How Many ICE Goons Beating On You Counts As Having Complied With Law Enforcement?

[0:04] Vivek Ramaswamy, the wealthy tech bro and Yale graduate, showed an Ohio town

[0:11] hall he doesn’t know why Ohio coal plants have shut down. Several journalists, including Don Lemon, were arrested for reporting on a protest that interrupted a church service. And we didn’t think Trump could get more fascist. After two murders by ICE in as many weeks, we have to ask, How many ice goons beating on you counts as having complied with law enforcement? This is Secular Left with Doug Berger. An independent, religion-free, progressive viewpoint on topics of the day. music music music music.

[0:59] In 2026 ohio has a governor’s election coming up our current governor Republican Mike DeWine is term limited and so that means that he cannot serve another term after this year and so there There are currently the Democrat, Dr. Amy Acton is the front runner for the Democrats. And on the Republican side, we have Vivek Ramaswamy.

[1:31] He is a venture capitalist, works in the biotech industry or has worked in the biotech industry. His claim to fame is he was buddies with J.D. Vance and Elon Musk. And he served as a co-chairperson of the Doge Committee, whatever that was, back in the early days of the Trump administration until he was forced out. And so he came back to Ohio, and he decided he’s going to run for governor. Of course, Vivak doesn’t have an American name. He does not look like he’s from the United States, but he is. He was born in Cincinnati. His parents were Indian immigrants from the country India. And, but he has a, a political outlook that is shaped by Catholics and evangelicals for some reason, even though he’s Hindu, who knows?

[2:38] But he claims to be a smart person. He’s very rich. He flies across the state for campaign events in a private jet. There’s a picture, a meme. Somebody took a picture of his SUV parked at some campaign event in the handicapped spots because he’s rich and he’s a very, very important person. So he should be allowed to park in the handicapped spots. And he did it the long way so that nobody could park next to his door.

[3:08] You know, those kind of people, those privileged kind of people. Well, the other thing, too, is he claims to be smart. He went to Yale, got a law degree, works with biotech firms. He claims to be a scientist. He’s not a scientist. He hasn’t developed any medications. But he has worked as a hedge fund manager. So he’s able to collect investment for certain things. And one of his main jobs, his main tech jobs that he had was that he fronted this company that would go in and purchase patents for medications that had not been brought to market from bigger, big pharma companies. And then they would develop these medications and put them on the market. And one of them that he did was a drug that supposedly that was supposed to help Alzheimer’s patients. He promoted it. He was on the cover of Forbes and everything. And they bought this patent from one of the big pharma companies for $5 million. It had already failed four other clinical trials, but they bought it anyway, promoted it, gained more additional investors, including some pension funds, some teacher pension funds.

[4:31] And it failed again. And so then they ended up abandoning the drug. And so all these pension funds lost money. He eventually, he cashed out. So he got money, but hardly any other investors did. So that’s how smart he is about money. So he’s been going around the state doing these campaign events, doing town halls, talking about he’s this anti-woke guy. and he hates DEI. He was also interviewed where he said that American workers are lazy and mediocre.

[5:10] He’s running for the governor of Ohio, but he loves Texas. And there’s a picture of him in a cowboy hat and a red, white, and blue vest from Texas. And he complained about Ohio, But yeah, he wants to be the governor. So the other thing that Ranswami has is a lack of knowledge about coal plants. He has no idea why coal plants were shut down in Ohio and why no new ones are being built at this time. At a town hall in December, a woman from Niles, Ohio mentioned the coal plants and the closing of those coal plants and wondered what his plan was to bring energy back to Ohio. And Ramaswamy blamed too many regulations, federal and state, without mentioning that the GOP have controlled Ohio since 2011. Then he said that if they just took existing coal plants and increased their output 80 percent, that would solve all the problems with the data centers needing power.

[6:21] So what I’m going to do is I’m going to play the clip that, and this was posted by his campaign. It was a short, less than a minute short of this woman asking this question and him answering it. And then when it’s finished, then we’ll come back. And I’m from Niles, Ohio, the birthplace of President William McKinley. Very much so, yeah. And I have a question about energy. Sure. So the Obama administration ordered any coal-fired power plants to not only be shut down, but they should be torn down. And there is a coal-fired plant in Stratton on the Ohio River that is almost completely down right now. There’s a lot of data centers being built in the state of Ohio that’s going to use enormous amounts of energy. And what are you going to do to help get energy back to this state? So I will say the first thing is we have great natural resources.

