By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, September 25, 2025
On Wednesday, a few hours after a man fired shots into a
Dallas facility for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the local
Democratic representative felt the most important thing his constituents could
know was that they couldn’t trust the Federal Bureau of Investigation to
accurately investigate the crime:
A Democratic congressman from
Dallas said he doubted that the FBI would lead a thorough and objective
investigation into a shooting that left two people dead near an Immigration and
Customs Enforcement field office in his district.
“I don’t trust anything that’s
happening out of that agency at all,” Rep. Marc Veasey said. “I don’t trust
them at all. They’re overly political.” . . .
“Until we get a full briefing on
exactly what happened, and there are documents that are released that third
parties can actually look through, and try to piece together the facts, I think
that that’s all we have, because we know that [FBI director Kash] Patel is
gonna — he’s gonna play Patel games,” Veasey said.
It did not take long for people on the left side of the political spectrum to
conclude that the photo that Director Patel posted, showing unspent rounds with
the slogan “ANTI ICE” written on the casings, must be fake.
Progressive
journalist Aaron Rupar contended that America was witnessing “a Reichstag
fire, but one of them every week.”
(On February 27, 1933, a sizable portion of the
parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, went up in flames from an
arson attack. While historians still debate who actually set the fire,
the Nazis’s enemies were scapegoated and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis used the
fire as justification to pass the “Decree of the Reich President for the
Protection of the People and State” to “abolish freedom of speech, assembly,
privacy and the press; legalized phone tapping and interception of
correspondence; and suspended the autonomy of federated states, like Bavaria.”)
Ken Klippenstein, formerly of The Intercept, The
Nation, and The Young Turks, reached
out to the shooter’s friends, and they contended that any expressions of
anti-Trump sentiment in his past posts had to be ironic, and that the shooter
was more accurately characterized as a libertarian who supported Ron Paul:
Among the dozen or so usernames he
used was one reading “#Impeachment.” When I asked if this wasn’t a clear
reference to anti-Trump politics, his friends recoiled at the idea that he
would express opposition to Trump so sincerely and straightforwardly. Instead
they saw it as part of his broader ironic persona, poking fun at anti-Trump
“resistance” types.
You don’t have to look far to find Democratic elected
officials who compare U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Nazi
Germany, terrorists, or “jackbooted thugs.”
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up
off the streets,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said during a May 2025 speech at the University of
Minnesota Law School’s commencement ceremony.
“For fascists, they select a public enemy. And today,
it’s an immigrant,” said Representative Delia Ramirez (D., Ill.), in June.
“Tomorrow, literally tomorrow, it’s anyone they find undesirable. I have
members of Congress in my committee who are filing legislation saying anyone
who attempts to obstruct Donald Trump from doing what he wants should have
their U.S. citizenship revoked if they’re a United States citizen.”
In January, New Jersey Democratic Representative Bonnie
Watson Coleman called ICE agents “jackbooted thugs” and part of President
Trump’s “reign of terror.”
Also in June, San Diego City Councilman Sean Elo-Rivera
posted a photo of armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in
tactical gear with the word “terrorists” scrawled across the image in orange lettering,
and wrote that the ICE raids were “state-sponsored terrorism.”
The same month, Boston
Mayor Michelle Wu said of mask-wearing ICE agents, “I don’t know of any
police department that routinely wears masks. We know that there are other
groups that routinely wear masks. NSC-131 routinely wears masks.”
(NSC-131 is a neo-Nazi group based in the New England
region; according to the Anti-Defamation League, the group has
“become increasingly inactive” since mid-2024. Raise your hand if you knew what
NSC-131 is. Raise your other hand if you think it’s a little weird that the
mayor of Boston is mentioning them like they’re common knowledge.)
“That’s what you see in a fascist state,” Senator Jeff
Merkley (D., Ore.), told Fox News in July about masked ICE agents. “We are not
a fascist state. We are ‘We the People’ and we need to make sure that people
are accountable.”
