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[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
In Springfield, Illinois, in 1838, a young Abraham Lincoln delivered a powerful speech decrying the “ravages of mob law” throughout the land. Lincoln warned, in eerily prescient fashion, that the spread of a then-ascendant “mobocratic spirit” threatened to sever the “attachment of the People” to their fellow countrymen and their nation. Lincoln’s opposition to anarchy of any kind was absolute and clarion: “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”
Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a yearslong baleful trend.
On Wednesday, 37-year-old “queer activist” Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Good, who had barricaded her vehicle in an attempt to obstruct an active law enforcement operation, ignored agents’ requests to exit the vehicle and instead directed her car at one of the agents. Good actually then hit the agent, who was briefly hospitalized for his injuries. But before she could do even more damage, the agent shot and killed Good. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.
Suffice it to say, Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey responded to the deployment of 2,000 immigration agents in the area and the deadly encounter by telling ICE to “get the f– out of Minneapolis,” while Gov. Tim Walz called the shooting “totally predictable” and “totally avoidable.” Frey, who was also mayor during the George Floyd-inspired mayhem of 2020, has lent succor to the anti-ICE provocateurs, seemingly encouraging them to make Good a Floyd-like martyr and riot accordingly. As for Walz, he’s right that this tragedy was eminently “avoidable” — but not for the reasons he thinks. If the Biden-Harris administration hadn’t let in untold millions of unvetted illegal aliens, and if Walz’s administration hadn’t conveniently overlooked hundreds of Minnesotans — of mixed immigration status — defrauding taxpayers to the tune of billions of dollars, ICE never would have embarked on this particular operation.
National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This sort of reckless fear-mongering may have already inspired a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.
Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.” The fact is, ICE is not the Gestapo, President Donald Trump is not Hitler, and Charlie Kirk was not a goose-stepping brownshirt. To pretend otherwise is to deprive words of meaning and to live in the theater of the absurd.
But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.
The implicit threat of all so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, whose resistance to the federal government smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area — or else. The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.
The truth is that swaths of the activist Left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course. In 2020, their monthslong rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the cop from the fateful Floyd traffic stop, was found guilty of murder. In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, pro-abortion activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes. And now, ICE agents all throughout the country face threats of violence — egged on by local Democratic leaders — simply for enforcing federal law.
In “The Godfather,” Don Corleone referred to this sort of thuggery as making someone an offer that he can’t refuse. We might also think of it as Lincoln’s dreaded “ravages of mob law.”
Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this. The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank. The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear or favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background — no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.
The proper recourse for changing immigration policy — or any federal law — is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court. The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road — only death, despair and mobocracy.
The entire attitude of the Uniparty can be summed up in five words: “We are afraid of riots.”
The authorities have the ability to stop this blackmail – just not the will. They have chosen capitulation instead of bloodbath because they are worried about the names they will be called if they respond to a riot by littering the streets with the corpses of the rioters.
Honestly, if 1,00o rioters were massacred in one city, how many of the other thousands would riot, KNOWING they would likely die in a savage crackdown. And that the authorities were going to give a huge middle finger to the middle class moderates who objected to the crackdown?
Time to crack skulls.
Excellent.article.
Yes, it is. However, Lincoln’s worry about the “attachment of the [American] people to their fellow countrymen and their nation” was not aggravated by an overwhelming influx of hostile 3rd-world foreigners determined to plunder and destroy us.
Useful Idiots can be easily identified by their Stupid signs with stupid Slogans on them as well as the Big time Coverage they get from the M.S. Media Bottom Feeders and Sewer Dwellers
We should go after their handlers. The useful idiots are essential non-player characters who just need a new chip inserted before they will follow a more righteous, patriotic herd. There is a reason you see liberal white women dominating that demographic. The men are all simps.
Nothing is cheaper and easier for the media to cover than domestic demonstrations and protests. That is why the media often provokes such events with incendiary “news”.
Gotta love Mr. Tough guy with the yellow sign. Ooooo, I’m scared of you. Guess what, carrying that stupid sign won’t get you any from the girly girls.
If Trump was like Hitler that Moron with he stupid sign and stupid Slogan would have been either Shot Dead or in a Concentration Camp this just proves some people are foolish enough to believe everything their told by some University Idiot with Sawdust for Brains
Very well written but they don’t care. They are not playing by our rules. And their tactics are often effective. This has to be put down. Period. Before it gets even worse. Are we winning? I’d like to know.
Trump is exercising great patience before invoking the Insurrection Act.
As the Left has become gayer and gayer it is no surprise that it has become very thilly.
I have never heard stories of the Nazi Gestapo sending people back to where they came from.
They took people whose families had been in Germany for generations and placed them permanently into work camps – working them to death.
How this can be confused with what is happening now with the support of the majority of the US citizenry can only be described as insanity.
The Left is useless. Their demigod, Karl Marx, was obviously a sociopath. How this ridiculous religion, which should be considered the crazy cousin of Islamic fundamentalism, has gained so much power in the Western academy; it shows how lazy the academy has been allowed to become. They are insipid, weak minded, parasites on society.
There is no one to blame but ourselves for this. It is time to take responsibility and remove them from positions of influence.
A really good article until you got to Calhoun and Lincoln. At that point I became distracted.
Dumb Leftist TDS idiots don’t even know which Hitler “enforcement” organization to pin on ICE activities. Obviously, they should have chosen “Schutzstaffel” to characterize them! “Trump’s Schutzstaffel”! That should bring out the “Suburban White Women” in droves!
It doesn’t require a crystal ball to foresee that the rioting will continue as long as there are no punitive consequences to their lawless acts. And when this issue gets politically stale, the Left will find a fresh new target. It’s pretty simple math.
Hitler was bad Mao was far worst Go tell PETA about his War on Sparrows