A culture of innocence, part three

“Not a very innocent guy.” That was President Trump’s characterization, at a news conference on April 18, of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the “Maryland man” deported to El Salvador a month earlier. Well, who is innocent, really? “Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape deportation?” as Hamlet almost said. This is presumably why, although the law supposes (or used to suppose) that you’re “innocent until proven guilty” there is no such legal finding as “innocent.” You may be “guilty” or you may be “not guilty” in a particular case, but nobody in our legal system gets to be pronounced innocent.

Mr Trump was commenting on the release of new evidence two days earlier by Attorney General Pam Bondi of Mr Abrego Garcia’s connections to the Salvadoran criminal gang MS-13 — evidence that had been hitherto suppressed by his lawyer in a court case going back to 2019. Adam Lehrer of the Scroll quoted an anonymous lawyer to the effect that “the administration might be orchestrating a deliberate drip of incriminating details to maximize Democrats’ eventual humiliation once Abrego Garcia’s MS-13 status becomes irrefutable.” Of course this is to assume that a party not humiliated by the presidency of Joe Biden or the candidacy of Kamala Harris is capable of humiliation.

A couple of weeks later, after several Democratic members of Congress had flown to El Salvador to petition that country’s government to release Mr Abrego Garcia from prison there and return him to the US, further evidence of his non-innocence came in the form of the body-cam video from the Tennessee Highway Patrol officer who stopped him in 2022 when he was driving a car belonging to a convicted human trafficker. It was easy to see why the officer thought eight people in a car without luggage or identification might be engaged in some such business too.

So no, Mr Abrego Garcia was almost certainly not a very innocent guy. But by implicitly acknowledging, as the media but not the law does, that innocence is the relevant criterion by which his case must be judged, Mr Trump abandoned a much stronger, indeed an unanswerable argument and the only one by virtue of which he could hope to carry out his promise to deport some significant portion of illegal immigrants allowed into the country in recent years — namely, that of the illegality of their very presence here.

It was understandable that he was drawn into an inevitably inconclusive discussion of just how innocent the 29-year-old Salvadoran was — something that only non-Democrats and non-media folk would believe him not to be even if it were proved that he was, as the administration claims he was, a member of a criminal gang, or beat his wife or engaged in human trafficking. But if only such guilty parties can be deported, he concedes, in effect, the Democrat demand that all such would-be deportees are entitled to “due process” of law in order that such guilt may be proven — something which, given the law’s delays, would inevitably result in no more than a thin trickle of deportations before the end of the President’s term.

It is more than probable — it is all but certain — that, since the rule of law was replaced in this country by the rule of lawyers, such undue process would clog the machinery of government indefinitely no matter what the President said or did. But the disingenuousness of the Democrat-media appeal to “due process” might be more apparent if he didn’t allow himself to be led into the distraction of another kind of “endless war” over some dubious individual’s guilt or innocence.

For the Democrats and the media have a quite different standard of innocence in mind from Mr Trump’s. For them Mr Abrego Garcia was not just innocent in the conventional legal sense of being not guilty — since he had not, as they frequently pointed out, been convicted of any crime — but innocent a priori, by virtue, paradoxically, of having committed the unprosecuted crime of entering the country illegally. This act of defiance against what they regard as an unjust law automatically enrolled him in the ranks of the oppressed, and he was thus to be regarded as innocent by definition.

It’s often said that the left, for whom the case of Mr Abrego Garcia had already become a cause célèbre, worship victimhood, but this is not quite true. It’s not victims per se that the left celebrate and defend but putatively innocent victims. And not just any innocent victims (children unborn, once a common synecdoche for innocence, don’t qualify, for example), or even the victims of oppression as such, but only the innocent victims of one of the intellectually certified oppression-narratives that the left and those who seek to be their clients are mainly in the business of dreaming up.

