“Targeting public safety threats is nothing new. … Under Secretary Noem’s leadership, nearly 70% of ICE arrests are of illegal aliens charged or convicted of a crime in the U.S.”
–Homeland Security Spokesman
March 5, 2026 — George Floyd’s death in 2020 turned Minneapolis into the launch pad for the BLM protests. From the participants’ perspective, the protest was an unqualified success.
- It quickly went national, with large protests in nearly every city.
- Law enforcement was largely passive, absent, or supportive.
- Political support was vocal, and all opposition was muted.
- Any violence (and there was a considerable amount of it) was either explained away (“mostly peaceful protest”) or ignored by the major media.
- Corporations provided generous donations $$ and rapid acquiescence to demands.
- Finally, and not insignificantly, it galvanized political opposition to Trump in an election year.
Ever since the re-election of Trump, the blue tribe has been searching for another event it could use to repeat its success with BLM. They thought they had finally found it with ICE (its enforcement actions produce numerous excesses it could exploit). Let’s dig in.
Vanguard Action
In guerrilla warfare theory, the best way to ignite everything from protests to revolutions is by using a vanguard.
- A vanguard (or foco in Che Guevara’s theory) is a dedicated group of activists, revolutionaries, or paramilitary fighters.
- They set the stage for the protests and revolutions to follow by undertaking bold actions to demonstrate viability and compel the government (the usual adversary) to overreact, thereby initiating violence that discredits it (moral defeat).
- They then hone, package (propaganda), and propagate a narrative depicting the government as cruel, illegitimate, and morally bankrupt, in an attempt to mobilize others to join them.
The Minneapolis Vanguard
The Minneapolis Vanguard (ICE watch) followed the playbook, updated for network connectivity. Here are some examples of the preparations involved;
- They built discussion groups to manage the vanguard. Due to their prior success with BLM, these Vanguard discussion groups included senior government officials.
- They developed and distributed a detailed training manual for confronting ICE and conducted training sessions for Vanguard members, teaching them to build the confidence needed to engage ICE agents aggressively.
- They also built surveillance networks that enabled community members to report ICE activity via their smartphones (photos, license plates, geotags, etc.). This data was put into a database that automatically alerted Vanguard members in the area to mobilize and deploy.
This led to increasingly aggressive confrontations between the Vanguard and ICE.
- Rapidly deployed crowds of protesters descended on ICE raid sites to harass and intimidate agents conducting raids.
- Paramilitaries staged attacks on ICE facilities, including a hotel housing ICE agents, and random individuals were enraged enough to ram or kettle ICE vehicles with their own cars.
- These aggressive confrontations demoralized ICE agents, making them fear for their safety, setting the stage for a violent counter-response that protesters and onlookers would capture via their smartphones.
Finally, after weeks of effort, they hit paydirt.
- The first event was the shooting of Renee Good while trying to flee/depart a protest site in her vehicle.
- The second event was the shooting of Alex Pretti after a struggle with ICE agents.
- Both events were documented via smartphone and led to an immediate surge in vocal support for the anti-ICE protest (all the way up to two former Presidents).
Despite this preparation and apparent success in generating widespread outrage, the BLM-scale national protest didn’t ignite. Let’s dig into why.
The Swarm
BLM wasn’t just a protest movement. It was a network swarm.
- A network swarm is an emergent network event that is ignited by an empathy trigger — from the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi (the Tunisian street vendor who publicly killed himself in 2010 after police abuse/humiliation, igniting the Arab Spring) to the death of George Floyd in 2020.
- Empathy triggers create a tribal kinship bond between the victim and the viewer (the way we use social media makes us vulnerable to such triggers). The trigger quickly cascades across the network, mobilizing and tribalizing millions in days.
- In a few weeks, millions of people are taking action, from burying all online and offline opposition to finding ways to take the fight to the tribal enemy (the Ukraine swarm disconnected Russia from the West in weeks) without any reference to policy or civility.
The reason the anti-ICE effort didn’t work is that the Vanguard effort didn’t produce what is needed to ignite a network swarm. Here are three places it fell short;
- The Empathy Trigger
- The Plausible Promise (the idea that holds the swarm together)
- The Network Environment
Weakness in any of these areas could be compensated for by strength in the others, but in this case, everything fell short.
A Complex Empathy Trigger
The videos of the shooting deaths of Renee and Alex were poor empathy triggers.
- None of the videos clearly showed the person in distress’s face (the optimal configuration for empathy transfer).
- It took multiple videos to determine what happened, and even after viewing them all, numerous interpretations remain possible (particularly regarding why the agents were justified in their actions, whether they were hit by Renee’s car,
or the status of Alex’s pistol). - The complexity of the event captured in the videos slowed the rate at which the empathy trigger spread. This delay allowed counter-narratives with different interpretations of the events.
A Narrow Plausible Promise
A network swarm relies on open-source dynamics (as in open-source software or insurgency). One of those dynamics is the plausible promise. A plausible promise holds a decentralized and diverse network together despite the absence of any formal organizational structure. A plausible promise;
- Must be simple and widely shared. For a swarm, nearly everyone must support the promise, even if their motivations for doing so are different. It must also be shown, through a real-world demonstration, that it is plausible (that it will yield results).
- “ICE Out” isn’t suitable as a promise (at least at this stage); it’s simply too narrow. With people connected to the illegal immigrant community or with those who believe that we’re at risk of a fascist coup, it resonates. However, that segment falls far short of even a simple majority of the country.
- It also hasn’t been demonstrated to be plausible. The government hasn’t stopped ICE enforcement; it’s still going strong, albeit with more of a focus on criminals.
Network Suppression
Finally, the network environment differs from that in 2020, when BLM swarmed, and in 2022, when the anti-Russia swarm emerged. The network is simply more resistant to swarms now. It suppresses them, denying them the amplification that the previous network environments provided.
- The first shift was Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Based on what he has said, he bought Twitter in large part because the Ukraine swarm unnerved him.
- Israel’s experience with the Gaza swarm led them to find a way to censor TikTok through an acquisition led by the Ellisons and facilitated by Trump.
- Finally, all of the social networks have learned to avoid controversy. They are simply tired of being called into Congress to explain any bias whenever the party in power shifts.
Here’s what the networks appear to be doing;
- Suppressing the swarm directly (likely X and TikTok). This is similar to how market circuit breakers slow extreme market movements, but more subtle. This works because swarms rely on overwhelming speed when mobilizing. If it mobilizes slowly, it gives opponents time to organize a response that picks apart the narrative.
- Suppressing expressions of outrage. The swarm’s tribalization process generates extreme outrage, in this case against ICE agents. Suppressing these outbursts slows the spread of the emotional contagion.
- Not suppressing counters to the swarm’s narrative. In the past, these counters were categorized as harmful (from misinformation to conspiracy theories to hate speech).
John Robb
Global Guerrillas & Grey Swan Investment Fraternity
P.S. from Addison: Thank you to everyone who joined Grey Swan Live! this week for our conversation with John Robb.
John Robb, author of Brave New War and Grey Swan Investment Fraternity contributor, joins us for a discussion on the war with Iran, how it’s being fought, and what it means for the dollar and other assets.
