
Remember when Barrack Obama sued the State of Arizona to prevent it from: (1) requiring people to comply with federal alien-registration requirements; (2) enforcing state laws that made it a crime for people illegally in the U.S. to work in Arizona, (3) requiring Arizona police to arrest people on probable cause that they committed any public offense that made them removable, and (4) requiring Arizona police to inquire into the immigration status, in defined circumstances, of people they stopped, detained, or arrested? Arizona enacted those laws because it was flooded with people who were in the U.S. illegally, and because it felt abandoned by the Obama administration’s lax immigration enforcement policies.
The case was Arizona v. United States (2012), and the Obama administration won. The Supreme Court invalidated nearly the entire legislative scheme on grounds that federal immigration law preempts state law. And that, by the way, means that any state law that obstructs federal enforcement of immigration law also violates the U.S. Constitution.
Consistent with the longstanding Team Blue agenda, Obama’s team blocked Arizona’s efforts to increase the number of illegals who would be removed from the U.S., in favor of the Obama team’s own enforcement policies which allowed many of those people to stay.
As Justice Scalia put it in his concurrence and dissent: “So the issue is a stark one. Are the sovereign States at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s refusal to enforce the Nation’s immigration laws?”
The answer is “yes,” given preemption and a Federal Executive bent on lax or non-enforcement of immigration laws. But also given preemption, are the states at the mercy of the Federal Executive’s insistence on enforcing the Nation’s immigration laws when the Executive is bent on enforcement? Answer from Anti-Trumpers: “Not if we can possibly agitate our way around it.” #RuleOfLaw #OurDemocracy
After Obama’s presidency and after Donald Trump was elected President in 2016, largely on a platform of reducing the number of people in the U.S. illegally, Trump was subjected to a barrage of lawsuits seeking to block his efforts, and a barrage of accusations that his policies were racist.
Consistent with the longstanding Team Blue agenda, during Trump’s first term, the team that opposed Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts sought, through lawfare and attempts at cancellation, to ensure that people in the U.S. illegally could stay here.
Later still, in 2020, when Joe Biden was running for President, he declared during a Democrat debate his recommendation to immediately “surge to the border all those people are seeking asylum.” It’s interesting that Biden spoke in terms of a “surge.” This was prescient, although a lot more than just people seeking asylum poured in with the ensuing surge. In fact, while the anti-bad-stuff people make great efforts to portray the millions who pour across the border illegally as stacked with asylum seekers, Notre Dame Associate Professor Alexander Kustov tells us that research shows “less than 20% of all international migrants are refugees or asylum seekers, while the overwhelming majority move for work, family, or study.”
In the U.S. itself, well over half of the asylum claims, and at times upwards of 2/3 of them, are rejected as unsupported.
In any event, Biden allowed a surge of many millions of people to enter the U.S. illegally, such that Pew Research estimated in 2025 that there were 14 million people living in the U.S. illegally. That number is greater than the population of each and every state in the United States other than California, Texas, Florida, and New York.
Consistent with the longstanding Team Blue agenda, Biden’s team not only allowed people here illegally to stay here, they also allowed millions upon millions more to surge into the country during 2021-2024.
Now Donald Trump is back in office, pursuing a policy of immigration law enforcement, to remove people from the U.S. who are here illegally. Meanwhile, the anti-bad-stuff team — the team that blocked Arizona’s self-help efforts in the Supreme Court under Obama; the one that sued Trump at every turn while accusing him of racism during his first term; the one that put out a call for people to “surge” the border during Biden’s campaign, and then allowed millions of people to surge-in illegally until 14 million people were living here illegally last year – is the same team now impeding immigration law enforcement, by taking to the streets with a campaign of chaos and disorder in Minneapolis-St. Paul and other select Team Blue places.
A remark by Boston Mayor, Democrat, Michelle Wu, revealingly demonstrates where the anti-ICE, anti-bad-stuff people are coming from on all this. Wu proclaims: “Every person, every human being has the legal right to come to the United States and seek asylum or shelter.” Well actually, no. What an amazingly wide-eyed display of idiocy…
Consistent with the Team Blue agenda, the team that holds itself out as the categorically good, the “antifascists,” the guardians of Our Democracy™ and the “Rule-of-Law™, do whatever it takes to ensure that the people here illegally get to stay here, despite the chosen policy of the duly-elected President, despite U.S. immigration law, and despite the wishes of the majority of the legal U.S. population.
When that team talks about Our Democracy™ and the Rule-of-Law™, it means only “Ourselves in power.” When they talk about threats to Our Democracy™ and threats to the Rule-of-Law™, it means only “Ourselves not in power.”
Remember 2021.
Are you an anti-bad-stuff person or a bad-stuff person?
If you give in to the anti-bad-stuff people, be prepared to show them your papers.
