Moral blackmailing of Americans

Unfortunately, it seems that every few years, Americans must be reminded anew of Lincoln’s wisdom. This week’s lethal Immigration and Customs Enforcement standoff in the Twin Cities is but the latest instance of a yearslong baleful trend.

On Wednesday, 37-year-old “queer activist” Renee Nicole Good was fatally shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Good, who had barricaded her vehicle in an attempt to obstruct an active law enforcement operation, ignored agents’ requests to exit the vehicle and instead directed her car at one of the agents. Good actually then hit the agent, who was briefly hospitalized for his injuries. But before she could do even more damage, the agent shot and killed Good. The federal government has called Good’s encounter “an act of domestic terrorism” and said the agent shot in self-defense.

Suffice it to say Minnesota’s Democratic establishment does not see it this way.

National Democrats took the rage even further. Following the fateful shooting, the Democratic Party’s official X feed promptly tweeted, without any morsel of nuance, that “ICE shot and killed a woman on camera.” This sort of reckless fear-mongering may have already inspired a crazed activist to shoot three detainees at an ICE facility in Dallas last September while targeting officers; similar dehumanizing rhetoric about the National Guard perhaps also played a role in November’s lethal shooting of a soldier in Washington, D.C.

Liberals and open-border activists play with fire when they so casually compare ICE, as Walz previously has, to a “modern-day Gestapo.” But as dangerous as this rhetoric is for officers and agents, it is the moral blackmail and “mobocratic spirit” of it all that is even more harmful to the rule of law.

The implicit threat of all so-called sanctuary jurisdictions, whose resistance to the federal government smacks of John C. Calhoun-style antebellum “nullification,” is to tell the feds not to operate and enforce federal law in a certain area – or else. The result is crass lawlessness, Mafia-esque shakedown artistry and a fetid neo-confederate stench combined in one dystopian package.

The truth is that swaths of the activist Left now engage in these sorts of threats as a matter of course. In 2020, their monthslong rioting following the death of Floyd led to upward of $2 billion in insurance claims. In 2021, they threatened the same rioting unless Derek Chauvin, the cop from the fateful Floyd traffic stop, was found guilty of murder. In 2022, following the unprecedented (and still unsolved) leak of the draft majority opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court case, pro-abortion activists protested outside many of the right-leaning justices’ homes, hoping to induce them to change their minds and flip their votes. And now, ICE agents all throughout the country face threats of violence — egged on by local Democratic leaders — simply for enforcing federal law.

Regardless, a free republic cannot long endure like this. The rule of law cannot be held hostage to the histrionic temper tantrums of a radical ideological flank. The law must be enforced solemnly, without fear of favor. There can be no overarching blackmail lurking in the background — no Sword of Damocles hovering over the heads of a free people, ready to crash down on us all if a certain select few do not get their way.

The proper recourse for changing immigration policy – or any federal law – is to lobby Congress to do so, or to make a case in federal court. The ginned-up martyrdom complex that leads some to take matters into their own hands is a recipe for personal and national ruination. There is nothing good down that road – only death, despair and mobocracy.