On the menu today: I don’t want to alarm you, but right now, there is no visible way out of America’s intensifying political divisions and continuing rounds of ideologically motivated violence. For our governing class and the most influential public voices, all the incentives are to get angrier, louder, more accusatory, and more incendiary. Yesterday’s shooting in Dallas was another set of facts that turned into a Rorschach test; once again, an angry young man who appeared to be on the left side of the political spectrum picked up a gun and did something terrible — and once again, a whole bunch of people on the left are choosing to believe the perpetrator absolutely must have been affiliated with the right side of the political spectrum. You can’t solve a problem if you refuse to see it clearly. Read on.
We Don’t Have the Leaders Who Can ‘Lower the Temperature’
On Wednesday, a few hours after a man fired shots into a Dallas facility for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the local Democratic representative felt the most important thing his constituents could know was that they couldn’t trust the Federal Bureau of Investigation to accurately investigate the crime:
A Democratic congressman from Dallas said he doubted that the FBI would lead a thorough and objective investigation into a shooting that left two people dead near an Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in his district.
“I don’t trust anything that’s happening out of that agency at all,” Rep. Marc Veasey said. “I don’t trust them at all. They’re overly political.” . . .
“Until we get a full briefing on exactly what happened, and there are documents that are released that third parties can actually look through, and try to piece together the facts, I think that that’s all we have, because we know that [FBI director Kash] Patel is gonna — he’s gonna play Patel games,” Veasey said.
It did not take long for people on the left side of the political spectrum to conclude that the photo that Director Patel posted, showing unspent rounds with the slogan “ANTI ICE” written on the casings, must be fake.
Progressive journalist Aaron Rupar contended that America was witnessing “a Reichstag fire, but one of them every week.”
(On February 27, 1933, a sizable portion of the parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, went up in flames from an arson attack. While historians still debate who actually set the fire, the Nazis’s enemies were scapegoated and Adolf Hitler and the Nazis used the fire as justification to pass the “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and State” to “abolish freedom of speech, assembly, privacy and the press; legalized phone tapping and interception of correspondence; and suspended the autonomy of federated states, like Bavaria.”)
Ken Klippenstein, formerly of The Intercept, The Nation, and The Young Turks, reached out to the shooter’s friends, and they contended that any expressions of anti-Trump sentiment in his past posts had to be ironic, and that the shooter was more accurately characterized as a libertarian who supported Ron Paul:
Among the dozen or so usernames he used was one reading “#Impeachment.” When I asked if this wasn’t a clear reference to anti-Trump politics, his friends recoiled at the idea that he would express opposition to Trump so sincerely and straightforwardly. Instead they saw it as part of his broader ironic persona, poking fun at anti-Trump “resistance” types.
You don’t have to look far to find Democratic elected officials who compare U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Nazi Germany, terrorists, or “jackbooted thugs.”
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said during a May 2025 speech at the University of Minnesota Law School’s commencement ceremony.
“For fascists, they select a public enemy. And today, it’s an immigrant,” said Representative Delia Ramirez (D., Ill.), in June. “Tomorrow, literally tomorrow, it’s anyone they find undesirable. I have members of Congress in my committee who are filing legislation saying anyone who attempts to obstruct Donald Trump from doing what he wants should have their U.S. citizenship revoked if they’re a United States citizen.”
In January, New Jersey Democratic Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman called ICE agents “jackbooted thugs” and part of President Trump’s “reign of terror.”
Also in June, San Diego City Councilman Sean Elo-Rivera posted a photo of armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in tactical gear with the word “terrorists” scrawled across the image in orange lettering, and wrote that the ICE raids were “state-sponsored terrorism.”
The same month, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said of mask-wearing ICE agents, “I don’t know of any police department that routinely wears masks. We know that there are other groups that routinely wear masks. NSC-131 routinely wears masks.”
(NSC-131 is a neo-Nazi group based in the New England region; according to the Anti-Defamation League, the group has “become increasingly inactive” since mid-2024. Raise your hand if you knew what NSC-131 is. Raise your other hand if you think it’s a little weird that the mayor of Boston is mentioning them like they’re common knowledge.)
“That’s what you see in a fascist state,” Senator Jeff Merkley (D., Ore.), told Fox News in July about masked ICE agents. “We are not a fascist state. We are ‘We the People’ and we need to make sure that people are accountable.”
Would Democratic officials be more relaxed about ICE agents wearing masks if they were told that the enforcement officials just didn’t want to catch Covid? “Hey, Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy is making it harder to get the Covid vaccine, so we’ve got to take other precautions, right? Haven’t you heard the warnings from the daughter of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner? When the offspring of Batman and Elektra tells you to worry about long Covid, you take it seriously.”
