John Daniel Davidson of the Federalist highlights disturbing comments from leading Minnesota Democrats.
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.