[7:18] So our issue here is not a problem of nature. It is a manmade problem. We make it hard to use the natural resources that are already here. Coal and natural gas, our state is blessed with these resources.

[7:29] But what we have failed to do is get them out of the ground quickly enough and to be able to use them. Some of that’s the federal level. There’s been an assault on coal actually earlier today. I want to thank everybody for their patience, by the way. I know it took us a little while to get here, but snow slows our travel down. But I was in a different part of the state meeting with coal miners earlier today and leaders in the coal industry. We shut down so many coal-fired power plants. That’s exactly why, in the name of climate change. By the way, that same coal production shifted to China in the name of fighting global climate change. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s part of why electric bills are so high. Now we have more demand on our grid than we’ve ever had due to AI data centers and other hyperscalers moving to our state. And yet baseload power generation is thinner than it’s ever been. And so the right answer, the nearest term answer is increase the supply and production of energy. And that’s us getting out of our own way. Speed up natural gas timelines, speed up power plant approval timelines. Those are manmade issues in that bureaucracy. And if I’m being honest, we’re a great state in so many ways, so I’m not taken away from that. But the bureaucracy in this state operates as though it is accountable only to itself and no one else. We were proudly a red state, but we often act like we are a state of red tape. And that red tape gets in the way of energy production.

[8:50] So if we’re able to take those existing coal plants and increase utilization of capacity from 60% to 80%, a lot of that’s government red tape in the way of that, and produce more natural gas-fired power plants. And coal-fired power plants, once you shut them down, you can’t reopen them for technical reasons. It just basically doesn’t exist anymore. But they’re still interconnected to the grid. Quickly build a natural gas-fired power plant in its place. These are bringing down electric bills immediately if we have a governor who’s actually focused on it. So hopefully there’s some smart people that have listened to that and know that he is a moron and he’s very wrong about energy and about coal plants.

[9:29] China producing power with coal doesn’t increase Ohio’s electric rates, since China’s grid, electric grid, isn’t connected to our electric grid. You know, they could use all the coal in the world to produce power in China. It’s not coming to Ohio, so we’re not paying for it. The other thing to remember, too, is Ohio’s coal is dirty. It has high emissions of mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides. So power plants need to have very expensive scrubbers in Ohio in order to use Ohio coal. And to give an example of how toxic Ohio coal is, there’s a town in southern Ohio that was next to an electric power plant, coal plant, that had to be bought and closed down because of the toxic chemicals in the ground and in the groundwater. It was called Cheshire, Ohio, and it was bought out by American Electric Power in 2002 for approximately $20 million due to intense pollution. Including toxic coal ash and sulfuric acid mist from the nearby Gavin Power Plant, which had been built from 1974 to 1975. The company had stored the coal ash in unlined pits that allowed all those nasty chemicals from the coal ash to seep into the town’s water supply, and it made people sick.

[10:59] And so basically them buying out the town precluded them from being sued, even though some people refused to be bought out because they wanted to sue the company. But that’s what they did was they bought the entire town and wiped it off, basically wiped it off the face of the map. The cost to operate coal plants today can’t compete with the price of natural gas and the power plants that are run with natural gas. It makes no market sense to try and keep coal going in Ohio. That and the fact that there hasn’t been a new coal plant built in Ohio since the 1970s. In 2019, House Bill 6, which was supported by bribes from First Energy, the electric provider, had a provision to support coal plants with extra charges on consumers’ bills. So it actually would have been more expensive on the electric rates to have coal as the power source. The coal plant subsidy charge wasn’t repealed until last year, 2025. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio ordered First Energy’s Ohio Utilities to refund $186 million to customers and pay $64 million in civil forfeiture fines.

