The alternate reality Democrats have constructed is falling apart in real time. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said the following when asked to comment on an ICE agent’s shooting of a woman in Minneapolis who was attempting to run over him with her car: “What we saw today was a criminal murder a woman and shoot her in the head while she was trying to escape and flee for her life.”
She then called “disgusting” the “editorializing” of those who argue that the ICE agent was in front of the car as it was accelerating, just before he fired. “Watch it for yourself, watch it for yourself,” she concluded, with supreme confidence that any viewer would see with the same skew of her own lenses.
Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey went even harder over the rhetorical cliff in responding to the shooting. He classified interpretations of the ICE officer’s action as self-defense as “bull***t” and demanded that ICE “get the f**k out of Minneapolis.” Mayor Mamdani in New York followed suit, calling the event a “murder” and a “horror.”
It is a stark bit of evidence of how American society has been warped by the twisted rhetoric of the radical Left regarding political conflict in our country.
The video from the officer who fired at the vehicle indicates clearly, however, that it was accelerating in his direction, with him close enough to touch the hood. How is it possible to watch video footage and see it as the “murder” of someone “flee[ing] for her life”? The vehicle was illegally blocking a law enforcement vehicle. Instead of complying with the demand to exit the vehicle as any sane person would do, the driver hit the gas, making contact with the law enforcement officer before being shot. Are we to believe that ICE agents came there precisely to kill her?
The New York Times now has video analysis that supposedly debunks the claim that the agent fired in self-defense. How? Well, the wheels of the SUV turned to the right just in time to avoid hitting the agent. Never mind that the agent was standing just in front of the vehicle when it started to move forward quickly, and he moved to avoid it. By the New York Times’ logic, the agent would apparently have been justified to use force only after the SUV had hit him.
The Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, has stated that he doubts a “fair outcome” can be reached in an FBI investigation of the shooting. He’s given no reason why he believes this. But, of course, if your view is that all sides not directly aligned with you ideologically are Nazis, this is a logical conclusion.
One might first hypothesize that Ocasio-Cortez, Frey, Walz, Mamdani, and others who share their bizarre interpretation of the evidence are cognitively challenged in some way. We do not wholly discount this possibility.
But the more likely answer is that such things become possible when a significant portion of the American media and popular culture has normalized the idea that totalitarians have taken over the government and are actively looking to kill their opponents. In such a scenario, attempting to run over the totalitarians with your car might not only be an acceptable choice—it might be the most moral one.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin connected the event to the language the far Left has been using to describe ICE: “This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing [a] 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”
There is no doubt that political radicals have been foaming at the mouth about ICE and other aspects of the Trump Administration’s policies in the most extremist language. They’ve justified using violence against them even since before the first Trump Administration took office.
The assassin who murdered Charlie Kirk in September, who was involved in a relationship with a transsexual, had come to believe that Kirk and other conservatives who criticized the overreach of trans radical activism were such a deadly threat that only lethal force was appropriate. He wrote anti-fascist messages on the casings of the bullets he used.
None of this is a surprise in a culture in which American nationalism is seen as the equivalent of Nazism and violent attacks against the Trump Administration and its supporters are cheered on and encouraged. And it is not just the explicitly political media that embraces this insanity.
Witness the response to One Battle After Another, the new film by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn, the film cheerleads for a radical anti-fascist terrorist organization as they wage war on American police and immigration forces. Penn is cast in a stupendously comical role as a caricature of which the Left never tires: he is a military figure and a white supremacist who nonetheless is sexually attracted to non-whites. All of the admirable figures in the film are revolutionary terrorists. The response by critics in the mainstream media has been a virtually unanimous cheer.
We are in a dangerous place. Leftist radicals are giving no indication of cooling their rhetoric—or their actions.
Buckle up. It is going to get rougher before it gets better.
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