Dems Are Agitating For Insurrection And Political Vigilantism

Forget January 6. It turns out January 7 might go down as the date when insurrection really arrived in America — not from the MAGA right, but from the anti-Trump left.

In the aftermath of the fatal shooting Wednesday in Minneapolis of a woman who appears to have tried to ram an ICE agent with her vehicle, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced at a press conference that he had issued a warning order to prepare the Minnesota National Guard to mobilize to “protect Minnesotans” from “rogue ICE agents.”

When asked if the National Guard would be deployed against federal agents, or if anything like that has ever happened before, Walz said, “We’ve never been at war with our federal government,” and at one point told Minnesotans, “do not allow them to deploy federal troops here.”

It’s an almost unbelievable series of statements from a sitting governor. If taken at face value, it amounts to a threat to use the Minnesota National Guard for an anti-federal insurrection — something that has never quite happened in American history (the late 1850s armed conflict between the Mormons and the U.S. Army comes to mind, but Utah was a territory at the time, not a state). If Walz actually follows through with that threat, it will be an open act of sedition.

In that case, the moderate response would be to immediately arrest Walz, federalize the Minnesota National Guard, and declare martial law. Is Walz radical and clueless enough to actually do this? He was willing to let Minneapolis burn in the 2020 BLM riots before he activated the National Guard to restore order, so who knows.

But it’s not just Walz. Every Democrat leader in Minnesota was angling to out-insurrection each other on Wednesday it seems. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey told ICE to “get the f*ck out of Minneapolis,” said the idea that the ICE agent was acting in self-defense was “bullsh*t,” and claimed ICE had come to Minneapolis to “literally kill people.” The shooting, Frey declared, was murder.

Frey and Walz are making these statements based on videos everyone has seen. At the time they made them, they had no special knowledge or facts about what happened, beyond what the rest of us had. To deploy this kind of maximal, incendiary rhetoric, in a city and a political climate as volatile as Minneapolis, is tantamount to begging for riots and mob violence from anti-ICE mobs.

Indeed, for many months now Frey and other leading Minnesota Democrats have been demonizing ICE agents and urging their radical base to disrupt lawful ICE operations. Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, currently the leading candidate for one of Minnesota’s U.S. Senate seats, urged activists to “put your body on the line” to stop ICE agents from “kidnapping” people.

If Republicans were deploying this kind of rhetoric the left would call it “stochastic terrorism,” a term which refers to the repetition of hostile rhetoric, amplified by news media, with the aim of goading people into committing ideologically motivated violence, randomly and unpredictably. The term gained notoriety in recent years as an epithet left-wing journalists decided to hurl at President Trump.

Yet what’s playing out now in Minnesota is a textbook case of stochastic terrorism — perpetrated by that state’s highest political officeholders. Walz and Frey and Flanagan are calling for (and getting) political vigilantism. The police chief of Minneapolis has urged city residents to call the police if they see masked ICE agents making an arrest, promising that Minneapolis police would intervene. Walz routinely calls ICE agents the Gestapo. So does Frey. So do many leading Democrats all across the country.

Keep in mind, they’re doing this because they don’t want the Trump administration to enforce existing immigration law. These ICE agents have not gone rogue. They are duly authorized by DHS and are conducting lawful operations. Democrat elected officials, not just in Minnesota but across the country, have decided that because they don’t want federal immigration laws to be enforced it’s okay to urge people to interfere, harass, assault, and impede ICE.

As a result, we have a network of anti-ICE activists (including the woman who was shot Wednesday) roaming the country, tracking agents and inserting themselves into ICE operations. Over the past twelve months there have been hundreds of incidents of “protesters” ramming ICE agents with their vehicles. Democrats have encouraged and incited this — all the while knowing that at some point, it would lead to someone getting shot by an ICE agent. Almost like they wanted it to happen.

As I write this, angry mobs are flooding the streets of Minneapolis. Rioters already smashed in the doors of the federal courthouse in downtown Minneapolis. The city might well burn in the coming days, as it did in 2020.

The lawlessness of the leftist mob is to be expected at this point. That’s not to say they shouldn’t all be rounded up and prosecuted at least as severely as the Biden administration prosecuted J6ers. But something must also be done about the Democrat politicians who are inciting violence and, in Walz’s case, flirting with insurrection.

Trump has a chance here to do what he should have done in 2020 during the BLM riots. Whether he acts boldly or falters in the coming days might not just define his presidency. It might also be the defining moment in our national divorce, our Bleeding Kansas, the moment to which we someday look back and say, it was all over after that.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.