[12:23] And just to tell you how out of touch Ramaswamy is about coal, his buddy, Elon Musk, is instead trying to use nuclear power for his data center needs in Tennessee. And that’s a whole other story. So he answers this question. And yes, there’s there’s people that can’t understand why you can’t do coal anymore. Well, because it’s too expensive. To do, and it’s also not only bad for the climate, it’s just it doesn’t make any market sense. And as a hedge fund manager and a biotech person, he should know what that means, and somebody should have told him about that before he gave that stupid answer.

[13:20] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[13:40] I almost wasn’t going to do a piece or do a segment on the recent arrest of former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who is now a freelance journalist. He was arrested in Los Angeles, I think it was on Saturday, Friday, no, it was on Friday. He was in town in Los Angeles to cover the Grammy Awards. And federal agents arrested him. And the reason why they arrested him was that he had covered the protests in Minneapolis, anti-Ice protests. And one of those protests, a group of protesters went into a church where the lead pastor is an official with ICE in Minneapolis. And they went in and interrupted the church service and explained that the person who was leading the service was a member of ICE and was, you know, doing what ICE was doing, you know, and that they thought that he wasn’t very Christian and they wanted to make sure that the congregation was aware. And it appears that most of them were already aware of it because they weren’t happy that their church service got interrupted.

[15:09] So, Doug, you’re probably wondering why that has anything to do with the federal government. You know, why isn’t that just a simple local matter, trespassing or whatever? Because back in the 90s, in 1994, a law was passed in the Congress called Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act. And this was in response to anti-abortion groups that were aggressively trying to prevent women wanting reproductive care from entering abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood clinics by blocking doors, blocking the entrances, chaining themselves to the door. And so the Congress then came up with this law that would make it a federal crime to prevent somebody from being able to enter a clinic. And it was signed by President Bill Clinton in May of 1994, and it prohibits the following three things.

[16:12] 1. The use of physical force, threat of physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with, or attempt to injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person who is obtaining an abortion. And number two, the use of physical force, threat, or physical force, or physical obstruction to intentionally injure, intimidate, interfere with, or attempt to injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person who is exercising or trying to exercise their First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship.

[16:51] And number three, the intentional damage or destruction of a reproductive health care facility or a place of worship. And that’s the thing, is that a lot of abortion rights activists wanted a federal law in order to protect women’s access to clinics. Well, in order to get it through Congress, of course, the Christian nationalists at the time got the churches added to that. That’s what they arrested Don Lemon and three other black journalists, coincidentally, of doing. Even though he wasn’t participating in the protest, he was covering it as his job as a freelance journalist. And so the Department of Justice, or I’m sorry, President Trump’s legal office, went to a couple of magistrates in Minnesota to try to get an arrest warrant signed, and nobody would do it because they did not see a crime from Don Lemon. He was not interfering with a church service. He was covering it.

[18:08] So supposedly, and this is still a question, supposedly the Department of Justice got an indictment, at least that’s what they say, and they sent some federal agents to go arrest him in Los Angeles and the three other people. They did it at 11 o’clock at night, and knowing that he would have to spend the night in jail, know that he would have to spend the night in jail just for spite. And then in the next day, when he was able to see a judge, the judge released him on his own recognizance without bail and with no travel restrictions. The Department of Justice wanted travel restrictions and bail because they said he was a danger to the community. And this is a classic attack on the press. I have a problem with the FACE Act because I don’t believe that even the protesters who were also arrested, eventually arrested when they were tracked down, they didn’t use physical force anymore.

[19:18] To injure or intimidate or interfere with or attempt to interfere with. All they did was they crashed a church service, just like any other one, any other person would do. And the fact that the Department of Justice is prosecuting these people is just a prime example of Christian nationalism run amok. Because several months ago there was a church service that was interrupted. Okay, so this was a month ago, so it was probably in December, January. A Texas Republican, Valentina Gomez, interrupted a church service in New Branfells, Texas.

[20:12] Service at the Faith Church in New Brunsville, who described themselves as an open and affirming congregation who celebrate the LGBT community. And so she was in the back, and she loudly interrupted the church service, called them groomers, that they would burn in hell, etc., etc. And they had some, staff people that came and requested that she leave. And as she’s leaving, she’s still throwing insults and everything. Well, this Valentina Gomez has also been known to burn books. She burns LGBT books that she finds in the library. And she’s a failed candidate for the Missouri Secretary of State. In the primary, I think she ran in 2024. In the primary, she was sixth out of eight people that ran. She is very, very much extremist. And the fact that she interrupted the church and she didn’t get arrested and prosecuted by the federal government tells you all you need to know about the situation with Don Lemon and the other reporters.