This presumption of innocence in oppression produces many stranger cases than that of Mr Abrego Garcia. Jews, for instance, have been oppressed for thousands of years, but their oppression-narrative is outdated since, in the view of the Manichaean left, they have passed from being oppressed to being oppressors. The TERFs, or trans-exclusionary radical feminists, have lately undergone the same transition. The murders of twelve people in the offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo by Islamist fanatics in January, 2015, were excused by some French intellectuals as “a matter of culture” — that is, the culture of the innocent-by-definition oppressed who murdered them.

To the Democrats, Mr Abrego Garcia’s innocence was of a similarly unlosable kind, conferred on him by the “intersectional” progressive ideology which the entire Democratic party seems now, like their media sponsors, to have embraced. This culture of innocence may be derived from Lenin’s celebrated formulation “who/whom” which, in its updated version, divides the human race into the innocent-by-definition oppressed, who belong to racial, sexual, ethnic or religious minorities, vis à vis a notional white, heterosexual male majority which are their non-innocent oppressors.

But in its political and legal manifestations, this ideology ends up looking like a particularly severe form of Calvinism by which a similar division was posited — between the Elect of God, whose pre-lapsarian innocence had been restored by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and everybody else, who was necessarily to be regarded as predestined to damnation. James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner of 1824 provides an interesting foretaste of the intersectional Elect’s sense of their unstained and unstainable innocence no matter what crime they may commit according to conventional ideas of criminal behavior.

“No one is above the law,” as the media-Democrat alliance has been insisting for over half a century — but now we see that what they really meant was that “No one apart from any random illegal immigrant or similar victim of America’s unjust laws is above the law — oh, and also those charged with enforcing and administering the law who feel either compassion for such immigrants or anger against those attempting to enforce the law against them.” The innocence, ex hypothesi, of the former may thus be supposed to rub off, as it were, on the latter.

This was confirmed on the same day that the President chose to question the innocence of Mr Abrego Garcia, when Judge Hannah C. Dugan of the Wisconsin circuit court for Milwaukee County facilitated the attempted escape of another illegal alien defendant, Eduardo Flores Ruiz, on multiple charges of assault through the jury room exit from the court-house while agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI waited outside to arrest him. For this blatantly criminal act she was subsequently arrested herself — and then lionized by the media and many outraged Democrats as the latest victim of the tyrant in the White House.

Dan Balz of The Washington Post wrote of Ms Dugan’s arrest as “a clear escalation,” of the President’s alleged “hardball” tactics, “meant to signal his willingness to intimidate opponents.” Moira Donegan of The Guardian likewise claimed that “The FBI’s arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan is a bid to silence dissent,” while Andy J. Semotiuk of Forbes thundered:

When federal agents marched into a Milwaukee courtroom and later arrested Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan, they crossed not only a physical threshold but also a constitutional Rubicon heading straight for a constitutional crisis. In doing so, they sent a chilling message: that the executive branch of government now claims the power to punish judges who stand in the way of its political priorities

So much for no one’s being above the law. Democratic members of Congress were if anything even more vehement in their protests in favor of the law-breaking judge. Axios provided a helpful summary of some of the most salient reactions:

• “It is remarkable that the Administration would dare to start arresting state court judges,” said House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D-Md.). “It’s a whole new descent into government chaos.”
• “The Trump administration again is breaking norms in how it’s dealing with immigration, the legal system, and normalcy. … This is stuff I expect from Third World countries,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wisc.) told Axios.
• Said Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio): “They arrested a judge?! They can no longer claim to be a party of law and order. This will have to be a red line for congressional Republicans. Unbelievable.”

Over on the Senate side, Senator Dick Durbin thought that: “When immigration enforcement officials interfere with our criminal justice system, it undermines public safety, prevents victims and witnesses from coming forward, and often prevents those who committed crimes from facing justice.” Senator Amy Klobuchar opined that “The Administration’s arrest of a sitting judge in Wisconsin is a drastic move that threatens the rule of law. While we don’t have all the details, this is a grave step and undermines our system of checks and balances.” Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin claimed that the administration had endangered “basic democratic values” by “relentlessly attacking the judicial system, flouting court orders and arresting a sitting judge.”

