Minnesota’s Democratic politicians have lost touch with reality — hardly surprising when their heads are lodged in a fundamentally dark place. Despite strong political competition to say the most clueless and incendiary things, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) might already have won this year’s prize.
Inveighing against federal enforcement of immigration law, Frey said, “Imagine [your] city or town was suddenly invaded by thousands … that do not share the values that you hold dear. Imagine if your daily routines were disrupted. … Imagine if schools shut down.”
The supposed invasion he refers to is by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, whose search for and detention of illegal immigrants is necessitated only because Frey’s “sanctuary city” bans local police from cooperating with ICE, so even violent criminals are let go rather than being handed to the feds. If Minneapolis cooperated with ICE deporting criminals, the mayhem Frey bemoans would not be happening.
Americans also don’t have to imagine schools being closed unnecessarily, they only have to remember it. That’s what they endured in 2020-2021. Minneapolis schools have closed again, supposedly for fears of children’s safety amid the “invasion,” but those same children are being organized into anti-ICE street protests. One suspects safety is not the real concern of teachers unions, who think more about left-wing resistance and propagandizing rather than educating students.
There is an even more stark detachment from reality in Frey’s rhetoric. When he calls the influx of ICE officers an invasion of aliens who don’t share local values, does he not hear himself? To him, American federal agents are invaders but not the foreign migrants from alien and often incompatible cultures with whom ICE is dealing. The former are just doing their jobs in difficult circumstances but are condemned, the latter — one thinks of Somali fraudsters who ripped off billions of dollars from taxpayers — are protected during years of official refusal to hold them accountable?
Frey and his ilk are hermetically sealed in a left-wing bubble and can’t or won’t hear the cries of a public that sees up to 20 million outsiders who have no right to be here, who have brought customs and mores that create a low-trust society that, for many Americans, makes the country unrecognizable as the one they grew up in and love.
Frey is not the only one confusing citizens for outsiders and illegal migrants for locals. Walz made an extraordinary speech on Jan. 14, referring to ICE officers’ presence in his state as an “occupation,” and accused them of conducting a campaign of “organized brutality” for President Donald Trump.
Perhaps Walz is going for broke because, after abandoning his hopeless reelection bid, he no longer has any political reason for restraint. This is a man who, if the Democrats had won the White House in 2024, would now be vice president, a stopped heartbeat from the Oval Office.
MY PART IN THE AYATOLLAHS’ DOWNFALL
He and Frey represent what the Democratic Party has become — a party that doesn’t believe in enforcing laws it does not like, which wants citizen resistance to law enforcement, and whose rhetoric encourages the violence and confrontation they deplore.
Recent events in Minnesota reveal that acceptance of lawbreaking and obstruction has become the norm for the party of the Left. It is its modus operandi. It wants to make laws for the nation, but when the nation puts the other party in charge, it wants the laws broken with impunity.