The Godfather, Vigilantism, & anti-ICE Protests, Part 2

In the last column I discussed the opening scene of The Godfather, and how leftist protesters wrongly see themselves as the good kind of vigilantes when they are quite the opposite.  But I left two groups out of that category.  Because it’s not just the protesters, but elected politicians and many judges who are also acting as vigilantes, IMO.

Which seems counter-intuitive, to say the least.  How can elected leaders – Mayor Small Frey and Governor Jazz Hands – become vigilantes who rebel against the government when they run the government?  And how can judges – Boasberg and the hundreds of Boasberg clones throughout the nationwide district and (sometimes) appellate courts – be circumventing the laws when they are in charge of upholding the laws?

The answer is simple: the politicians and judges are local officials who are opposed to the federal laws of the land – embodied in our Constitution, our immigration laws, and the sections of the U.S. Code that deal with interfering with federal officers in the performance of their duties, etc.

So yes, elected officials and local judges can be insurrectionist vigilantes in 2026, just as their Democrat forebearers were in the Southern slave states in 1861.

Having said that, I’d like to turn to the potential for right-wing vigilantism, if the current administration isn’t able to stop the lawless anti-ICE protests occurring in various blue states and sanctuary cites around the country.  I hope it doesn’t come to that, because vigilantism is always fraught with dangers for a society. 

But as I discussed in the last column, it can also sometimes be a proper course of action. 

Let’s briefly revisit the Godfather.  The mortician comes to Vito as a patriotic American citizen.  “I believe in America,” he says, in the words that open the movie.  “America’s made my fortune.  And I raised my daughter in the American fashion.”

He is, in other words, the kind of legal immigrant we would like to see.  He appreciates the country and the blessings it’s given him, and he has assimilated.  When his daughter is attacked, he goes through the proper, legal channels (the cops and the courts).  

But it’s significant that his name is “Amerigo Bonasera,” meaning “America, good night.” Because the American government betrayed him in his hour of need.  So now, the proper (though morally problematic) course of action is to go to the Godfather for the justice that the justice system did not provide.

Vito knows that, even though his initial words demonstrate why mob justice (in this case, literally “mob” as in Mafia) was his preferred first choice: “Why did you go to the police?” he asks. “Why didn’t you come to me first?”

The answer is clear for all of us conservative, law-and-order types: Because we SHOULD go to the police.  They’re supposed to protect us from criminals and give us justice.  And in a society in which the justice system is functioning properly, all vigilante action would be disordered and wrong.

But when the government has failed (or even intentionally abandoned) its core function of protecting citizens from criminals – I’m looking at you, Democrat party! – many people see vigilante justice as a viable option. During the dark days of the Biden maladministration, as we watched millions of foreigners lawlessly pouring over our border, day after day for years, many of us on the right and center felt a kind of growing desperation and despair. 

A few states took small steps toward taking the law into their own hands, Texas being one example.  When Governor Abbott pleaded with the feds to enforce the border in his state, he proposed that Texans secure their own border, if the feds wouldn’t.  When Biden forbid Texans from protecting themselves – immorally forcing Texan citizens to suffer the ongoing harm from the flood of illegals – Abbott appealed that to higher courts, while in the meantime defiantly maintaining his own barriers at the border.

Fortunately, there is a sane but narrow majority on SCOTUS that allowed Texas to reinforce their border, even if only on a watered-down technicality, i.e. the barriers that Biden started destroying were on municipal or private land, not federal land. 

But that was a terrifyingly close-run thing.  If Hillary had been able to appoint a couple of SCOTUS judges, or if Trump hadn’t won in 2024, who knows how badly things would be going right now? 

This is why I think conservatives are being ever more tempted to explore dramatic alternatives to resist the cascade of illegitimate power grabs by national Democrats, which are still going on. The left has relentlessly attacked the integrity of our democratic republic in multiple and critical ways. 

• They’ve illegally declared sanctuary territories, in blatant contravention of the Supremacy Clause and other parts of our Constitution.

• They’ve admitted tens of millions of illegals and tried to give them the vote, and thus an insurmountable lock on all future national elections.

• They’ve resisted all attempts to ensure the integrity of our elections (through no ID requirements, unrestricted mail-in voting, vote harvesting, unvetted vote counting, etc.)

• They’ve pursued widespread judicial insurrection, via partisan local judges who transparently rule based on their political priors instead of our laws.

• They’ve allowed massive fraud networks in their states, which steal from all American citizens, since the lion’s share of the stolen funds come from the federal taxes we all pay.

For these reasons and more, we cannot allow the feds to back down, and allow insurrectionist mobs in Minnesota – or Portland, or LA, or anywhere else – to drive them out and get away with it.  That’s what happened when the Democrats started the Civil War.  Just like Small Frey saying, “ICE, get the f**k out of Minneapolis,” they said, “Federals, get the f**k out of the South.”

That time, a Republican president marshalled some forces and went down and militarily disabused them of their insurrectionist notions.  After some false steps with some 19th century versions of RINOS – I’m looking at you, McClellan! – he got himself a future GOP president in the form of bad-ass Grant, and achieved some good old fashioned “peace through strength” by 1865. 

But the Dems didn’t completely get the message.  They formed the KKK, and they passed Jim Crow laws, and after some more decades of their insurrectionist schemes, more Dem governors (the Tampon Tims of their day, except without the effeminate Jazz Hands demeanor) once again defied the feds.  They stood in the doorway of schools and harassed worshippers at churches, until another GOP president sent the National Guard to kick their arses and restore the law and the constitution.

Now we’re in the same position, and we’ve got to make the dishonest hypocritical Dems eat their own words.  For years they’ve demanded that “nobody is above the law” and “insurrection must be punished.”  We agree.  And now they need to find themselves on the pointy end of those particular sticks. 

Otherwise, the eternal call of vigilante justice, as embodied in the Godfather, might one day be listened to by American citizens who are not going to tolerate mobs of violent criminals – foreign AND domestic – taking over their cities with impunity.

Because we don’t want to see Amerigo go silently into that Bonasera. 

Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!

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