From Daughters of Liberty to “Wine Mom Mobs”

MORRISTOWN, NJ — From my office window on Speedwell Avenue, the view of suburban Morristown is usually a quintessential postcard: historic brick facades, kitschy coffee shops, and the steady drum of a town that prides itself on its Revolutionary War pedigree. But on January 11, 2026, that normalcy was shattered by the cold machinery of the state.

That Sunday morning, masked ICE and Homeland Security agents in tactical gear descended upon Willmar’s Laundromat and several retail stores along Speedwell Avenue, detaining 11 people. Many were simply neighbors tending to their weekend chores, including a 17-year-old Morristown High School senior attempting to do his laundry. Although a federal judge has since ordered the student’s release for lack of due process, the “atmosphere of fear” described by Mayor Tim Dougherty remains, hanging as thick as gunpowder smoke in the frigid winter air.

By the following Tuesday, hundreds of protesters gathered in the falling snow outside my building, decrying a system that tears families apart. But as our community grapples with this trauma, a sinister narrative begins in the national echo chamber. While we see neighbors protecting the vulnerable, conservative media sees a “mob” of “angry wine moms” whose non-compliance is framed not as political dissent, but as a moral and psychological failure.

Indoctrinating the False “Deserved It” Framework

Transforming political actors into agents of chaos is a foundational authoritarian tactic; right from the start of 2026, we’ve seen this machinery operate with lethal efficiency. The cycle began in Minneapolis on January 7, when ICE agents killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother. Video shows Good attempting to drive away from masked men reaching into her vehicle before she was fatally shot. To the state, her flight was not a mother’s instinct for safety as much as it was an act of “non-compliance.”

Barely two weeks later, on January 24, the state claimed another witness: Alex Pretti, a VA nurse and U.S. citizen. While the administration immediately branded Pretti a “gunman,” bystander video revealed a different reality, in which he was tackled and executed while holding only a cell phone to record an ICE raid.

Though the labels used to vilify them differed, the underlying strategy was identical. For Good, the state weaponized the trope of the unstable woman to frame her fear as a threat. For Pretti, they weaponized the trope of the violent insurgent to frame his documentation as an attack. In both cases, the state attempted to assassinate the victims’ characters to justify the trigger-pulls.

Ultimately, this “deserved it” rhetoric is a Rorschach test for American power—a framework suggesting that safety is not a right, but a reward for total submissiveness. By pathologizing Good’s flight and criminalizing Pretti’s camera, the establishment sends a chilling message to the women marching in Morristown: Your safety is conditional on your silence. If a mother in her car or a nurse with a phone can be rebranded as a lethal threat, then no one on Speedwell Avenue is safe.

Defining the Double Standard: Trivialized vs. Criminalized

This same impulse to pathologize female agency is now directed at our local protesters. A recent Fox News opinion piece characterizes impeding federal law enforcement as “just crime” rather than protest. And going beyond legal definitions, social media has framed these women as “mobs” fueled by “wine and hysteria” in a calculated attempt to strip their dissent of moral weight.

The “Wine Mom” label is a calculated attempt to strip dissent of its moral weight. When a man protests, it is viewed as an act of ideology (dangerous, perhaps, but political). When federal agents killed Pretti, they had to invent a weapon to make him a “legitimate” target. But when a woman protests, the state doesn't need to make her look dangerous—it only needs to make her look delusional.

By labeling protesters as “wine moms,” the Right attempts to domesticate the threat, implying these women belong in a homemaker bubble, not on a street corner blocking agents who left a six-year-old girl alone in an apartment after “abducting” her father during the Morristown sweep. This is the hallmark of patriarchal control, showcasing men to be criminalized, but women to be trivialized. If the state can convince the public that these women are merely “hysterical,” it doesn’t have to answer for the morality of its raids.

The GOP fears a specific kind of order, the kind of organized power front-lined by women who refuse to look away. In Morristown, the women standing in front of retail shops were not “hysterical.” They were there because they recognized the inherent violence of a system that hunts people at a laundromat on a Sunday morning.

The Right’s obsession with mobs is an admission of weakness. When women organize, the narrative of the strongman state crumbles. To counter this, they must turn the public against these women by making them objects of ridicule, ensuring that when the state moves in with zip-ties and flashbangs, a silent majority will cheer.

Echoing the Spirit of 1776

The irony is staggering. This town bills itself as the “Military Capital of the American Revolution,” a place where we curate and celebrate the very “mobs” the state now fears. We build monuments to the Sons and Daughters of Liberty who engaged in the same messy, loud, and illegal acts of non-compliance we see today—rebels who viewed centralized authority as tyrannical, yet whose modern equivalent the establishment now pathologizes as a “mental health crisis”.

The “Wine Mom” label is merely a modern update to a 250-year-old colonial fear. In the 1770s, British loyalists mocked the Daughters of Liberty as “meddling housewives” for their tea boycotts. In 1775, Philip Dawe’s famous satirical cartoon depicted these women as neglectful mothers and masculine radicals, attempting to shame them back into the domestic sphere.

To the British Crown, a woman refusing tea was considered “unruly”. To the modern GOP, a woman blocking an ICE van is “hysterical.” These labels mask a dark truth: When the domestic center of the American family moves to the front lines, the state has already lost the moral high ground.

There’s a bitter, jagged hypocrisy in a movement that drapes itself in the Gadsden flag while demanding women “just comply” as a mother is shot in her car or a nurse is executed for holding a phone. Morristown’s founders did not “just comply.” By the Crown’s standards, they were a “mob” of dangerous radicals…and we thank them for it every July.

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, the Morristown raids, and the execution of Alex Pretti symbolize a world where autonomy is treated as a provocation. In such a world, non-compliance isn’t a crime. It’s our most sacred duty, one that aligns more closely with the spirit of 1776 than anything manufactured in a cable news studio.

When I look out my window now, the protesters are still there in the snow. Their voices bounce off the historic brick of Speedwell Avenue, a defiant refusal to be civil in the face of cruelty. We are not a mob. We are the latest chapter of American dissent—a lineage of People of Liberty who refuse to let the state go unchallenged.

We are angry. And in Morristown, that is exactly what a patriot looks like.