"What Have We Become?"

We may not like the answer to that

A friend of mine posted the title question after the fatal shooting of an anti-ICE protester in Minneapolis. The answer is multi-layered and the usual us/them binary fails. Spectacularly. If your thought process holds that “our” team stands with the angels and “their” team marches with the devil, I humbly submit that you are doing it wrong.

This is not about parties or ideologies. Those have always existed, usually with nothing more than the occasional shouting match. Opposites even managed to maintain friendships and good family relationships. How many of you can lay claim to that today? The current zeitgeist is the actions we tolerate in the name of team, hypocrisy be damned. Principles have given way to principals. Put more simply, the WHO overrides the WHAT.

That is the only explanation for how we have become…

· …a country where the people who treat Renee Good and Alex Pretti as martyrs insist that Ashlee Babbit had it coming. And vice versa. The common bond across all three is that none deserved to die, but each made poor decisions.

· …a country where those who protest deportations remain silent about Americans who have been murdered by illegals.

· …a country where advocates of the Second Amendment, including the FBI Director, are finding emanations and penumbras that do not exist. It is not very smart to carry a firearm at a high-tension event, but it’s not illegal.

· …a country where the very people who talk a big game about individual liberty are expanding the reach and scope of the surveillance state.

· …a country whose media is now screeching about how 47 is pursuing deportations went on ride-alongs when 44 did it. Did you know that Trump’s point man was also Obama’s, and that the latter gave Tom Homan an award for meritorious service?

A great many have wrongly conflated the right to peaceful assembly with the perceived right to stick bullhorns and whistles in others’ faces, assault people you don’t like, and, if necessary, physically interfere with law enforcement. Try the last one with your local cops and report back on how it went. Or have your lawyer tell us.

There is a right to speak out against laws that are unjust or do not make sense. There is no concurrent right under which individuals get to decide which laws can be enforced and which cannot. The irony meter is visibly cracking at the sight of people attacking those who would enforce laws while actively defending those who break them. And this is not limited to Minnesota or immigration. A bill before the Virginia House of Delegates would effectively ban oversight of how taxpayer funds given to charities and non-profits are used.

Do not blame the messenger of this news. In the bill’s own words – “No state agency responsible for the administration of federal funds shall impose a requirement on a nonprofit charitable organization providing a federal public benefit to determine, verify, or otherwise require proof of eligibility of any applicant for such benefits.” Is normalizing fraud the new American way? Imagine your money being used for something you vehemently oppose and state officials telling you to suck it up. If your party can do that today, be sure the other party will do it when it gets a majority.

If you take a step back from the chaos and look at everything that is swirling about, it is virtually impossible to say that this is routine politics. No sane person believes that the gathering crowds are showing up organically or spontaneously. If that were true, the scenes up north would be reflected in the other states where deportations are ongoing. Without mobs. Without conflict. Without anyone dying. In this case, bedlam is the point and it predates what’s happening now.

Did you forget Covid and how some turned from a nightly ritual of celebrating medical professionals to actively cheering the ones who were fired for not taking a certain vaccine? Did you forget how small businesses nationwide were forced to close while the big boxes stayed open, effectively engineering the largest upward transfer of wealth in our history? Did you forget how open-air parks were padlocked and church doors were shut while liquor stores, porn shops, and weed dispensaries were deemed essential?

That doesn’t even touch the summer of 2020 when the law itself took a knee and the mob ran wild, killing dozens, destroying billions in property, permanently shutting down businesses, and ushering in a massive crime wave that plagued urban America for years. The residue of that is still evident in murders in Charlotte and Auburn, Alabama, an immolation and attempted murder on a Chicago commuter drain and a woman doused with acid in Savannah, all of them victims of career criminals who by all rights should have never been free.

The chaos is not confined to professional activists and their benefactors. It’s also among the key tools of Team Trump, something I have covered before. The man’s MO is to shine as many laser pointers as possible while the cats go crazy deciding which one to chase. It’s also a revision of a previous approach. The Cloward-Piven playbook was also based on chaos by working to break the welfare system by overloading it.

Disruption and defiance are not new tools; the disconnect between rhetoric and reality, however, is very new. In recent months, people have openly celebrated a man’s murder; they lamented that two would-be assassins failed to take out a presidential candidate; a group called Queers for Palestine did not notice the obvious disconnect in its stated position; and so forth.

Right now, the people who equate ICE to the Gestapo and Trump to a certain dictator do so while fully expecting that they can protest and nothing will happen to them. It’s a thought process that borders on psychosis. Spoiler alert: protesting against genuine dictators guarantees that something will happen. Something ugly. Something that makes Minnesota look like a bar fight. For reference, see how Iran is currently handling dissent, how virtually every Middle Eastern nation run by a monarch, emir, or potentate handles these rare (for a reason) occurrences, or how the old Soviet Union and China responded.

Eventually, the mob will claim its pound of flesh. Whether that involves an actual federal agent or stems from a story like this one in which software engineers were somehow mistaken for ICE personnel and set upon is undetermined, but it is almost inevitable. This is not the civil disobedience of the civil rights era; there are training classes now for activists that are less about protesting and more about seeing how far the feds can be pushed before they have a Popeye moment. Then what?

That is not an idle question. If you have not considered the potential answers, you are already behind the power curve. I’m not sure that those answers are any more encouraging than the original question that sparked this, but here we are. For a nation that claims to exalt the rule of law, we are often selective in our application of this standard. A British comedian touched on this in a recent performance by saying, and paraphrasing here - if reasonable people do not police the borders or the streets, then unreasonable people will.