RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2025/04/22/a-tale-of-two-presidents-deportation-records/

With their party dragging itself through an existential struggle, Democrats, with of course help from the media, have made the president’s illegal immigrant deportations their raison de etre. They’ve turned to tantrum-laced political theater and seasoned it with a mountain of hypocrisy.

This year’s George Floyd (or Michael Brown) for the Democrats is Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the El Salvadoran and alleged MS-13 gang member who was sent back to his home country. His case, says the Associated Press, is for Democrats “about fundamental American ideals — due process, following court orders, preventing government overreach.”

Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, was speaking, even if unofficially, for the party and the media that does the party’s dirty work when he said in regard to the administration’s deportation policy, that “due process and separation of powers are matters of principle” and “without due process for all, we are all in danger.”

It’s blatantly obvious that Democrats “desperately want to neuter the Trump administration’s right to remove those who have come here illegally, including those who belong to foreign gangs, or commit serious felonies.”

Where were the Democrats and the media when Barack Obama was deporting more than 5 million (including both formal removals and returns), many – maybe even a majority – of whom didn’t get their “day in court”? They were around, but not much was said, certainly not to the level of screeching we’re hearing today. There was no rancor, no childish grandstanding, no rallies on behalf of the deported.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/06/chicagos-longest-weekend-the-george-floyd-riots-five-years-later/?utm_

The city recovered, but its Democratic politics were wrecked

I want to tell you a story about how my city lost faith in itself. The end of May marks the five-year anniversary of the George Floyd riots. It is a dark memory to summon, nearly as dark as the five-year anniversary of nationwide Covid lockdowns in March, which are the riots’ immediate predicate and context. Many of the nation’s cities burned or experienced looting. Our national politics changed forever, for the worse. And half a decade on, Chicago still reels from the consequences in a way that few other metropolises do; we have arguably never recovered from the loss of confidence and shift in city politics the Floyd riots triggered. Your experience of them may be different — every state in the union witnessed at least some sort of civil unrest, after all — but this is mine.

The story begins elsewhere, of course. On May 25, Minneapolis man George Floyd died after being restrained during arrest by police officer Derek Chauvin. By May 26, viral videos of the arrest taken by onlookers were rocketing around social media, raising public outrage at the tactics used by Chauvin to restrain Floyd. On May 27, the powder keg exploded in Minneapolis: Protests swiftly turned into vandalism once night fell, then riots and fires, and finally unrestrained larceny. And the riots did not end. They continued for days, each time beginning as night fell, their purpose seemingly different from that of the initial spasm of civic rage: with method, intent, and mass looting.

Equally as alarming as the violence on the streets was the reaction of mainstream and social media to it all: Instead of deploring the civic breakdown, a good portion of the nation seemingly excused or even lionized it. We were told over and over again by print media and cable news that the protests were “mostly peaceful,” regardless of how much property destruction, arson, and looting was going on. (The trend reached its legendary apotheosis a few months later, when a CNN reporter did a live hit in Kenosha, Wis., in front of a burning store and declared the protest, with zero sense of irony, “mostly peaceful.”) The unceasingly celebratory din from the left on Twitter was even more appalling, as a nation of self-radicalized twentysomethings, restless from lockdown, convinced themselves that this was their moment for revolutionary racial justice and sloganeered about the need to “defund the police” while cheering for as much destruction as possible. (The snide cries of “Who cares about looting? Target has insurance, after all” still ring in my ears.)