The Jan. 1 atrocity in New Orleans, carried out by an ISIS sympathizer who plowed a vehicle into a Bourbon Street crowd, killed at least 14 pedestrians and wounded dozens more. The attack reminded me of a recent post on the Chronicles website, where regular columnist Tom Piatak explained why “Americans voted against suicide” by re-electing Donald Trump.
Piatak argued that if Trump had not won, the country would have leaped from the frying pan into the fire, trading the so-called “senile tool of the woke left” still in the Oval Office for an even more leftist Kamala Harris. Both President Joe Biden and Harris appeared comfortable with their party’s open-borders policy, aimed at creating a permanent Democratic majority by allowing waves of illegal immigrants to cross the border. Piatak questioned why a newly elected Democratic president would abandon that policy. Harris not only embraced the estimated 10 million to 12 million unidentified and unvetted illegal aliens who entered the country, she celebrated them.
It is impossible to dissociate this terrorist act from the Democrats’ policy on illegal immigration and the accompanying cultural radicalism unleashed by the American left.
Kamala Harris and her party believe we should stop calling illegal aliens what they plainly are, provide them with homes and money, and even offer “sex reassignment” for those undocumented residents who request it. The fact that this immense population includes in its ranks drug hustlers, violent gangs, and Islamist terrorists should matter less to us than their enriching presence as we work to overcome our “systemic racist” past.
When asked about the New Orleans attack, FBI officials waited hours before using the word “terrorist” to describe what happened. After all, the Biden-Harris administration has applied that term to “truly evil people” such as anti-abortion demonstrators and parents in Northern Virginia who objected to trans-themed instruction in public schools. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) has complained that whenever he raises terrorism with the White House, he is lectured on “racially motivated extremism.”
Allow me to adapt my colleague’s argument: Not all Americans voted against suicide — more than 75 million supported it, in fact. Donald Trump won this pivotal election by fewer than 2 million votes, which means almost half of the electorate was willing to grant another mandate to a leadership that opened our borders to more terrorism, along with countless murders and rapes.
Some may object that the New Orleans attacker was, as Biden emphasized, “an American citizen.” Legacy media outlets note that he was “American-born,” implying that this detail outweighs his Islamist fervor or the copy of the Quran in his Houston home, opened to a page calling for the slaying of Allah’s enemies. They want us to believe he represents an indigenous problem, unrelated to the broader cultural shifts accelerated by Biden’s immigration policy. The Washington Post berated Trump for even hinting at a connection between the crime and immigration.
Yet it is impossible to dissociate this terrorist act from the Democratic Party’s policy on illegal immigration and the accompanying cultural radicalism unleashed by the American left. The Islamic fundamentalism that the New Orleans mass murderer absorbed has become increasingly common in this country with both the importation of Muslim extremists and the anti-Western indoctrination in our institutions of learning. As mass rallies for Hamas terrorists become alarmingly commonplace in our cities, we might note that what influenced the terrorist’s mindset is becoming more and more acceptable in our transformed country.
Stressing the killer’s “mother-and-apple-pie” American identity bolsters one leftist claim: that those crossing the southern border illegally are somehow superior to the citizens who have lived here for generations. These newcomers are deemed free of the “Christian, white racist” baggage critics assign to earlier arrivals, so we should therefore value their salvific arrival.
In 2024, New York City’s government published a report it called “factual,” asserting that undocumented immigrants provided an enormous benefit — particularly when they supposedly saved “our largest asylum city” after COVID-19 struck, rescuing it from a looming financial crisis. That seems dubious, considering the federal aid poured into food, shelter, and living expenses for these unwelcome intruders. It also excludes the government-funded travel to whichever destination they preferred, as well as the social and financial toll of crimes they committed.
But if it’s true, as our cultural elites tell us, that the newcomers are even more beneficial than older residents, then the New Orleans terrorist may be the living proof of that. Consistent with the leftist narrative, it took someone born in this racist, morally defective country to have acted as badly as he did.
New orleans massacre, New year’s day, Jihad, Isis, Domestic terrorism, Joe biden, Kamala harris, Illegal immigration, National suicide, Donald trump, Border crisis, Democratic party, Open borders, Leftism, Opinion & analysis
