The two recent shooting deaths in Minneapolis were the result of split-second decisions by federal officers. In the first case, the federal officer shot at a woman because he believed she was trying to hit him with her car. The second was when someone confronting police was discovered to be carrying a firearm. When officers saw the gun, they shot and killed him. Both cases are truly tragic.
It is easy for some people to assume that both cases amounted to murder by federal officers. That is wrong. While the officers may or by not have made the correct decision, in both cases they didn’t have much time. One could argue that they could and should have used more restraint, but that is quite different from murder. More importantly, both incidents could have been avoided if there was not an organized movement designed to make it difficult if not impossible for ICE to do its job. We recently saw proof of the extent to which this was coordinated when someone managed to hack their secret group messaging system.
This was made even worse by the reckless and irresponsible rhetoric of both Governor Walz and Mayor Frey. They slammed ICE with wild unmerited accusations and encouraged people to confront ICE and photograph them so Walz could prosecute them at some point in the future. This borders on or crosses the line between political rhetoric and inciting an insurrection.
The decision by Donald Trump to publicly order ICE into Minneapolis is part, but only part of the problem. These results were easy to predict. Since they were to be expected, the Trump administration should have been prepared to manage this better.
The losers here are those people who have conspired against ICE. In their haste to organize all those protestors, they forgot something important. Their private communications have been hacked and exposed. They just may have documented their own criminal conduct.
Trump will withdraw ICE, just like he did in Los Angeles and Chicago. But that does not mean he is abandoning Minneapolis. Instead, ICE will be replaced by an extremely dangerous team of FBI and DOJ investigators. The Trump team now knows the identity of the real players, and it knows how the money flows.
In addition, it is significant that Trump sent Tom Holman to Minneapolis because he wanted an adult in charge. Both Kristi Noem and Gregory Bovino made the situation worse by poor use of words. Noem referred to the people who were shot as “domestic terrorists.” Bovino said that Alex Pretti was there to engage in a mass shooting. This gave undeserved ammunition to the people desperate to blame everything on Trump and/or ICE.
The next question is whether Democrats will shut down the government, again. They are already in a lose-lose situation. If they don’t shut down the government, they will lose at least some of their left-wing radical base. But if they shut down the government, this will have an immediate negative impact on a lot of voters. That is particularly true with much of the nation is being slammed by a major snowstorm.
The real problem for Democrats is that even the MSM is unable to cover-up their systemic radicalism and incompetence. New York is already getting a full dose of Democratic Socialism, otherwise known as Communism. Communism has been an abject failure everywhere it was tried. New York is extremely unlikely to be an exception. Combine this with the massive fraud in Minneapolis and the statewide incompetence in California and this is close to being a perfect storm.
As Abraham Lincoln once said: “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
Idiotic comments by Hollywood Celebrities and the people in Minneapolis stupidly assaulting armed ICE officers are proof that a lot of the people are fooled all the time. But a significant percentage of people are not involved in protests, and they are not worried about ICE officer interfering with their lives. They are more concerned about the price of gas, and if that continues to drop Democrats are in serious trouble.
There is another quote from Alexander Pope in his poem “An Essay on Criticism”: “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” Remind you of anyone?
TDM