In the March issue, Chronicles published two well-researched, highly informative essays on the Insurrection Act and its relevance to the anti-ICE riots that broke out in Minneapolis with incitement from state and municipal leaders. Only slightly less defiant gestures have come from other Democratic politicians in Blue States, which seem equally determined to hold on to the 10-to-20 million illegals whom their party let into the country under Joe Biden.

What these Democratic leaders who are coddling illegals, including murderers, rapists, and drug-dealers, really want is almost too evident to need stating. The Dems are using these felons to become a one-party state. The well-funded illegals will be enlisted for the census to increase Democratic representation in Congress; they will also be enfranchised as soon as the mainstream media can clear the way by presenting this action as a humanitarian gesture dictated by “human rights” and the never-ending war against “fascism.”

Only a hardened woke leftist ideologue or media-brainwashed zombie can be impervious to these motives for unleashing violence. When President Trump, in his State of the Union speech, said the Democrats, once back in power, will bring in lots more illegals and oppose voter identification precisely because they want to cheat, he was telling us the plain truth. Democratic politicians and operatives will try by any means to hold on to their prizes once they bring them here. And the anti-ICE riots being organized on their behalf serve another transparent purpose, which is helping topple or at least render impotent the present non-leftist administration.

My question is whether invoking the Insurrection Act will end the ongoing coups d’état. I doubt it will, which is alarming. What we’re observing is not like other past organized attempts to incite violence in which the federal government stepped in. In the resistance to the Supreme Court’s civil rights decisions, the violence was localized, and those who engaged in it did not enjoy vast national support or mass media endorsement. We were observing the last stand of an institution already discredited. Even if some raised objections to the scope of this Supreme Court intervention, most Americans did not support racial segregation. 

The pursuit of Southern secession in 1861, as Bill Watkins cogently shows in his article last month (“Anti-ICE Violence, the Insurrection Act, and Jefferson Davis”), was also entirely different from the present rebellion against federal authority. The Southern secessionists voted to leave the federal union, not to overthrow the national government by force. Many Americans, including some of our Founders, believed states had a right to leave the Union, and some joined with the proviso that they could depart if they didn’t like the arrangement. But all this became moot once the federal government invaded the seceded states and forced them back into the federal union.

The attempt to see the present resistance to federal law enforcement as a reapplication of the doctrine of nullification also doesn’t quite fit our situation. Democratic governors who resist ICE and abet riots against the Trump administration are not just “interposing” themselves in dealing with the feds. They’re trying to seize national power and, unless stopped, may get away with it. They’re inciting rebellion against a federal administration that doesn’t suit their ideological purposes. 

A truer comparison is available for the present agitation than antebellum states-rightists or diehard segregationists. That more accurate comparison would be with the American Communist Party circa 1936, though our revolutionary left is far more popular than American Communists ever were. Although the Communist Party USA hoped to take over the federal government to turn the U.S. into the equivalent of Soviet Russia, even during the height of the Depression, it won only 80,000 votes, less than one percent of the national total. Unlike the American Communists, Black Lives Matter, a corrupt black racist, radical socialist organization, enjoyed 67 percent approval ratings in 2020 polling and can still claim the endorsement of 45 percent of the American population. 

Those who compare past examples of “insurrection” with what the left and the Democratic Party are now doing may be drawing this defective comparison for effect. They may believe Southern slaveholders trying to leave the Union were so politically incorrect that comparing the riotous, subversive behavior of the current left to these 19th-century gentlemen would be a well-merited insult. They may also believe that by invoking segregationists, they are putting Governor Walz, Mayor Frey, and perhaps now Governors Spanberger and Sherrill in disgraceful company. But we are now dealing with a very different problem: attempts to subvert a non-leftist regime and to replace it with a revolutionary one.

Making matters even worse, up to half the electorate, including many supposed independents, side with the insurrectionists. Governor Orville Faubus of Arkansas and Governor George Wallace of Alabama were easy pickings for the feds because their regional backing was eroding. The contemporary left, by contrast, has a nationwide public on its side and can count on the drooling adulation of the media, educational institutions, and popular entertainers. Southern segregationist governors in the late 1950s or South Carolina Nullifiers in 1832 had nothing even distantly approaching this support system.

Thanks to media doctoring and effective Democratic violence, Trump and ICE are well underwater in terms of public acceptance of their attempt to deport illegals, even the violent criminals among them. The law enforcers have been made to look evil because they’re arresting felons in the face of organized resistance, and the insurrectionists have been winning. With all the persuasive tools at their disposal, including obliging leftist media throughout the Western world, Trump’s enemies can shape their own reality, or counter-reality. And those who encounter it are finding confirmation of what cultural and educational institutions are also telling them. ICE’s moves in this continuing confrontation are secondary. The federal administration is doing what it was presumably elected to do, but powerful coordinated adversaries are making it pay for what the left doesn’t want to have done. And they control the narrative. 

To make matters even worse, the conservative establishment gravely underestimates the other national party, the one with fire in its belly. They persist in viewing the riotous tactics and cultural upheaval of the Democrats as self-destructive and insist that their politicians are headed for ruin. There is absolutely no evidence that this is happening. In our ideologically polarized country, the Democrats’ massive constituency is cool with what Democratic politicians and media are saying and are poised to vote for them again. Those on the right and those who incline in that direction mistakenly ascribe to the general population their own moral compass.

