News pouring out of Minneapolis these last few weeks is generating a strange sense of déjà vu.

Once again, protests in that midwestern city are saturating Americans with emotion — intense, performative and increasingly untethered from reality.

On social media, in particular, it feels like 2020 all over again.

Check out Instagram and you’ll see a rolling broadcast of distress: long captions about trauma, solemn declarations that this moment is unlike anything we’ve seen before and constant reminders that to look away is to fail.

Well-meaning people of all political persuasions, women above all, have succumbed to an irrational empathy that’s strangling any hope of reasoned debate on law enforcement and illegal immigration.

It’s not just a few overheated activists or fringe influencers: Lifestyle accounts, parenting feeds, wellness spaces, and for-profit brands that normally stay well away from political discourse are caught up in the emotional excess. 

“It’s OK if meal planning feels hard today,” went a post this week from Whole30, a company that offers guidance on elimination diets. “We just watched our government brutally murder a man in the streets.”

“Surely a great nation can enforce its immigration laws without terrorizing the innocent [and] without playing with racial hatred like a child with a lit match,”  the homeschool curriculum The Well-Trained Mind ranted on its Instagram account.

These statements, and countless more like them, are serving as emotional cues — making it clear that any response short of outrage is a moral failing.

The goal isn’t persuasion, but manipulation.

Among very-online parents, emotional dysregulation is increasingly framed as virtue.

Mom blogger Nina Caviggiola  wrote that she’s been teaching her children “about immigration, displaced people, minorities, people of color . . . since they were babies.”

“Children, especially ages 3–5, feel what’s happening in the world,” she warned. “They notice shifts. They sense fear, tension, injustice.”

Nonsense. Children don’t feel the news; they feel their parents.

When Mom or Dad models anxiety as moral engagement, kids absorb the message that emotional overwhelm isn’t something to regulate — it’s something to embrace. 

Professional validation of this spiral is deepening the problem.

Physician Lucy McBride writes about how her patients, unable to stop watching “the violence unfold in Minneapolis,” are suffering insomnia, tension headaches, racing hearts, skipped medications, and collapsing routines — all due to their “collective trauma.”

But she makes no suggestion that their distress might be disproportionate or unhealthy; she presents their symptoms as evidence of moral seriousness.

Emotional collapse isn’t a problem to address, in McBride’s telling, but proof that you care.

On her “Relatable” podcast, author Allie Beth Stuckey warned that America’s women are being trained to “feel their way through politics.”

Emotion replaces analysis. Anxiety is mistaken for activism.

The strongest feelings are assumed to be the truest ones.

Once this emotional groundwork is laid, political actors enters the picture, often with misleading messages.

So it’s no surprise that progressive influencers are increasingly urging followers to contact their representatives and demand they “defund ICE” by stripping funds for the Department of Homeland Security from a must-pass appropriations bill.

Ignorantly or intentionally, these posts omit the fact that the annual DHS funding bill under discussion doesn’t touch the locked-in budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but instead risks the $64 billion allocation for agencies like FEMA and the Coast Guard.

But the legislative facts matter not at all when emotional urgency is at stake — and thanks in part to the groundswell, a Democrat-driven government shutdown is once again in play.

Feel first. React loudly. Ask questions later.

We’ve seen this movie before.

In 2020, when COVID-19 emerged, fear rapidly replaced reason and dissent became socially unacceptable.

The Black Lives Matter era overlapped with the pandemic, as slogans overwhelmed scrutiny and institutions competed to signal their virtue.

The conflict in Gaza has been judged largely through social-media feelings about warfare and the plight of suffering Palestinians, rather than sober analysis.

And the moral absolutism surrounding gender ideology has brought relentless language policing as even private hesitation was cast as harm.

Each episode reinforced the same lesson: restraint is suspect, nuance is dangerous, and emotional conformity is rewarded.

Yet once the emotional peak of each new crisis passes, there is no reckoning — just a pivot to the next one.

Declaring oneself traumatized by secondhand exposure to information one has chosen to consume on repeat is nothing but moral cosplay.

Real strength isn’t found in broadcasting despair. It’s found in resisting the pressure to join in.

Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.