Would Democratic officials be more relaxed about ICE
agents wearing masks if they were told that the enforcement officials just
didn’t want to catch Covid? “Hey, Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy is making it
harder to get the Covid vaccine, so we’ve got to take other
precautions, right? Haven’t you heard the warnings from the daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer
Garner? When the offspring of Batman and Elektra tells you to worry
about long Covid, you take it seriously.”
Meanwhile, President Trump jumped on Truth Social and declared:
I have been briefed on the deadly
shooting at the ICE Field Office in Dallas, Texas. It has now been revealed the
deranged shooter wrote “Anti-ICE” on his shell casings. This is despicable! The
Brave Men and Women of ICE are just trying to do their jobs, and remove the
“WORST of the WORST” Criminals out of our Country, but they are facing an
unprecedented increase in threats, violence, and attacks by Deranged Radical
Leftists. This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly
demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE
Officers to “Nazis.” The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in
the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped. ICE Officers,
and other Brave Members of Law Enforcement, are under grave threat. We have
already declared ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization, and I will be signing an
Executive Order this week to dismantle these Domestic Terrorism Networks. I AM
CALLING ON ALL DEMOCRATS TO STOP THIS RHETORIC AGAINST ICE AND AMERICA’S LAW
ENFORCEMENT, RIGHT NOW! The Trump Administration is fully committed to backing
Law Enforcement, Strong Borders, securing our Homeland, deporting Violent
Illegal Criminals, and fully rooting out the Left Wing Domestic Terrorism that
is terrorizing our Country. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
It is fair for the president to urge Democrats to cease
comparing ICE to Nazis. It is not fair for the president to urge Democrats to
cease criticizing ICE or the administration’s immigration policies entirely.
Yesterday, after news of the shooting broke, Vice
President JD Vance posted on X, “the obsessive attack on law enforcement,
particularly ICE, must stop. I’m praying for everyone hurt in this attack and
for their families.”
Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack
Obama and a host of Pod Save America, responded,
“The Vice President is not a reliable source of information. This is now the
fifth or sixth time he’s posted a political take contradicted by facts from his
own law enforcement agencies.” Vance reacted
with vitriol, “The gunman had anti-ICE messaging carved on the bullets he
used. What, precisely, did I get wrong, dips***?”
The editors of National Review observe that
yesterday’s shooting is part of a pattern of attacks on ICE agents:
In July, eleven left-wing agitators
ambushed an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, opening fire on agents and
shooting one in the neck. In Portland, Ore., an incendiary device was thrown at
officers. That same month, another attacker in McAllen, Texas, shot two police
officers and a Border Patrol employee, sending them to the hospital. An ICE
facility in Washington suffered an arson attack. The left has tried to
popularize a push to unmask and dox ICE agents.
We don’t have the leaders right now who can “lower the
temperature” or calm the waters. Very few of our leaders, in government or out,
show any sign that they want to calm public passions. So far, it looks
like most of them want to stir them up.
Even if our leaders wanted to pour water on the fire
instead of gasoline, there are few remaining figures who are trusted across the
political spectrum. Every Democratic senator voted against the nomination of
Kash Patel to be FBI director. No other position at the FBI requires Senate
confirmation. To many of us, the idea that the entire Dallas office of the FBI
would conspire to manufacture evidence that the shooter was opposed to ICE when
in fact he was supportive of it is an absurd conspiracy theory that would
require a lot of dedicated law-enforcement professionals to violate oaths and
risk criminal charges, just so the administration could “win” a news cycle.
But looking at Attorney General Pam Bondi, fresh off a wild mischaracterization of the First Amendment,
and Patel, and Dan Bongino, there are few, if any, figures over at the
Department of Justice or FBI who are trusted by folks on the left.
President Abraham Lincoln closed his first inaugural:
I am loath to close. We are not
enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained
it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory,
stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and
hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union,
when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Problem No. 1 is that few if any leaders in American life
are willing to say things like that, to calm our intensifying political
divisions, paranoia, and rage. Problem No. 2 is that I’m not sure too many
leaders in American life are even capable of thinking the way Lincoln did.
No comments:
Post a Comment