Meanwhile, President Trump jumped on Truth Social and declared:
I have been briefed on the deadly shooting at the ICE Field Office in Dallas, Texas. It has now been revealed the deranged shooter wrote “Anti-ICE” on his shell casings. This is despicable! The Brave Men and Women of ICE are just trying to do their jobs, and remove the “WORST of the WORST” Criminals out of our Country, but they are facing an unprecedented increase in threats, violence, and attacks by Deranged Radical Leftists. This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to “Nazis.” The continuing violence from Radical Left Terrorists, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, must be stopped. ICE Officers, and other Brave Members of Law Enforcement, are under grave threat. We have already declared ANTIFA a Terrorist Organization, and I will be signing an Executive Order this week to dismantle these Domestic Terrorism Networks. I AM CALLING ON ALL DEMOCRATS TO STOP THIS RHETORIC AGAINST ICE AND AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT, RIGHT NOW! The Trump Administration is fully committed to backing Law Enforcement, Strong Borders, securing our Homeland, deporting Violent Illegal Criminals, and fully rooting out the Left Wing Domestic Terrorism that is terrorizing our Country. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
It is fair for the president to urge Democrats to cease comparing ICE to Nazis. It is not fair for the president to urge Democrats to cease criticizing ICE or the administration’s immigration policies entirely.
Yesterday, after news of the shooting broke, Vice President JD Vance posted on X, “the obsessive attack on law enforcement, particularly ICE, must stop. I’m praying for everyone hurt in this attack and for their families.”
Jon Favreau, a former speechwriter for President Barack Obama and a host of Pod Save America, responded, “The Vice President is not a reliable source of information. This is now the fifth or sixth time he’s posted a political take contradicted by facts from his own law enforcement agencies.” Vance reacted with vitriol, “The gunman had anti-ICE messaging carved on the bullets he used. What, precisely, did I get wrong, dips***?”
The editors of National Review observe that yesterday’s shooting is part of a pattern of attacks on ICE agents:
In July, eleven left-wing agitators ambushed an ICE facility in Alvarado, Texas, opening fire on agents and shooting one in the neck. In Portland, Ore., an incendiary device was thrown at officers. That same month, another attacker in McAllen, Texas, shot two police officers and a Border Patrol employee, sending them to the hospital. An ICE facility in Washington suffered an arson attack. The left has tried to popularize a push to unmask and dox ICE agents.
We don’t have the leaders right now who can “lower the temperature” or calm the waters. Very few of our leaders, in government or out, show any sign that they want to calm public passions. So far, it looks like most of them want to stir them up.
Even if our leaders wanted to pour water on the fire instead of gasoline, there are few remaining figures who are trusted across the political spectrum. Every Democratic senator voted against the nomination of Kash Patel to be FBI director. No other position at the FBI requires Senate confirmation. To many of us, the idea that the entire Dallas office of the FBI would conspire to manufacture evidence that the shooter was opposed to ICE when in fact he was supportive of it is an absurd conspiracy theory that would require a lot of dedicated law-enforcement professionals to violate oaths and risk criminal charges, just so the administration could “win” a news cycle.
But looking at Attorney General Pam Bondi, fresh off a wild mischaracterization of the First Amendment, and Patel, and Dan Bongino, there are few, if any, figures over at the Department of Justice or FBI who are trusted by folks on the left.
President Abraham Lincoln closed his first inaugural:
I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.
Problem No. 1 is that few if any leaders in American life are willing to say things like that, to calm our intensifying political divisions, paranoia, and rage. Problem No. 2 is that I’m not sure too many leaders in American life are even capable of thinking the way Lincoln did.
ADDENDUM: Back in July, over in that other publication I write for, I looked ahead to the off-year elections in November and noted, “There are murmurs that Democrats are nervous about the New Jersey gubernatorial race, but the first major poll of the general election put Democrat Mikie Sherrill ahead of Republican nominee Jack Ciattarelli by 20 points.” Four years ago, the Garden State gubernatorial race ended up much closer than expected, so apparently the New Jersey GOP has a pulse.
This morning, a new The Hill/Emerson poll shows the race a tie. Maybe it’s a weird outlier. Maybe it’s a sign that voters were slow to tune in to the race.
Or maybe voters aren’t particularly enamored with Sherrill telling a radio show host that she couldn’t remember whether or not she made $7 million in the stock market.
The Washington Free Beacon had the numbers back in May, but few people noticed:
In her 2019 financial disclosures, Sherrill reported assets totaling between $733,209 and $4,321,000. By 2024, those figures had ballooned to between $4,840,076 and $13,975,000. The wide swing of ranges comes because federal financial disclosure forms require each asset to be listed as between a range of values. That requirement means that Sherrill, in theory, could have only seen an asset increase of roughly $500,000, but that possibility is unlikely. Using the average of the two ranges would place Sherrill’s asset increase at just under $7 million.
Members of the House of Representatives make an annual salary of $174,000, and the meteoric rise of Sherrill’s net worth comes as a result of the exemplary performance of her stock portfolio.
The stock market’s been pretty darn good since 2019, but not tripling-your-assets good. How is it that these ordinary schmoes get elected to Congress, and seemingly overnight become sharp-eyed, shrewd investors that would put Warren Buffett to shame?