Here we go, unfortunately, again, with the political back-and-forth following a shooting, this one in Dallas, at an ICE processing center, with two immigration detainees killed by a sniper who we’re being told is actually anti-ICE, just with really bad aim.
No law enforcement folks were injured in the shooting, which was perpetrated, we’re told, by a sniper positioned on the rooftop of a nearby building, who then turned the gun on himself.
Not much is known at this writing about the man ID’d as the shooter, 29-year-old Joshua Jahn, except that the FBI is saying he wrote the words, apparently in ink, “ANTI-ICE” on one of the bullets recovered at the scene.
Yeah, that’s odd, but it’s enough for FBI Director Kash Patel to claim on Twitter that the “initial review of the evidence shows an ideological motive behind this attack,” unleashing the predictable torrent of ideological messages from the Trump administration.
“The takeaway from all of this is that the rhetoric has to stop,” said a guy who goes by the name Joshua Johnson, the current acting director of the Dallas ICE field office, at a news conference, not being specific about what “rhetoric” needs to stop, but you know where he’s going.
“Your political opponents are not Nazis,” U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said at the newser, urging people not to demonize each other for partisan reasons.
“The divisive rhetoric, tragically, has real consequences,” Cruz said.
“This shooting must serve as a wake-up call to the far-left that their rhetoric about ICE has consequences,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement.
“Comparing ICE day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police, and slave patrols has consequences,” Noem said.
Left unsaid by any of the above is what other “rhetoric” has “consequences.”
Just yesterday, for instance, this was Donald Trump, speaking to the United Nations:
“If you look back just a year ago, it was millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, from prisons, from mental institutions, drug dealers, all over the world they came, they just poured into our country with the ridiculous open-border policy of the Biden administration. Our message is very simple. If you come illegally into the United States, you’re going to jail, or you’re going back to where you came from, or perhaps even further than that, you know what that means.”
This “rhetoric” is the backdrop to the Trump administration using masked ICE agents to kidnap non-criminal immigrants off the streets – literally ripping people from cars, from job sites, in front of schools, from their homes.
And here’s the uncomfortable part to the whole thing for the likes of Trump, of Noem, of Cruz – under federal law, a person cannot be arrested or incarcerated for simply being undocumented; unlawful presence in the U.S. is a civil, not a criminal, offense.
The terms “illegal immigrant” and “illegal alien” are themselves misnomers, which Trump & Co. are acknowledging with their “rhetoric” about “millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, from prisons, from mental institutions, drug dealers.”
They have to make immigrants into all being mentally ill drug dealers to justify plucking them from their homes, their cars, their kids’ schools, their jobs.
That “rhetoric” is fueling the explosion of anti-ICE sentiment on the streets in big cities, where people are fighting back against the unlawful detentions of innocents – and getting beaten and gassed by the masked federal authorities for their efforts.
Today’s tragedy in Dallas could have been a lot worse – we’re reading that the shooter’s bad aim was a function of him not using a sight on his rifle, suggesting that he was an amateur at the shooting thing.
You don’t have to be good with guns to kill people, of course – that’s kind of been the point made by gun-control advocates for the past, oh, half-century or so.
Cooling down the “rhetoric” isn’t going to be a matter of unilateral disarmament.
If the Trumpers want to continue to demonize innocent people as being immoral mentally ill monsters so that they can continue disappearing them, they’re going to get pushback from activists standing to protect the rights of those being unjustly detained – and, yes, there are going to be people on the fringes, who have access to lethal weapons, doing things like we saw today.
Last word here to JD Vance, our vice president, Ivy League graduate, and former bestselling author:
“When the left-wing media lies about what they’re doing, when they lie about who they’re arresting, when they lie about the actual job of law enforcement, what they’re doing is encouraging crazy people to go and commit violence.”
Lesson: not learned.
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Chris Graham
