A time for choosing

Psalm 82:3-4

If you are a history nut like me, you probably have thought about how you would have responded to various seminal moments in history. Do you think you would have been loyal to the king or sided with the patriots? Would you have been a Confederate or a Union man? Would you have resisted the growing Nazi movement in 1930s Germany, or would you have gone along to get along? In the 1960s, would you have sided with the segregationists or the Civil Rights activists?

It’s interesting to put yourself into the shoes of people who lived during those periods. When we read history, we mostly read about the firebrands, the people who were loud and figured prominently in the time. We don’t hear about the people who just wanted to live their lives and be left alone, the average people who didn’t eat and breathe politics.

Image: “A Time To Choose” created by Perplexity AI

I tend to think that most people are in that category. They don’t want to fight. They don’t want radical change. They don’t want to put their lives and welfare at risk.

But they also don’t want chaos and injustice. If a regime gets brutal and oppressive enough, the fence sitters can be persuaded to take sides. Sometimes that can come at great cost.

In Nazi Germany, the cost was so high that meaningful German resistance never developed. There were pockets of opposition to Hitler like the White Rose and Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Confessing Church, but these movements came too late to stop Hitler. They are mostly remembered today for the martyrs they produced.

Sometimes, persecution makes a movement grow. In American history, the colonists were unhappy with the king and parliament, but few were advocates of a complete break with England. The first shots of the American Revolution were fired in April 1775, but independence was not declared until July 1776. What happened in the intervening 15 months was a heavyhanded British response that included the punitive burning of Falmouth, Massachusetts. The American Revolution wasn’t strictly about taxes, it was about the British crown assaulting the neighbors of the colonists and causing destruction and chaos.

We may have had a similar, pivotal moment over the weekend. In a second ICE-related shooting in Minneapolis, a “legal observer” recording with his phone was killed by several armed agents. Alex Pretti, 37, a nurse at the VA, was pinned to the ground by five ICE and Border Patrol agents who took Pretti’s legally-carried pistol from its holster and then shot him in the back as he lay on the ground. If you don’t think that is a fair characterizaion of the incident, I suggest you watch the Wall Street Journal’s compendium of video footage of the shooting.

Even worse, after the shooting, numerous government statements blamed the victim with a transparently false description of the incident. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said, Pretti “approached U.S. Border Patrol officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun. The officers attempted to disarm the suspect but the armed suspect violently resisted. Fearing for his life and the lives and safety of fellow officers, an agent fired defensive shots.”

None of that is true, as evidenced by both numerous videos and eyewitness testimony.

To an even greater extent than the killing of Renee Good, the killing of Alex Pretti looks a lot like murder. A case can be made, however tenuous, that the officer who shot Renee Good feared for his life as she accelerated her car to get away from the government agents. Despite the fact that the kill shot was in the side of her head, there is a very low threshold for “justifiable” shootings by officers. (The officer may have been struck by the car. The government claimed he suffered internal bleeding but never provided evidence.)

Not so with Alex Pretti. The video shows Pretti at the bottom of pile of federal agents who had swarmed on him and pepper-sprayed him after he helped a woman that an agent had pushed down. A sworn affidavit by a doctor who provided Pretti with CPR said there were “at least three bullet wounds in his back.” As least 10 shots may have been fired.

To summarize, federal agents have killed two American citizens (and shot three) on the streets of Minneapolis in broad daylight within three weeks. At this rate, ICE is probably statistically more dangerous than illegal immigrants who, if you’ve studied the data, have a very low propensity to be violent.

And the government is lying to us about what ICE is doing. If it were not for the plethora of cell phone cameras, people doing what Alex Pretti was doing, we would only have the official government line that Pretti was a dangerous radical who attacked officers who were heroically performing their duty.

What does it say about the Trump Administration when they lie so flagrantly while knowing that the truth will come out almost immediately? If the Administration tells such obvious lies in cases where there is ample video evidence, the odds are good that the stories they tell when cameras were not present stray even further from the truth.

Sentiment has been turning against ICE and the crackdown, not on illegals, but on American cities. Rasmussen, a pro-Republican pollster, found that Trump approval on immigration, his signature issue, was down to 39 percent with 59 percent disapproval in a poll released the day before the Pretti killing.

Americans don’t like what they are seeing from ICE. They will like it even less when it leaves their television screens and comes to their city.

The killings get the most attention, but they are only the tip of the iceberg (pun partially intended). As I described last week, ICE is out of control, creating its own emergencies, assaulting and detaining Americans, and splitting up families. They harass citizens and legal immigrants and go out of their way to be cruel to illegals.

In yet another infamous case, five-year-old Liam Ramos was detained by ICE agents as he returned home from school. The government described Liam’s father as an illegal alien, but the family’s lawyer says Ramos was in the asylum program and did not have a deportation order. CNN reports that witnesses say ICE detained Liam and his father and tried to use the five-year-old as “bait” to get access to their house. Liam and his father are still detained.

