The Immunity Economy: How Sanctuary Politics and DEI Created America’s Child Soldiers
- lhpgop
- 47 minutes ago
- 7 min read
The Immunity Economy: How Sanctuary Politics and DEI Created America’s Child Soldiers
For most of the twentieth century, American sovereignty rested on a simple bargain: the federal government enforced the law, and civilians obeyed it. When people protested, they expected consequences. When they confronted police, they expected arrest. When they defied federal agents, they knew where the line was. The adulthood of citizenship presupposed responsibility; responsibility presupposed consequences.
That bargain collapsed somewhere between 2016 and 2025, primarily in blue strongholds that treated immigration activism, racial politics, and gender ideology not as causes but as sacraments. In cities like Portland, Berkeley, Oakland, and Minneapolis, a new kind of social economy emerged—one in which political virtue immunized activists from consequence. Confronting federal agents, obstructing ICE operations, tailing convoys, swarming courthouses, and disrupting arrests were no longer crimes or even protests; they were civic callings.
An “immunity economy” was born.¹
In this strange new market, the activist accrued moral credit while the state absorbed the risk. The activist gained status while the agent, the officer, and the prosecutor lost legitimacy. Over time, activists internalized a staggering lesson: interference with federal sovereignty carried no legal, social, or moral cost. In fact, it conferred benefits—clout, praise, influence, identity, and meaning.²
Sanctuary as Nullification
Sanctuary jurisdictions did not merely decline to cooperate with immigration enforcement; they effectively created pockets of nullification. The Constitution does not grant cities the right to suspend federal law, but sanctuary politics created something even more destabilizing: immunity without sovereignty.³ Cities withdrew support for federal enforcement while granting civilians moral license to obstruct it.
This inversion destroyed the three pillars of deterrence:
Certainty of enforcement
Swiftness of enforcement
Meaningful penalties
With deterrence gone, a new type of civilian emerged: the para-sovereign activist, a person who believed they had jurisdiction over territory (“our community”), over law (“abolish ICE”), over enforcement (“we protect immigrants”), and over narrative (“fascism must be resisted”).⁴
These activists did not see themselves as protesters. They saw themselves as agents of a rival authority—an authority rooted not in the Constitution but in a moralized political theology.⁵
From Dissociation to Vocation
What made this cohort particularly potent was not merely its immunity from legal consequence, but its immunity from psychic consequence. The activist class that matured in the immunity economy was shaped by an earlier event: the pandemic. COVID lockdowns dissociated millions from reality, family, work, and normal social feedback loops. Isolation does not produce reflection; it produces anxiety, derealization, and identity diffusion.⁶
Historically, such suffering manifested in private disorders—cutting, anorexia, depression, non-lethal self-harm—overwhelmingly among adolescent females. In the 1990s and 2000s, these behaviors were treated as illnesses. They were hidden, pathologized, and treated.
In the 2020s, the same psychic profile re-emerged, but now the culture offered a vocation rather than a diagnosis.⁷ Instead of blades and calorie deprivation, it offered hormones, mastectomies, pronouns, and DEI catechisms. Instead of shame, it offered celebration. Instead of pathology, it offered sacrament.
Cutting was a cry for help. Transition was a quest for salvation. Both were forms of self-harm, but only one had the endorsement of the state, the university, the school counselor, the HR department, and the White House.⁸
The Infantilization of a Citizenry
A society that affirms self-harm as identity does not merely lose its psychiatric bearings; it loses its ability to produce adults. The immunity economy required infantilization. Victimhood became nobility. Responsibility became oppression. Boundaries became cruelty. Consequences became violence.⁹
To be an adult is to accept friction with reality. To be a minor is to demand insulation from it. The activist cohort that emerged in the post-pandemic, post-Floyd, post-DEI moment did not want to abolish adulthood; they wanted to abolish the obligations that define it. And sanctuary cities obliged them.
In this framework, the activist was not merely protected from punishment; they were exempted from consequence. This is the critical distinction. Punishment is the state’s response to breaking a rule. Consequence is reality’s response to touching a stove.¹⁰ The immunity economy protected activists from both.
Media as Armor, DEI as Doctrine, NGOs as Command Structure
Movements rarely transform into cadres without institutions. The immunity economy relied on three:
Media to sanctify and narrativize
DEI to moralize and formalize
NGOs to organize and operationalize
Media turned confrontation into righteousness. DEI turned identity into doctrine. NGOs turned disruption into logistics.¹¹
By the mid-2020s, immigration activism looked less like protest and more like counter-surveillance. ICE-watch networks developed text trees, phone chains, convoy tailing, and operational playbooks. Activists filmed agents from inches away, blocked exits, surrounded vehicles, and treated civilian obstruction as righteous resistance.¹²
To the activist, this was not illegal behavior. It was liturgical. It felt like defending the vulnerable, purifying the community, and opposing fascism. No empire in history has been able to counter an opponent convinced they are enacting a sacrament.¹³
The Return of Sovereignty
When Trump returned to office and authorized DHS to reassert sovereignty over immigration enforcement, the immunity economy abruptly ended. But its child soldiers did not know the war had changed. They still believed that filming agents at close range, obstructing arrests, or escaping in an SUV would be treated as civic virtue, not risk.¹⁴
When the first activist was shot after using her vehicle to maneuver around a federal agent in Minneapolis, many appeared genuinely stunned—not by the force, but by the existence of consequence. It was as if a decade of political physics had been reversed. Reality, long suspended, had returned, and it did not negotiate.¹⁵
Civilian or Combatant?
