Nuance Us, Please: It Would Go A Long Way

The political forces tell us we must choose. Either the “ICEstapo” executed a heroic nurse this weekend as a precursor of the new holocaust or ICE is the most elite law enforcement agency ever assembled and anyone who dies had it coming. Mercifully, more of us are refusing these absurdities, but there aren’t yet enough of us.

Let me say upfront two necessary truths that can draw the ire of the Left and Right, respectively. The work of significant immigration enforcement is necessary and the way ICE is going about it is dangerously negligent, at best.

I am not merely doing performative “both sides-ism” here. To say two sides, both of which pick up the same tactics, are both guilty is simply to say two sides, that use the same tactics are, well, guilty. They use the same language and stoke the same rage, they just do so at different times to suit their purposes.

The current outrage cycle is merely an act in a nightmarishly endless play. Those angry that ICE is on its current snit but who previously backed the policies of the Biden administration have no one to blame but themselves. The incompetent mismanagement of the previous administration’s policies gave us President Trump 2.0, just as previous Democrats’ dismissal of even a large swath of their own 1990’s base gave us Trump 1.0.

Most of what ICE is doing is enforcing laws reasonable Americans support. Most of us want immigration law to be enforced even as we eagerly support lawful immigration. We do not want millions of people skipping the immigration system.

It seems obvious to us that if we are lackadaisical on borders lest we keep some of the best people immigrants out, it will necessarily also create a vulnerability our enemies will utilize. And even if that were not true, even most of us who are strongly pro-immigration realize in a world of limited resources, encouraging immigration cannot mean “everyone who wants to come can come however they want and whenever they want.”

The extremes that dominate the Democrats today won’t admit any of this. They are too busy painting swastikas on every immigration enforcement effort. In doing so, all the Left is doing is creating a powder keg of unavoidable tragedies like the one this weekend.

The unnecessarily high tension protests against ICE even as it enforces the law, merely serves to whip everyone into a frenzy, civilian and officer alike. A brew of huge doses of anger, confusion and (legal) weapons is a recipe for tragically lethal outcomes.

By all accounts, Alex Pretti was facing off against officers well beyond the constitutionally protected realm of free speech thanks to unnecessarily fomented protests. If I had done what he had done, I might even fear something could go wrong and I’d end up dead.

But, my cynical viewpoint doesn’t mean he should have ended up dead. Alex Pretti shouldn’t be dead.

Maybe arrested. Maybe fined for obstructing law enforcement. But, alive and well to voice his opinions another day. Recording police or, as video appears to indicate, protectively moving between a fellow protester and the police should not be a death sentence.

Nor should lawfully wearing — not brandishing — a gun. We should from here on out ignore the many alleged “second amendment advocates” who previously wrung their hands over the death of Ashli Babbitt and now think law enforcement should kill someone simply for having a gun. Most of us can see these people are party hacks and not those with principles.

Renée Good is a more complex situation. Video does show she hit an officer with her car in the midst of refusing to follow orders those officers were within their rights to give. In the split seconds of the situation, her willful resistance combined with her recklessness with her car to create a far more justifiable use of deadly force.

Not to say ICE gets a pass with her either. If you shoot someone because she’s hit an officer with her car, that’s explainable. If you keep shooting and then cuss out the woman you’ve killed, that’s… not.

Reasonable people ought to be able to agree on all of this. I noted at the beginning, the response to Pretti’s death hints that reasonable people do. The two-side partisan façade is cracking. So why even write this?

Because I’m worried about where the water will flow when those cracks bring the dam down.

Neither political party is ready to abandon their own extremes. The Trump administration keeps stoking the incendiary, defending the most overly zealous, unprofessional ICE actions and seemingly glorying in its worst impulses. One can make a compelling, reasonable case for Homeland Security enforcement; constantly jumping to conclusions when things go wrong while posting kitschy AI generated slop posts that largely mirror what White Nationalists post is not it.

(I am not one of those who thinks the Administration is a bunch of racists. But either in one of the most dramatic demonstrations of tone deafness ever or in the pursuit of “owning the libs” over all else, they play right into the tempest and worsen the situation for ICE agents on the ground as they do.)

I could go on and on with a laundry list of additional messes that outrage many of us. Insulting NATO allies’ veterans and threatening to take allies’ land, for example, and that’s just to name this week’s headlines.

Reasonable people are repulsed and think, “Huh, I guess I need to vote for the other side.”

But, do the Democrats even offer a modicum of effort to form a broad coalition of the reasonable? Not at all.

Do they try to cool the temperature on the unnecessary excesses of the ICE protest movement that is creating the catalyst for tragic violence? No. They aren’t willing to admit that protesting lawful enforcement of immigration policy creates a dangerous dynamic where bad things can happen.

Nor is that the extent of their own maximalism. Time and the Democrats’ present state as the “faithful opposition” soften their own radicalism, but watch what happens when we inevitably give them our votes to rightly punish the Republicans for their failings. They won’t reward the reasonable by moderating into a Clintonian Big Tent of the 1990’s. No, they’ll triple down on the very things that previously caused us to hold our noses and tolerate Trump.

Are they willing to tone down their bloodlust for unrestricted abortion well beyond what liberal European policy looks like? No, they’d rather go after principled, Christian institutions that cannot commit what we believe to be murder. Will they soften their insistence that biological men can compete against girls and that such men — still “intact” — can be naked in the same locker rooms? No, they’d rather tar and feather J.K. Rowling for being consistent in her advocacy for biological women.

And so it goes. The other side of a given moment never searches for reasonableness when it becomes the side of the next. They are content to capitalize on the fact that their unreasonableness isn’t the latest, most extreme form of the presently ruling party.

Those of us who are at least halfway principled and reasonable swung away from Trump in 2020 because he had grown so unreasonable. We swung back his way in 2024 because the Democrats had proven even worse. But, never one to be outdone, Trump has tried to top his and Biden’s worst hits over the last year.

The Democrats will gain many of the reasonable voters’ support not because they’ve learned, but at least they are presently the resistance to the absurdity in power. But, not having learned, then they will need to be resisted all the more as they make their enemies’ past excesses look like restraint to their own newest ridiculousness.

They play us for fools.

But the two party façade is cracking. Which leads me to wonder: which party can, at least in lip service, acknowledge that first? And how bad will the damage be if it is indeed mere lip service to cover the next round of madness?

I can easily imagine the ever slick Gavin Newsom — or someone like him — recalculating for the umpteenth time and being willing to give border enforcement a bit more support while critiquing the excesses. Good! And continuing to distance himself from the edges of the transgender lobby without seeming needlessly hateful. Also good!

And winning. Very bad!

Why? Because it will have been lip service, not conviction. Inevitably, he’ll then return to the service of his own party’s worst angels, the ones he abandoned only long enough to gain the power to serve them better.

And that’s why this needs to be written. We will not escape this nightmare loop by serpentining back and forth to the latest other side when the presently in power side is crazy. Because neither side can read when our support is a plea “for less crazy” rather than a swap of craziness.

We need to demand something better. A little nuance. An ability to denounce ICE using too much lethal force without having to label all immigration laws as Hitler-esque, for example.

If there are any genuinely sincere future politicians out there, try us. We’re ready for you. Just don’t forget us when you do start to rise in power, because you’ll face the temptation to pick an extreme.

But nuance never goes out of style, if someone would care to embrace it.