The Left Achieves Victory in Minneapolis

I know I’m posting about the Current Thing twice in rapid succession, but again, I have enough to say that I think it’s warranted. I thought about trying to condense it into a note and realized that I want to be able to refer back to this later. That’s because I think this is the turning point in the immigration battle, at least under the current paradigm. Now, granted, I didn’t think Donald Trump would win re-election, and I didn’t think he would do much differently from his first term if he did. So there’s two steps that I didn’t think would happen. But it’s still not nearly enough.

I’ve just seen headlines of “ICE partially withdraws from Minneapolis.” This comes after two incidents in which leftist agitators got into violent confrontations with police and were shot dead. I’ll generously just say that the circumstances of the shootings are disputed and leave it at that because this article isn’t about those specifics. This article is about what those deaths were able to achieve.

Renee Good and Alex Pretti throwing away their lives has defeated the Trump presidency on immigration. Now they had help, of course—the entire leftist ecosystem was behind them. That was the play, ratchet up the chaos as high as possible until dead bodies inevitably came out of it, then hold up the corpses and blame the right. And it worked.

The result of this chain of events is that, even when Republicans are in power, and even when Republicans have the law on their side 100%, the left can still get its way by just freaking out really, really, really hard. That’s the message that it sends to withdraw ICE from Minneapolis right now. What other message could the left, or really any of us, possibly take away from it? Just freak out really hard, and when people start getting hurt, use it as an excuse to freak out that much harder, until the other guy eventually blinks. That’s the winning play.

I’ve taken a keen interest in this particular showdown because it seemed, just for a moment, like we might actually have Republicans in power who had developed an immunity to this playbook. That after years and years of abuse and lawlessness at the hands of this tactic under the guise of BLM, maybe the right had finally learned better. This just proves that they haven’t. Their tolerance for it is higher than before, maybe. Still not high enough.

This is the worst possible outcome I can think of, or certainly up there as one of them. It would have been better for Trump to have never sent ICE into Minneapolis than to send them in and then prove unable to stay the course. Not only will immigration law not be enforced there, but the left has now been handed a heckler’s veto over law enforcement in general. They have every incentive to keep doing this any time they aren’t getting their way. The whole world has been watching this—the entire global left just watched violent protest from local leftists drive off federal law enforcement. Left-wingers in Minneapolis have indirectly achieved nullification of federal law.

Part of this debacle is that the administration made statements about these incidents that, while perhaps not provably lies, were really really stupid. There was no good evidence on which to call Renee Good a “domestic terrorist.” There was probably even less evidence on which to suggest that Alex Pretti was planning to carry out some kind of mass shooting against ICE. Yes, the left tells ridiculous lies all the time and gets away with it. That doesn’t mean the right can or should. The more advantages the enemy has, the smarter you have to play if you want a shot at victory. That’s obvious.

I didn’t even consider mass deportation raids to be a particularly good idea before all this hit the news. I considered it a fool’s errand and believed that the proper solution would be to create conditions under which illegals would feel little choice but to self-deport, such as by taking away their ability to work through stricter scrutiny of employers. Like I’ve said elsewhere, the fact that the Trump administration hasn’t even vaguely talked about this is reason to believe that they aren’t that serious on this issue.

I came to feel more supportive of the raids when I saw evidence that perhaps they were having a deterrent effect that went beyond just the number of migrants that they removed from the country directly. Well, that’s probably ruined now. We already knew that the next leftist president would probably throw the border back open on day one. Now? It’s a guarantee, locked in. They know now that if they let another 10+ million in like they did under Biden, those people aren’t going anywhere, even if the next election goes to Republicans. The right has no credible counter-play to it. We don’t have the balls to do anything about it, and they called our bluff on that.

I have to conclude that maybe Donald Trump just isn’t very good at this, or at least, not nearly good enough. Would a president Ron DeSanctimonious have done a better job? Maybe, who knows. But as I wrote at the time, I refused to vote for Trump because I assessed him as insufficiently committed to genuine right-wing ideology. Yet again, I have to conclude that I’ve been vindicated in that assessment. The immigration issue was really his main redeeming quality in my mind—it seemed like he had an opportunity to actually change the paradigm on it, and as I like to say, the future trend is more important than the current situation. If he’d actually gotten us to a new paradigm on immigration, maybe that would be enough to overlook his flaws.

Doesn’t seem likely at the moment.