Even more disturbing are ICE’s encounters with American citizens. A video taken after Pretti’s killing shows ICE officers swarming a man who identifies himself as Matthew James Allen. Allen appears to have been released without being charged, which seems to be common for US citizens. People from all walks of life and ethnicities from military veterans to retired grandfathers have been caught up in ICE’s catch-and-release, often being detained for long periods without being allowed to contact lawyers or family members. This is Trump’s America.

This is speculative, but there is evidence from ICE agents themselves that the agency is building a database of political opponents, people that it considers to be “domestic terrorists” even though they have committed no crime. This database may contain personal information including facial recognition to license plate numbers and addresses.

Going further, in the wake of the Pretti killing, the Administration has launched an attack on Second Amendment rights that even drew some muted criticism from the NRA. Pretti’s possession of legal firearm has been used as a rationalization by the Administration that Pretti was up to no good, but in a country, state, and city that allows publicly carrying guns, Pretti was well within his legal rights. If the mere possession of a gun is justification for federal agents to kill you, there is no meaningful right to bear arms.

Second Amendment advocrates, such as Charlie Kirk, have long argued that one purpose of the constitutional right to bear arms is as a line of defense against a tyrannical government. There has been a long road to the public carry laws now in place across much of the country that has coincided with jurisprudence that establishes the very low bar of a “reasonable” fear of immediate death or bodily injury for police to use deadly force. That makes it possible for police to raid the wrong house, start a shootout with legal gun owners inside, and still credibly claim that their actions were justified.

An increasingly abusive and aggressive government employing plainclothes agents in unmarked cars to snatch people off the street and enter houses without warrants, mixed with expansive right-to-carry laws sets the stage for far more bloodshed than we have seen already. Gun rghts activists and law enforcement agencies have a responsibility to help defuse this ticking time bomb.

I’ve long suspected that a would-be authoritarian would eventually move against the Second Amendment. We may be nearing that time. At the very least, MAGA leaders have shown themselves to be squishes on the Second Amendment when it is utilized by political opponents.

With every ICE killing and every high-profile abuse of power, public opinion is turning against the government. A sheriff in Maine who previously supported the government’s efforts to get illegal alien criminals off the streets has changed his mind after seven agents detained one of his corrections trainees, a “squeaky clean” immigrant who was following legal processes. Seven agents swarmed the man and left his car abandoned and unsecured with windows down.

“We’re being told one story, which is totally different than what’s occurring or what occurred last night,” Sheriff Kevin Joyce told KBTX. Joyce was referring to incident involving his trainee, but the statement conveys a much broader truth.

The killings are becoming more frequent and the video evidence of wanton ICE brutality comes on a daily basis. The videos of assaults and bullying can be missed, but the killings are harder to ignore.

As Americans, it can be difficult for us to believe what is happening is real. We aren’t used to having our freedoms threatened in any meaningful way. Two ICE killings in three weeks is starting to wake people up.

As a Tea Party activist during the Obama era, I argued against Democratic abuses of power. A lot of us thought that Obama was going to come for our guns and criminalize dissent. Some of us even thought he was going to send federal troops to occupy cities.

Donald Trump is doing a lot of that already. I had a lot of differences with Obama, Biden, and Democrats, but they never sent federal agents into the streets to snatch and kill random people. I never had to wonder if criticism of them would make me the target of retaliatory lawfare.

Trump isn’t Hitler, people say. No one is sending immigrants to the gas chambers. That’s true, and the goal is to make sure that those things never happen here, but Tump has already gone much farther down the road to authoritarianism and fascism than Obama and Biden ever did. And he’s done to to the cheers of the Tea Party crowd (although some Libertarians are starting to wake up to the danger.)

If you’ve ever thought about what it would be like to live through one of those pivotal moments of history, you’re in one. If you have dreamed of standing up against a tyrannical king or helping oppressed minorities, the time for choosing is fast approaching. For many of us, it’s already here.

Things are going to get worse. How much worse they get is going to depend largely on America’s silent majority. The further we travel down the authoritarian road, the more difficult it will be to put things right.

Do we go along to get along, or do we step up and risk our own wellbeing to defend those who are being persecuted and who cannot defend themselves? The time for choosing is here.

To Americans, people for whom freedom and individuality are birthrights, the answer should be clear.

MINNESOTA ULTIMATUM AG Pam Bondi laid out demands for Tim Walz in a letter obtained by multiple outlets. Among the demands were an end to sanctuary policies and access to the state’s voter rolls. (I wonder why she wants voter information.) Contrary to some reports, the letter does not tie the demands to a withdrawal of federal agents.

MINNESOTA GUARD DEPLOYED The Minnesota National Guard has been deployed to Minnaopolis to secure the crime scene where Alex Pretti died and to support local law enforcement.

ICE RESTRAINING ORDER A federal judge issued a restraining order that requires ICE to preserve evidence in the Pretti shooting. Minnesota law enforcement says the DHS blocked access to the crime scene, raising concerns about the availability and chain of custody of evidene.

OVERSIGHT IS COMING (MAYBE) The chairman of the House Oversight Committee has requested testimony from ICE and Border Patrol officials, indicating that Republicans are feeling pressure on the issue.

LYING TED Axios recordings of Ted Cruz making critical statements of Trump policies and JD Vance’s character in sharp contrast with his public persona.

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