The Democrats’ attempt at chaos in Minneapolis has now borne fruit with the help of legacy media coverage.
It’s also the result of two tragic incidents, and it is indeed the result of the mishandling of those tragic incidents by people inside the Trump administration. That combination means that the attempt at chaos by Democrats in Minneapolis has actually worked, to some extent.
It has now driven the Trump administration into action. The Trump administration yesterday announced that Gregory Bovino, the Border Patrol chief, has been removed from Minnesota and will apparently return to El Centro. Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, is also on thin ice at this point, given her mishandling of the two tragic cases in which American citizens were shot by federal agents under disputed circumstances.
The mishandling of those situations by both Gregory Bovino and Kristi Noem has put the administration in a particularly poor position.
But let’s not forget that this begins with Democrats attempting to obstruct federal law.
Democrats have been obstructing federal law and attempting to dissuade the administration from enforcing the law, while the administration has been forced to actually change its tactics with regard to deportations.
The Trump mass deportation policy, which has been part of Trump’s stump speech since 2015, has suggested that all illegal immigrants have to go. The reality is that Americans are much more focused when it comes to actual deportation from the United States of America. They may be fine with the idea of mass deportation, but the place they really want to focus — and the politically easy call — is to deport the people who are committing rape and arson and sex and assault and murder.
Early on, the administration did an amazing job of specifically targeting those people. The problem is that blue states have refused to work with ICE and tolerated obstruction of federal law enforcement, and that has meant that ICE has become more targeted in its pursuit of criminal illegal aliens.
If local authorities work with ICE and you pick somebody up for rape or murder or some other crime, you check their immigration status. If they are here illegally, you call up ICE, and that person ends up being deported.
But if local authorities don’t work with ICE, that person may end up in jail or in the system, acquitted or released for lack of evidence, and can end up running around the countryside.
That’s what’s been happening in blue states since October.
What this means is that ICE, when it goes to actually try and do deportations, ends up picking up people who may or may not have committed a crime.
This is a point that’s been made by the White House border czar Tom Homan, who said if they let ICE in their jail, ICE could arrest the bad guy in the safety and security of the jail. That also means when ICE does pursue a criminal illegal immigrant, they now have to go and knock down a door.
That makes ICE confrontations more likely. It makes protests more plentiful. It means uglier pictures on your television.
This is being facilitated and driven by Democrats’ sanctuary city policies. But what that also means is that those ugly pictures on your television change how people think of the issue in general.
People like it when the law is enforced; they like law and order. They just don’t like to see law and order in progress. They don’t want to see it happen.
This is not just true for illegal immigration. This is true for normal police operations. Policing is a very messy and difficult job. This is why you will see many circumstances in which somebody takes a video of a police officer having to do his job, and the entire online crowd will jump on the police officer for having to do the kinds of things police officers have to do, because pretty much every person who’s dealing with a cop is experiencing the worst day of their life.. And all day long, the cop has to deal with people on their worst day. Thus, he is likely to encounter people in their most violent state.
That means that the pictures on your television when this stuff gets broadcast are ugly. And just like everything else ugly in life, people don’t like to see the ugliness. They just like to see the result.
When those ugly pictures involve American citizens being killed under disputed circumstances, that allows legacy media actors to treat all of law enforcement as an exercise in brutal tyranny and to start propagandizing,
Which brings us to Jimmy Kimmel.
Here’s what Kimmel said last night:
I spent the weekend, like probably a lot of you did, looking at my phone and just feeling shocked and sick about what is happening in Minneapolis. One video after another, screaming people being torn from their families, Americans, people who were born in the United States, being pulled out of their cars for the crime of having an accent or whatever.
Children, small children, babies being tear-gassed, taken into custody, separated from their parents, just one atrocity after another, being committed by this gang of poorly-trained, shamefully-led, mask-wearing goons. And that is what they are: they’re goons committing vile, heartless and even criminal acts. And it’s sickening to watch and it’s frustrating to watch. It’s like we’re all being forced to play a game that has no rules. They just make up the rules as they go along.
When you hear Kimmel label our law enforcement as jackbooted and masked thugs who are out there pursuing atrocities against Americans, that is the story that the Left would like to tell, and they facilitated that story by obstructing federal law enforcement.
This is the game.
Kimmel continued by lying about the circumstances under which Renee Good was shot: “They won’t even admit that it was a mistake. They say the Honda SUV Renee Good was driving was weaponized. They say the gun Alex Preti had a license to carry in an open carry state; many of these same people scream very loudly about when it was Kyle Rittenhouse carrying the gun. A gun that Alex Preti did not even draw, did not touch, a gun that was taken from him by one of the agents before he was shot dead by the other ones. They fired ten times on an ICU nurse. They’re telling us, ‘It was justified, you know.’ Is that the law and order that you voted for?”
Notice what he’s doing there. He takes some facts and then wraps a giant fiction around them.
It is true that DHS claimed Renee Good had committed an act of domestic terrorism, and they did the same with Alex Preti.
This is why I said that failures inside the Trump administration have made Democrats’ job easier for them in order to shut down law and order.
But notice how Kimmel wraps that into a generalized critique of all law and order in the United States, and suggests that the only possible solution is to simply allow our immigration law to go unenforced.
Kimmel continued:
“My wife and I, a family in Minneapolis, are afraid to take their kids to school. They’re afraid to go to work. And I can only imagine how people who aren’t white feel about this. How does this end? What’s the plan here? Is the plan to just keep doing this in every city that didn’t vote for Donald Trump? Does anyone on any side believe this is good leadership?”
What he’s doing here is also a lie. This is only happening in blue cities. Blue cities are the places that are not working with ICE. Red cities are working with ICE, so it’s not a problem. Blue cities are not working with ICE, so it is a problem.
This is all incredibly frustrating to watch if you are attempting to be objective-minded about the very difficult realities of enforcing the law, and you recognize that there has been a mechanism set up by blue states in order to obstruct the enforcement of that federal law, and that the people attempting to enforce that law are then blamed when things go wrong.
It’s deeply, deeply frustrating.
The problem is that frustration does not change the fact with regard to public opinion. CNN’s Harry Enten pointed out that the net approval numbers for ICE have plummeted.
This is why yesterday, the Trump administration attempted to change course by honestly assessing what has been going on, recognizing that people are attempting to obstruct the law, and also attempting to change some of the staffing decisions that they have made
Trump is sending the person who should have been in charge all along, border czar Tom Homan, who, since the beginning of this, has been the “law and order, let the full investigations take place, we’re enforcing the law” guy.
Tom Homan has always been the adult in the room on this policy.
The Trump administration is reorienting toward the better parts of the administration in terms of handling this and trying to de-escalate the situation.
Whether that de-escalation is possible is going to be, at least in large part, up to the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis.
Democrats are clearly sensing blood in the water here. They clearly sense momentum, which is why this entire chaos operation run by the Democrats is a disaster area.
If they can politically win by obstructing federal law, that is a massive problem.
But — it’s quite possible here that the Democrats win the battle but lose the war, meaning that if they win the battle against ICE, if they get Americans to briefly see ICE as the problem and illegal immigration as a secondary issue, if they get all of that to happen in the short term, that may not be the result they want in the long term.
We saw the same exact thing happen in 2020, when the police were treated like an invading army by the Democrats, and for a moment, the police were wildly unpopular. And then it turned out that crime rates radically skyrocketed, and people got mad and turned on the Democrats for that, which is why the Democrats have been underwater on the immigration issue and also on policing for years on end.
Democrats could win the battle against the Trump administration in Minneapolis for the moment, but ultimately lose the war.
