The Left’s Performative Outrage

Right now, the moment either the Democratic Party or the GOP senses momentum, they put the pedal to the metal, and then proceed to overreach so dramatically that the American people are repulsed and react in disgust to that agenda.

Democratic politicians are being driven by a media and celebrity culture that has decided that what’s going on with ICE is the new, gigantic outrage of the day, and therefore everyone must speak out. They have decided this is their new civil rights moment.

The Democratic base is constantly in search of an animating principle, and the animating principle is supposed to be a pale knockoff of the civil rights movement of the 60s. They’ve done it with gay rights, transgenderism, and now with illegal immigration. “The jackbooted thugs, they’re enforcing laws that are discriminating against wide classes of people,” Democrats still argue. 

They’re always looking for their chance to do a Selma bridge moment. The problem for them is that those moments are rare because — thank God in America — that sort of stuff has been outré for half a century.

In terms of generic public policy, every country has to enforce its border, and every country has to make sure that illegal immigrants are deported. There’s nothing new about that.

But Democrats, and particularly radical activist class Democrats, are always looking for their new moment to be involved in a civil rights movement. The minute they see anything even remotely resembling that moment, they go for it whole-scale.

This is how you end up with Scott Galloway suggesting the Democrats should conduct Nuremberg trials against the Trump administration. He stated, “I think there should be something equivalent to the Nuremberg Trials after this is all over. And to make it clear that once we’re back in power, which we will be, this is going to happen.”

This sort of language is not helpful. Kara Swisher, on the same podcast, suggested that Stephen Miller has blood on his hands and should be put in jail. She also compared Miller to arch-Nazi Heinrich Himmler, saying, “We always focus on Trump, as we often focus on the top people. But Stephen Miller, like a man named Bendetsen, he was the one who created the internment camps for Japanese, Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi regime, this is what he is.”

Comparing Stephen Miller to Heinrich Himmler is an astonishing leap.

In addition, we have the entire celebrity class, who, of course, have now been reanimated. They found their new cause.

One year ago, they were wearing Hamas pins at the Oscars. This year, presumably, it will all be about ICE.

Katy Perry, who is now dating Justin Trudeau, the Bernie Sanders of the north, ventilated on Instagram, “Who: You, the power is in your hands. What: Call your senators. When: Now. We have until Friday, January 30th to block $10 billion (on top of the $75b that’s already been funded) from going through to ICE.” Then she put up a phone number because she feels it’s time to turn anger into action.

I’m not sure why we should treat the musings of celebrities as particularly important, but they clearly think their musings are.

Natalie Portman suggested that she’s never been sadder to be an American. “I could not be prouder to be American right now by the way the Americans are acting,” she bloviated. “And I could not be sadder to be American right now with the way the government is behaving.”

Last I checked, Portman has been living in Paris with her children since she moved there in 2014. She even chose to stay there after she and her husband — who had taken a position with the Paris Opera Ballet — got divorced in 2024.

Olivia Wilde suggested that ICE is a criminal organization, saying, “We can’t go another day accepting this as our new norm. It’s outrageous. People are being murdered, and I don’t want to normalize seeing that violence—on the internet or on film. It’s hideous. If we can do anything to support the movement to cast ICE out and delegitimize this criminal organization, then that’s what we should be doing.”

The musings of actors mean very little, but they do mean a lot in Democratic upper-echelon circles. When the celebrity class speaks with one voice, the people who tend to listen are the people they go to cocktail parties with: Democratic front-runners. That could be people like Wes Moore in Maryland, or Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania, or Gavin Newsom in California.

And then there was Ethan Hawke, who is currently nominated for best actor for a movie called “Blue Moon.” He said, “I never felt scared about what I was going to say until the last couple years. Where I feel like ‘Oh, you have to be careful. Or, or what? I don’t know, but there’s a kind of fear in the air that I’ve never felt before — and it’s not America. To get to be an artist in a free country, I’ve had enough of an education to know what a privilege that is. And, um, I don’t feel that way anymore.”

He doesn’t feel that way anymore? The hell he doesn’t. He’s out there making movies all the time.

There’s “fear in the air”? There’s this evanescent fear in the air?

Ethan Hawke is not walking around in fear.

My favorite thing about modern America is when people who have all the rights and privileges of being a modern American suggest that they are living in deep fear when they clearly are not. For God’s sake, he’s speaking into a microphone on camera.

You know what? People in totalitarian regimes don’t do that thing because they know what comes next — and it ain’t good.