Expressive of this overgeneralizing about their own moral convictions is the confidence of Republicans that nobody but isolated extremists is going to vote for Democrats, who take positions that only 10 percent or less of the electorate embraces. Almost all Americans supposedly oppose gender-altering surgery on minors or allowing boys into girls’ locker rooms. No reasonable person supposedly thinks that people can change their gender by imagining they are the opposite sex or that men as well as women can get pregnant. Contrary to Fox News’s blithe assumptions, politicians holding these grotesque views won elections all over the country in November. A Democratic feminist running for a congressional seat in Tennessee won 85 percent of the vote in Nashville while claiming that people can change their gender at will. 

Trump’s statement that Democratic congresspersons who place illegals above American citizens are crazy may be true, but lots of voters share that madness. The cultural, educational left has been indoctrinating the American population for the last 60 years, and now, as we saw last year in Virginia and elsewhere, foreign-born voters, public sector employees, and radicalized blacks and white women have joined up with the “crazies.”

Equally relevant, far more than 10 percent of the population buy into what Republicans consider lunatic positions. Heritage researcher Jonathan Butcher, as I pointed out in my February editorial (“The Middle Path”), documents this alarming fact even while claiming that wokeness is on its way out. Moreover, even if only a minority supports those “crazy” positions, voters who do may feel far more strongly about them than a majority expressing only mild opposition. So far, there is no proof that Democrats are losing their partisans or even most independents by sounding wacky. There is ideological polarization in this country, which is a graver problem for our side than the “affordability issue.” The left controls both the culture and the news cycle, and the invocation of the Insurrection Act will not turn this situation around.

What can be done to turn things back in our direction are the following actions:  

First, the administration should continue presenting the woke, managerial left as crazy and antipatriotic because that’s exactly what they are, even by the standards of 20 years ago. JD Vance’s attacks on those who are determined to take children away from parents who resist “gender-affirming” medicine for the young resonate with normies, and so does Trump’s charge that the Democrats prefer illegals to American citizens. These points score with at least some “independents” and certainly with MAGA voters who recognize what reality was before the media and Democratic Party reconstructed it.

Second, all efforts must be made to withdraw government money and patronage from leftist institutions and government agencies. Trump has begun to do this, and he should continue, no matter how loudly his enemies protest.  Let the left live off its own resources!

Three, not only should the government continue, albeit as inconspicuously as possible, to round up and deport illegals, but it should restrict future legal immigration, which is likely to benefit the left. The recent victories of leftist gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey depended heavily on immigrant votes.

Moreover, voter identification must be pushed through by any means possible, and the federal government should keep close tabs on voting procedures in heavily blue urban areas. Never mind how many Dems attack such vote-checkers as racists and fascists. These strident sore losers will continue to resort to such invective until they win. Further, those who buy their charges are not likely in any case to vote Republican.

Finally, all resources must be used to identify low-propensity conservative voters and to bring them to the polls. No attention should be given to moral grandstanding, for example, by “reaching out” to inner-city voters, who reliably support the left. Recruiting efforts should be focused on winning the votes of those already leaning in our direction.

As this issue underlines, our side should not allow the question of birthright citizenship to be decided by our adversaries. The Democrats are delighted to turn anyone on the planet into a citizen at birth, provided this constitutionally questionable practice can be made to benefit them. Restricting citizenship to those born in this country to parents already residing under “American jurisdiction” will not only stop making a mockery of citizenship, but it will also deprive the left of another potential electoral weapon. One can be sure that if the likely beneficiaries of this practice were conservative Republicans, no Democrat in the country would want to bestow the vote or even a right of residence on the children of a mother who delivered her baby on American soil illegally or on a stopover between Mexico and Canada.  

And let me end with a warning to those at The Wall Street Journal who initially seemed pleased with the candidacy of “Bible scholar” James Talarico in the Texas Democratic senatorial primary, praising him for his “faith-based message.” These journalists attach the “moderate” label to any Democratic politician whom they imagine they can push into their camp. Such people never stop hallucinating about “moderates” even after grossly misrepresenting them as Abigail Spanberger, Mikki Sherrill, Josh Shapiro, Josh Stein, and other leftist governors. 

But far more alarming than this mislabeling is the fact that more than 40 percent of Texans, according to Real Clear Politics, would give their vote to a Democratic candidate whose views on social issues are worthy of the inmates of an insane asylum. James Talarico believes there are at least six genders, that the U.S. should open its border to as many invaders as may wish to come in, and that we should treat our Southern border as our “front porch.” 

This “seminarian” also thinks that the right to abortion is biblically sanctioned, that men as well as women can give birth to children, and that “God is nonbinary.” It would take pages to enumerate all his nutty positions, but even more unsettling is that multitudes of voters in what I’m told is still a Red State would vote for him. Those rallying to this weirdo are not driven by the cost of eggs or current mortgage rates. It is his inverted morality that makes him politically attractive, and the mainstream media, which sings Talarico’s glory, fully shares in the encircling madness.