I talked to an old friend of mine the other day. Regular readers have heard of him, because he’s one of a couple of lefties I’ve been close to for years.
Many readers from the CO site – which I’m still hoping to be able to revive with CO, so please be patient – have commented to the effect of, “How can you be friends with a leftist, after everything they’ve done and everything you’ve said about what they’ve done?”
Which is a rational question to ask. Though an even better question might be how can he be friends with me, after everything he thinks conservatives have done? Especially since lefties are usually pretty quick to cut off and cancel anyone on the other political side, IMHO.
The answer is that even though I think his politics are wildly wrong, and he thinks the same about mine, deep down we both know that there are some things more important than politics. I’ve known him for 40 years, and he’s got a good heart. I was godfather to one of his kids, and he introduced me to my smokeshow wife, and for that I will forever be in his debt.
I love him like a brother. A lovable but addled and confused brother. 😊
The reason I mention all that is that since our conversation, I’ve been thinking about the chaos in Minneapolis, and I’ve come to the conclusion that good lefties are wrong about immigration and ICE for two main reasons: they’ve misunderstood the law, and they’ve misunderstood and/or misapplied empathy.
Empathy first. The first time I heard the term “toxic empathy” was not very long ago, but it has become a hotly debated topic since then. At first glance, the concept would appear to be oxymoronic – how could “empathy” ever be “toxic?” But you don’t have to think very long to come up with tons of examples to prove that it often is.
Anyone who has been in or observed human relationships – watching one spouse enable another by making excuses for abuse; loaning money to somebody with a gambling problem; giving $20 to a homeless guy who uses it to buy the fentanyl that kills him; parents spoiling a child until he’s a 30-something basement-dweller – recognizes that reality.
The same negative results ensue on a political level, when government programs that are meant to help people actually incentivize bad behaviors that gravely damage the recipients. Giving women welfare benefits only if there is no man in the house produces sky-high fatherlessness, and traps them in dysfunctional dependence, which is an unmitigated disaster. Guaranteeing college loans to people to get worthless grievance studies degrees produces bitter 30-somethings with $200K in debt and a minimum wage job. Etc.
But aside from the toxicity issue, empathy is very often only selective, on both the right and the left. Some on our side empathized with the nonviolent people among the J6 protestors way more than we empathize with the non-violent among leftist protestors, because we basically agree with the former and disagree with the latter.
But the lefties in Minneapolis and around the country have taken that to an extreme, IMHO. I haven’t heard any lefties express empathy for Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, or any of the thousands of Americans who did nothing wrong, but were attacked or murdered by unvetted illegals. But they have been gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over illegals who broke our laws (including wife-beating human smuggler Kilmar), and legal immigrant citizens who were briefly detained to confirm their legal status before being released.
The elite leftists have used a cloak of lies to try to turn the five-year-old boy with the cute backpack into a tiny, photogenic victim of cruel ICE, claiming that ICE “arrested” him. The truth, of course is that ICE took care of the kid after they tried to take his criminal dad into custody, and the creepy POS fled, leaving the boy behind in freezing weather.
Yet the leftists condemn the ICE agents who cared for him, rather than the criminal dad who abandoned him. Unexpectedly!
Speaking of kids, it’s been widely reported that around 300,000 illegal children have been snuck in and given into the custody of others – some probably relatives or friends of their parents, but many fraudsters posing as their parents to improve their chances of getting in, and many others either cartel-associated or cartel-coerced people who facilitate the sexual and other abuse of those children.
Anyone who actually cares about kids has to be horrified by the prospect of a third of a million small, powerless victims of the left’s pitiless policy of opening the border to unvetted waves of uncontrolled immigration and human smuggling. And yet the elite left has been utterly silent about this massive crime.
And when Homan announced last week that this administration has located and rescued around 145,000 of those victimized kids, the silence of those who can’t stop virtue signaling about, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?!” has been deafening.
Not one word of celebration or relief. Not even a grudging “good job” from the armies of those who claim to be the champions of “undocumented” children.