The tragedy of the immunity economy is not that it emboldened activists, but that it dissolved the boundary between civilian and combatant. In Minneapolis, sanctuary politics turned nullifiers into protectors, protectors into sovereigns, and sovereigns into children. When consequence returned, it was the child who bled.¹⁶
The United States cannot function with rival jurisdictions of morality and rival definitions of sovereignty. A nation cannot be at once a federation and a collection of cult enclaves. Sanctuary politics, DEI catechisms, and gender sacraments did not merely polarize America; they produced a generation of dissociated political minors who believe they have the right to nullify federal law with cameras, SUVs, and hashtags.¹⁷
The immunity economy did not create revolutionaries. It created child soldiers.
And now the state must decide what to do with them.
ENDNOTES
Immunity economy refers to the idea that activists gained moral and political immunity in exchange for disruption.
The costs of confrontation fell on the state; the benefits accrued to the activist.
Nullification here is used in the constitutional sense: preventing enforcement without abolishing law.
The activist’s worldview is jurisdictional, not merely ideological.
A political theology confers sacred meaning to secular power struggles.
Dissociation and identity diffusion were visible in adolescent psychiatric data during lockdown.
A vocation implies purpose, narrative, and public affirmation, not illness.
Institutional affirmation converts pathology into sacrament.
Infantilization is a political tool used to produce compliant dependents.
Consequence is broader than punishment; it includes physical, social, and moral friction.
NGOs served as the logistical wing of the activist class.
ICE-watch ecosystems demonstrate counter-surveillance sophistication absent in traditional protests.
Sacred violence is harder to deter than strategic violence.
The activist class failed to update its risk calculus after deterrence returned.
Deterrence reintroduction is always experienced as brutality by those previously exempt.
Once civilians behave as combatants, states face binary choices.
Dual sovereignties cannot coexist within a federation indefinitely.
A SAMPLE FROM A CRAZY WORLD
VIGNETTE: From “Self-Harm” to “Sacrament”
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, America encountered an epidemic of teenagers—mostly girls—who cut themselves. The medical community called it non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). Parents called it terrifying. Schools treated it as a crisis. Counselors viewed it as a symptom of unspoken trauma, depression, anxiety, or dissociation.
Cutting was not “affirmed.”It was treated.
These girls were not celebrated for their bravery or their “authentic selves.” They were seen as wounded, and the wounds were understood as messages from the psyche:
“I do not know how to live in my body.”“I need to feel control.”“I need to feel pain to feel real.”“I want to punish myself.”“I want someone to notice that I’m drowning.”
The blade was not the solution. It was the cry.
Twenty years later, the same psychological cohort—anxious, dissociated, body-alienated, overwhelmingly female—did not vanish. It merely found a new language for its suffering.
But this time, instead of a razor blade hidden in a drawer, the culture handed them a surgical pathway, a pharmaceutical protocol, and a moral narrative.
Cutting was a disorder.Transition became a vocation.
Where the cutter sought pain, the trans-ing body seeks transformation. But the underlying message is eerily familiar:
“I do not know how to live in my body.”“I need to feel control.”“I need to become someone else to survive.”“I want someone to notice that I’m drowning.”
The difference is not in the wound; it is in the witnesses.
When a girl carved words into her thighs, the adults saw a patient.When a girl binds her chest and plans her mastectomy, the adults see a prophet.
The Cultural Absurdity
A society that once intervened medically, therapeutically, and morally now applauds.It writes articles about courage.It opens GoFundMe pages.It commissions praise from the White House.It hosts celebration rituals.It treats bodily injury as self-actualization.
Cutting sought relief through pain.Transition seeks redemption through mutilation.
The first was framed as harm, the second as holiness.
The Political Horror
If cutting was traumatic, transitioning is trauma institutionalized:
No one held cutting workshops for minors.
No one recommended anti-depressants as an on-ramp to cutting.
No school counselor ever asked a child which razor identity they “felt.”
No surgeon offered to remove the problem limb to prevent future cutting.
No teacher changed pronouns to match the disorder.
Transition is medicalized self-harm with bureaucratic paperwork and insurance codes.
The Moral Inversion
Cutting was a symptom of suffering.Transition is framed as a path to salvation—a ritual that promises rebirth.
It takes unhealed psychic wounds and converts them into:
a political identity,
a protected class,
a spiritual narrative,
and a social currency.
If cutters hid their scars, the trans cult displays its scars as stigmata.
Not the wounds of illness, but the wounds of holiness.Not cries for help, but badges of initiation.
The Meta-Problem: Why the State Prefers the Second Form
The state could not use cutters for politics; they withdrew into bathrooms and bedrooms.But the trans-ing child is a public commodity:
a symbol of “progress,”
a bludgeon against dissent,
a moral test for society,
a fundraising engine for NGOs,
a vector for institutional control.
Cutting created private suffering.Transition creates public obedience.
Cutters scared parents.Trans children scare legislatures.
The Dark Insight
The cutter punished herself.The trans child sacrifices herself to the cult.
The first wound was personal.The second is political.
Both are tragedies.But only one is applauded.