"Don't tread on me" used to be a slogan conservatives and libertarians alike could rally around.
But since the Trump administration started cracking down on illegal immigration, many libertarians have become confused.
A spate of articles with titles like "Where Have the 'Don't Tread on Me' Republicans Gone?" and "Where Are All the 'Don't Tread on Me' Americans?" has cropped up in publications ranging from libertarian mainstay Reason magazine to DC insider site The Hill.
Have conservatives turned their backs on the Gadsden Flag -- the Revolutionary War symbol that shows a rattlesnake against a yellow background with the words "Don't tread on me" below -- by supporting what Reason calls "police-state immigration tactics"?
Just the opposite: It's libertarians who've wound up as dupes of the anti-American left.
Minneapolis proves the point: In their efforts to thwart America's immigration laws, what did anti-ICE activists do? They set up "borders" of their own, with barricades blocking streets and "protesters" demanding ID from anyone trying to get past.
And what comes next may be what was demonstrated in Seattle during the last flare-up of progressive mobs, in the wake of George Floyd's death.
Leftist activists seized power over part of the city they renamed the "Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone" (CHAZ) or "Capitol Hill Occupation Protest" (CHOP).
And far from ending "police" violence, they perpetrated it.
A black teenager, Antonio Mays Jr., was shot and killed by what the Seattle ABC affiliate KOMO News calls "civilian guards who were acting as CHOP security."
No one's been arrested for that crime, though last month a jury held the city of Seattle liable to the tune of $30.5 million for Mays' slaying.
Whether the scene is Minneapolis at the start of this year or Seattle in 2020, what's happened in America's cities is not just a revolt against law enforcement -- it's an attempt to establish different laws, different borders and a different kind of government, not through a democratic electoral process but by directly seizing control of the streets.
The anti-ICE activists checking IDs and setting up roadblocks in Minneapolis, without a shred of legal authority to do so, were painted by sympathetic media as harmless citizen activists.
Yet even Minnesota Public Radio acknowledged how these protesters were taking other people's lives.
"When streets are blocked, it slows our response and limits access to critical resources," Minneapolis's interim Fire Chief, Melanie Rucker, was quoted as saying. "Every second matters when lives are on the line."
There's a word for what the protesters in Minneapolis were doing, a word the liberals themselves like to bandy about whenever think they can use it against President Donald Trump.
That word is "insurrection."
That's what the CHAZ/CHOP was, and it's what was taking root in Minneapolis.
The difference between those leftist operations and the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol by Trump supporters is that Jan. 6 would have been much worse had the rioters had the kind of disciplined organization -- not to mention supportive press coverage -- of the anti-cop and anti-ICE mobs in Seattle and Minneapolis.
Yet libertarians often agree with progressives when it comes to immigration, including illegal immigration, and they can exhibit a knee-jerk hostility to law enforcement of all kinds.
ICE's critics like to claim they have procedural legal objections to the way immigration law is being enforced.
Yet they can hardly say they're for the rule of law when not only do the "protesters" they champion behave as a law unto themselves, but the very cause that animates them is illegal immigration.
The anti-ICE movement occasionally tries to wrap itself in the American flag -- or at least the Gadsden Flag -- claiming that resisting federal law enforcement within our own country is the same as resisting the Redcoats in the American Revolution.
But the point of the American Revolution was to win self-government for Americans: the ability to live under laws of our own making as citizens, not laws made for the benefit of foreign interests.
There is a parallel between the Revolution and what's been taking place in our cities lately, but it's not the comparison the anti-ICE activists want to draw.
They are, after all, trying to defeat the laws of the United States of America for the benefit of people who are not Americans.
Whatever procedural or other arguments might be made against ICE, those are matters for the courts, and ultimately the people's elected representatives, to decide -- not activist mobs that aspire to be a law unto themselves.