Why are at least two people dead and multiple federal law enforcement officers injured?
What broader principle are Democrats, liberals and leftists rioting over in Minneapolis?
It certainly isn’t the idea that states can defy the federal government on immigration law. Obama took Arizona v. United States to the Supreme Court to prevent states from enforcing their own immigration laws. The Biden administration dispatched some of the same federal immigration law enforcement officers now being assaulted and booed to dismantle barriers and fencing put up by states like Arizona and Texas to control the mass invasion of millions of illegal aliens.
Democrats however never actually believed that states couldn’t defy the federal government on immigration law, more properly they believe that states can only defy the federal government by moving further leftward. That’s why they support sanctuary states like California and Minnesota whose defiance of federal authority has escalated to the point of armed conflict, but went after states that tried to secure their borders and block illegal aliens from overrunning their cities.
The broader consistent principle at stake isn’t federalism: it’s leftism. The entire political and cultural machine that has been mobilized over Minneapolis opportunistically supports wielding federal authority over states and state rejection of federal authority on immigration law only when the end result, whether state or federal, is open borders and mass illegal alien invasions.
This is true in all areas. The Left has no legal, let alone constitutional, principles, only goals.
Does the same network of politicians, media talking heads and professional agitators oppose police crackdowns, federal interventions and harassment of innocent people? Obviously not.
We’re not that many years away from the COVID lockdowns during which protests were banned, people could have the police show up at their door to ask if they were secretly conducting religious services or Thanksgiving meals. Today’s ‘born-again’ leftist libertarians implemented state regimes that criminalized everyday conduct. They marked their federal takeover by filling D.C. with troops and holding an inauguration under a virtual martial law while hunting down the people who took part in a political riot of the kind their leftist allies pull off every other month, including in Minneapolis, because it’s not about the act, it’s about the politics.
The objections to federal immigration law enforcement raiding homes or deporting children are certainly not grounded in any kind of principled position. Bill Clinton, who emerged from defying a congressional subpoena in the Epstein case, to condemn federal law enforcement in Minneapolis, had Attorney General Janet Reno, known for staging multiple confrontations that ended in mass deaths, build a plan with 250 immigration agents to raid a Miami home and, in defiance of the court, kidnap a 5-year-old refugee boy from his family and send him to Cuba.
Heavily armed border patrol agents operating under an illegal warrant used a battering ram to smash their way into the family home, kicked down doors and screamed at the 5-year-old boy’s cousin, “Give me the f – – – ing boy or we’ll shoot you.”
Tony Zumbado, an NBC cameraman, was kicked in the stomach. “We got maced, we got kicked, we got roughed up.” The NBC sound guy was hit in the head with a rifle butt and lay bleeding on the ground. Members of the little boy’s family were not only held at gunpoint, but reportedly had laser dots trained on their foreheads. Clinton’s feds put a boot on his back and the NBC cameraman was told, “don’t move or we’ll shoot.”
NBC News not only had no objection to its people being assaulted and hospitalized, but it celebrated the kidnapping, and an NBC spokeswoman, when asked about the assault on one of its own people, replied, “It’s too early to say how we feel or don’t feel.” While all of that happened a while back, the NBC News affiliate in South Florida had a more recent upbeat twentieth anniversary sit-down interview with the man behind the operation and the assault on NBC News personnel was tactfully not brought up by anyone involved.
Suffice it to say that neither the Democrats nor the media have any objection to sending in the Border Patrol, battering down the doors of private homes and seizing and deporting kids, while bypassing court rulings and the rule of law, as long as the political objective is a leftist one.
The Left usually wants to keep illegals and refugees in, rather than out, but the moment that it decides that its political agenda is served by deporting someone, it will send in the troops, smash down doors, beat up reporters and threaten to kill family members.
So once again that’s not the principle that leftists are trying to kill and die in Minneapolis over.
The principle isn’t states’ rights. That’s a principle that only comes into play when asserting that states can block federal law enforcement from arresting illegal alien criminals, sign treaties with China, set their own fuel emissions standards or some other leftist policy goal.
The principle certainly isn’t that people should be secure in their own homes and free of having to show their papers to heavily armed agents of the state. That principle may be sacred when it comes to illegal alien criminals (although not child refugees from Communism) but goes out the window when it comes to meeting during lockdowns, filling in rainwater on private property, or committing some other offense against some ideological leftist agenda item.
Even deportation and armed immigration law enforcement officers breaking into homes is an entirely transactional position that can fly out the window when it suits the Left.
What this means in the broader sense is that we are not a nation of laws, but of leftists.
The Left does not believe in or follow any laws or principles other than its own politics. There is no rule of law (and certainly not of the Constitution) that applies consistently at all times. Laws are just a means to a leftist end. If a law is momentarily suited to that end, it will be upheld and suddenly trumpeted as the great pillar of democracy and all that separates us from the beasts.
The next minute it will be trampled on and dismissed as systemic racism that will doom us all.
(Take the Senate, hailed as a bulwark of democracy when Democrats hold it, and as a legacy of slavery when Republicans take it back. Or the Supreme Court which goes from the only thing protecting us from tyranny to a corrupt institution that needs to be packed or abolished.)
That’s why the same leftist movement that has spent generations claiming that only fascists and madmen carry guns in public has now embraced the Second Amendment to defend a gunman who was shot while taking part in harassing federal law enforcement officers in Minneapolis.
Orwell’s ‘We have always been at war with Eastasia’ with its endlessly morphing party dogma is the defining political principle of a leftist party that can simultaneously deny the existence of women and champion feminism, that tells Jews they are Israel’s best friends and claims that Israel is committing genocide, that flips from delivering speeches surrounded by armed soldiers to playing revolutionaries depending on who is in power and who controls all the guns.
Don’t get the idea that the Left doesn’t believe in anything. It believes in a great many things. But those things don’t include the Constitution, the rule of the people, any laws that they don’t make and any limitations on their power to fundamentally transform America and the world.
Everything else is transactional and disposable.
Americans increasingly live under a corrupt tyranny that pretends to be a democracy, a one-party state that shamelessly gerrymanders and rigs elections, a bunch of radical thugs pretending to be civil rights warriors, informers playing reformers, criminals acting as if they are rebels, and tyrants playacting revolutionaries. In the areas under their control, there are many laws, but there are also no laws, because these places are nations of leftists, not laws.
The larger crisis in Minneapolis and the United States of America is not that radical mobs with the support of city and state governments are waging war in the streets against federal law enforcement. That’s only a symptom of the problem. The problem is that there are no laws, except what leftists want to do, and that means that there is no rule of law, only the rule of leftists.
Minnesota doesn’t just need some raids to bust illegal alien criminals, it needs liberating. The illegal alien criminals being harbored in sanctuary states and cities are just one element of a larger radical infestation seizing control of the country, mile by mile, and state by state.
America will either have the rule of law or the rule of leftists. That’s what this is about.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.
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