But the prize for most unhinged Democratic senator must go to Ed Markey of Massachusetts who, addressing a crowd in Boston in February, had called for “revolution against Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” and who now appeared to repeat that exhortation in a post on X about the arrest of Judge Dugan: “The Trump admin has arrested a judge in Milwaukee. This is a red alert moment. We must all rise up against it.”

As a spark for revolutionary action, the protests against Judge Dugan’s arrest, or that of Joel Cano, a New Mexico judge, and his wife who were charged with sheltering Cristhian Ortega-Lopez, a known member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, were hardly the storming of the Bastille. But Senator Markey was not the only unlikely Robespierre making the rounds this spring. According to an admiring piece in The Guardian Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker had this to say in an address to a Democratic party gathering in New Hampshire at the end of April:

“Stop thinking we can reason or negotiate with a madman,” Pritzker told the crowd, adding that Republicans enabling Trump should “feel in their bones that when we survive this shameful episode of American history” their portraits will be relegated “to the museum halls reserved for tyrants and traitors”.

“Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now,” he added. “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.”

Though they may ignore it, the fans of such rhetorical excess cannot not know that there’s something inherently preposterous about a 60-year-old billionaire politician of positively Taftian proportions calling for “mobilization” of the masses against a twice-elected President of the United States. But as Democratic activist Max Burns wrote for The Hill, “Democratic voters have made clear they want a fighter. Pritzker is willing to give them one. . . This is not a time for small men. As Pritzker will be happy to tell you, he’s anything but a small man.” Perhaps he means to take down “these Republicans” by sitting on them.

I wrote in these columns a couple of months ago (see “Melting the ideological permafrost” in The New Criterion of March, 2025) that I thought America was “kinda done” with the comparisons of Mr Trump and his supporters to Hitler or Nazis, but I was wrong. Governor Pritzker, for one, continues to make such comparisons. So does former Vice President Al Gore. “I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement,” said Mr Gore to a gathering of “climate advocates” in San Francisco. “It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it. But —” (You knew there was a “but” coming there, didn’t you?) “But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.” One such lesson, according to the highly intellectual former vice president, was this:

“It was [Jürgen] Habermas’ mentor, Theodore Adorno, who wrote that the first step in that nation’s descent into hell was, and I quote, ‘the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power,”’ Gore said. “He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, ‘attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.’ End quote. The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality.”

The irony of making such an outrageous suggestion in a context which he himself had just insisted could not bear the weight of the comparison never occurred to him. Nor was he inclined to see any connection between blurring the distinction between true and false and doing likewise to the distinction between guilt and innocence. Nor did he remark on how the sort of manufactured innocence of a Kilmar Abrego Garcia or a Judge Hannah Duncan bears a remarkable resemblance to the ideological creation of its own preferred version of reality.

In fact it is just this ersatz reality that is behind the calls for revolution and the Hitler comparisons. Nothing can be expected to move the masses to revolt more than outraged innocence, which is why the Trump people keep harping on largely unreported stories of the rape and murder of children by illegal aliens. That they are not more successful in this may be owing to the Democrats’ and the media’s already having overplanted that field with the kind of ideologically defined innocence that non-ideologues don’t understand as such. That’s why, by exaggerating the evil of the putative oppressors with Hitler comparisons and so forth they hope similarly to exaggerate in the public mind the innocence of their putative victims.

And so Governor Pritzker thinks it appropriate, even necessary, to mention the Holocaust as a parallel, according to a CNN interview.

In the interview, Pritzker compared this moment in America to what he sees walking through the exhibits of the Holocaust museum he helped get built outside Chicago. He likened it to the point when Nazis were on the rise, everyone was writing them off and only looking back “where you can feel, you know it, you can see and absorb what was happening in 1933, 1934.”

As I say, the governor and others of his kind, of which there are many, especially in the universities and the media, cannot be quite unaware of the absurdity of such comparisons. But their ideology assures them that they are on “the right side of history,” and so they believe that it entitles them to “their own preferred version of reality.” Such arrogance and contempt for those who do not share that ideology must be what occludes, for them, the clarity with which we non-believers can see their own detachment from the reality of everybody else.