Compare that to the tsunami of grief for Robin Good and Alex Pretti. I know that many good lefties actually do grieve for those two, just as I and many other conservatives feel some sympathy for the tragic ending that their own disordered ideology led them to. But I also know that many in the leftist elite are more than happy to exploit the deaths of those two for their own propagandistic political gain.
That much is clear from the way they’ve relentlessly lied about both cases. They claim that Robin Good was an innocent mother who stumbled into an ICE action, and died while trying to flee the murderous agents, through no fault of her own. (The truth was that she and her partner had trained at an organized anti-ICE boot camp, went there to illegally interfere with agents, and was killed in the process of committing multiple crimes, including driving her car toward an agent who had already been hit and dragged by one of her political co-religionists previously.)
They claim that Alex Pretti was a noble nurse, murdered by ICE agents for the “crime” of trying to help a woman they were victimizing. (The truth was that he was a repeated assaulter of ICE agents who went there to attack and interfere with their legal actions in a chaotic situation, and died in the process of committing multiple crimes.)
Ironically, misplaced and toxic empathy played significant roles in both of their deaths. Because one of the best examples of toxic empathy in government is the policy of going soft on crime, which both of the dead protestors had learned to expect.
Nationwide anti-ICE protests routinely violate a great many of our laws, and yet almost none of those in the mobs of protestors/agitators/rioters ever face legal consequences for their actions. They aren’t arrested, or if they are, they are quickly released with all charges either dropped, or reduced to the equivalent of a traffic ticket. (And that amounts to an actual reward, since they gain admiration and praise from their disordered companions for heroically “standing up to the fascists.”)
Thus the protestors – exhilarated by an intoxicating mix of political hatred and a sense of their own moral superiority and the righteousness of their cause – see some of their companions screaming at the LEOs, and throwing the first objects or fireworks at them. And nothing happens to them. So they join in, and things accelerate.
And soon, they end up believing that their opponents are basically powerless against them, and they will never face any consequences for their crimes, which they don’t even recognize or acknowledge ARE crimes.
That process ends with Robin Good dead, and her partner wailing, “Why are they using real bullets?!” (Anyone not drunk on an ideological fervor involving delusions of invulnerability can clearly see the obvious answer: When you attack armed LEOs and try to run over them with a real car, you can expect to catch a lot of real bullets.)
That process also ends with Alex Pretti’s death. If law enforcement had arrested him shortly before, when he committed multiple crimes at a previous protest (interfering with an arrest, spitting at cops and damaging one of their vehicles, then fighting with one of them), he would still be alive today.
But because he didn’t face an arrest 10 days earlier, he was emboldened to escalate his criminal behavior until he faced the end of his life 10 days later.
And ironically, the actions of his comrades also played a huge role in his death. One of their tactics has been to constantly blow whistles at an ear-splitting volume, which is obviously disorienting and extremely aggravating and even painful to the LEOs carrying out their legal tasks, as it is intended to be.
Because Pretti was carrying a gun – which he could legally do – to a legitimate law enforcement action where he intended to commit crimes – which he could NOT legally do – he had already put his life at great risk. In the ensuing confusion, when one of the cops saw his weapon and called out, “Gun!” things instantly escalated, as they must.
Tragically, one cop had already gotten Pretti’s gun away from him when other cops – because he was struggling with them (which one cannot legally do), and because they were almost certainly not aware that he no longer had his gun on him – shot him.
Typically, in that situation a cop will let the other cops know when he has removed and secured the weapon from the criminal. And it is very likely –to say the least – that the cop in this case tried to do that.
But because a mob of insurrectionist a-holes surrounded the cops and Pretti, blowing their deafening whistles, no one could have heard the information that would almost certainly have saved Pretti’s life.
And so Alex Pretti – just like Robin Good, and (as sad as this is to say) Ashli Babbitt – died, almost entirely because of his own reckless actions.
Next up: I’ve researched and will try to summarize the main legal issues underlying the anti-ICE and pro-illegal immigration wave that is sweeping the country.
Hamas (and Trantifa) delenda est!
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Martin Simpson 