Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’m trying to make one of my haphazard appearances, depending my energy level, after all these medications they put me on, after this lung cancer surgery. But I’m here on the farm, and I’m doing my best.

I wanna talk a little bit about the open defiance of the federal government. I’ve mentioned that earlier, but when you collate everything that Attorney General of Minnesota Keith Ellison has said, Gov. Tim Walz, Mayor Jacob Frey of Minneapolis, it’s unabashed, unapologetic, insurrectionary rhetoric.

It’s not just that they’ve told Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave. It’s not just that they’ve told their own police forces and law enforcement in Minnesota, in general, not to come to the aid of ICE. It’s that they’re actually working hand in glove with people on the street.

In other words, they encourage them to take pictures, to harass, to block ICE law enforcement activity. And you get the impression that they feel there’s no consequences.

In other words, they’re saying to the rest of us, the 330 million people outside Minnesota, that we, Minnesota elected officials, have the God-given right to pick and choose which federal laws we’re going to obey. And we are just not going to obey the enforcement of federal immigration law. We don’t really care about 10,000 people coming across the border during the Biden administration per day, but we do care about the federal government rectifying that lapse or that crime, by trying to find out where and who and how to get these people out, in Minnesota.

Nor do they care that ICE, according to its own figures, has rounded up 4,000 people with various criminal misdemeanors and felonies, and got them out of Minnesota. And that has contributed to Minnesota’s low crime rate.

But the problem is this, that they understand that the Trump administration, if........

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