This past week American and Mexican law enforcement agencies and military, working in concert, launched an operation to arrest a notorious drug cartel leader in Mexico. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), the bodyguards of this drug cartel leader, referred to as El Mencho, decided to shoot it out, and he was killed. 

Infuriated at this open challenge to their impunity and power, the cartel members started fires, blocked traffic, and threatened continued violence in order to reassert their authority over the law abiding—one would have imagined this was Minneapolis instead of Mexico.

However, both of these episodes—in two different cities in two different countries—are much the same in terms of how often those who violate the law use revenge and terror when those troublesome enough to insist those pesky laws be obeyed need to be taught a lesson about shutting their mouths and meekly complying with the criminals. 

Is there a fundamental difference between drug dealers in Mexico and those battling immigration enforcement in Minneapolis (and elsewhere) if their tactics—and supreme arrogance—when confronted are essentially the same? Many supposedly-enlightened Democrat Socialists and their allies would be both horrified and insulted hearing themselves being mentioned in the same breath as El Mencho and his heartless cartel lackeys, but the plain fact of the matter is that choosing to obstruct, threaten, and attack police officers who are enforcing the law can differ in degree only—insurrectionist criminal behavior is much the same wherever you live.

There is also a startling similarity between what is happening Minneapolis and Mexico regarding the open complicity of elected officials who are protecting lawbreakers from any and all consequences of their actions. Mexican government officials are, understandably, particularly terrified of being injured or killed by the ruthless and soulless operatives of the drug cartels who all but rule their nation; in comparison, the biggest worry of officials in Minneapolis and Minnesota is being flamed on TikTok or facing a re-election challenge, but this makes their self-serving cowardice only the more shameful. Regardless, surrendering the safety of your citizens to an implacable and cruel mob that cares little for the law sounds the same in both English and Spanish—no translation is needed.

Of course, the protestors in Minneapolis insist that they are freedom fighters protecting people against the tyranny of—wait for it!—the laws passed by our country’s elected representatives, but such is the nature of those whose ideological fervor is so strong that they do not care about the legal niceties of democracy or our Constitution. Having spent many decades convincing themselves that arresting and punishing the guilty is authoritarian immorality while calling everyone who disagrees with them a Nazi, it should be no surprise that people with too much time on their hands and too little common sense are wallowing in their presumed moral superiority while helping all manner of criminals—including pedophiles, rapists, and robbers—roam free throughout our nation.

Laws are sometimes unjust, and it would be foolish to argue otherwise. However, simply disagreeing with a law does not automatically mean it is unjust. The perceived injustice might simply boil down to having spent far too much time in a social media or academic echo chamber where alternative viewpoints are non-existent, so the shrill certainty of the coddled child becomes the animating force of a sadly sheltered mind. Of course, a significant portion of our population, truth be told, finds every inkling of personal responsibility and accountability to be unfair and oppressive, and their rantings whenever they are called to task are rarely credible, but they still rage—endlessly and loudly—against the tyrannies of adulthoods they strive with every fiber of their being to avoid. 

If you ever want a peek into the mindset of these sorts of toxic and smug individuals, I suggest taking a look into the cult of the “sovereign citizen” movement throughout our country, whose adherents claim they need not obey any law with which they do not agree. Wanting to do whatever they please without interference, the law be damned, is a pathology that shared by both those who sell deadly drugs in Mexico and those who want to enable foreigners to crash our borders in America. Chaos is, understandably, a poor substitute for governance, but a willingness to overthrow civic order and trample on the rights of others is the defining characteristic of criminals everywhere, so the similarities between the lawbreakers in Mexico and Minneapolis should be no surprise.

The attitudes of the drug cartels operating throughout the length and breadth of Mexico find lots of common cause with the loopy Lefties barricading streets in Minneapolis while blowing whistles and updating their locations on a riot-specific Telegram account. When you find it within yourself to disobey the laws you find inconvenient to obey or that insult your personal moral code, any action can be justified, whether it is as stupid as pounding on a police car or as heartless as slicing open a rival from neck to groin. Any time one can rationalize violence of any sort—as opposed to the peaceful protests we must all support and celebrate—we quickly fall down the rabbit hole to perceptions and behaviors that eventually lead to assault, arson, and murder.

The past both here in America and elsewhere has been filled with individuals and groups who believed they were saving the world by defying the law. Sometimes (but not very often) they have been correct, and people of good will and faith flocked to their causes. Unfortunately, for the most part the flouting of our laws has led to disaster and carnage because mobs always traffic in rage rather than reason, destruction rather than creation, and hate rather than hope—and this is no way to run a nation.

The arrogance and idiocy of both the supposedly enlightened and the fundamentally uncaring have been the bane of humanity throughout our bloody centuries on this planet.