[21:29] It’s all performance. It’s all for show. They’re not going to be able to find a judge or a jury or anybody that’s going to try them or convict them. They’re going to be released because there’s no crime. They were exercising their First Amendment rights, and it was part of the press.

[21:52] But they’re doing that so that it looks good on TV. So Pam Bondi can go and act like she’s real tough, even though she’s not.

[22:05] So that’s my comment about the Don Lemon situation, that it’s obviously this law is not treated equally. In fact, it’s really hard to get police to arrest people that interfere with women trying to get abortions. I know a couple of clinic escorts, and they tell me some of the stories sometimes that they can’t even get the cops to show up when they want to get them cited for trespassing. So the whole issue with Don Lemon, that’s how it’s going to turn out, is nothing’s going to happen to him. It’s going to be in the press and they’re going to make hay out of it. And Trump’s going to complain about it. But in the end, Don Lemon’s going to be fine. And once again, the Christian nationalists show who they really are.

[23:13] For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us.

[23:33] Coming within a couple of weeks, a week or two of the murder of Rene Good came another ICE-involved shooting. A 37-year-old man by the name of Alex Pretti, P-R-E-T-T-I, he was a ICU nurse and he worked at the VA clinic. Alex was tackled by a gang of ICE agents when he attempted to intervene to help a woman who was also being harassed by a gang of ICE agents. Alex happened to be carrying a gun.

[24:19] And in the scuffle to arrest him or to detain him, one of the agents pulled the gun out of his holster, out of Alex’s holster, and took it away. And then in the video that was filmed from a couple of different angles, one of the ICE agents shot Alex, and then that started a whole fuselage, is that the word, fuselage, many, many, many, many shots. And unfortunately, Alex was killed.

[24:59] And so my question is, you know, because we heard this, we heard this by the by the apologists. We heard this after Renee Good was murdered. You know, if only she had complied, if they told her to stop and get out of the car, she’d only gotten out of the car. She wouldn’t be dead. She brought this on herself. So what are they going to say about Alex? What are they going to say about the nurse that worked at the VA clinic who happened to have a permit to carry a weapon and Minnesota is a concealed carry state? I mean, how many federal thugs need to be beating on you in order for you to be considered complying with officers?

[25:57] You know, it just looked like the force that they used was just not proportionate to what was going on. He didn’t, he did, unlike their initial statements from ICE, he, Alex was not brandishing the gun. He didn’t charge the agents. He wasn’t going to murder them. They tried to make the gun out to be more scarier than it was. It was a SIG Sauer pistol. And they kept saying, well, it’s semi-automatic, and it had multiple magazines. It wasn’t a machine gun. It was a handgun, which means he probably could have got off maybe 10 rounds if that was his intention, which it was not. And the video showed that he was holding his phone most of the time because he was doing his job that he took on as an observer, a legal observer. So that was the other thing that the ICE complained about was that he was obstructing justice.

[27:05] Supposedly, they were trying to apprehend somebody that an illegal alien, a criminal illegal alien. and that’s their whole thing. But they didn’t need the shooting. They didn’t need to shoot Alex. They didn’t need the killing, just like they didn’t need to kill Renee Good.

[27:27] And this is what happens when you have people that are brought up on video games and think that they’re badasses because they’re dressed in military gear and carry a gun, but they haven’t been trained. Properly. You know, most police departments don’t accept hot shots like that. And if you get a hot shot like that, then they make sure that you’re not around for very long because they don’t want hotheads. They don’t want people who shoot first and ask questions later. That is not the job of law enforcement. You know, he was a Alex was a citizen. He was a white male. Well, he did not need to be beat up and slammed onto the ground and then shot. There were several gunshots in his back. So he was laying face first onto the ground when he was shot. So they not only beat him up, threw him to the ground, but they also sprayed his face with pepper spray. Because they also like to do that when they have you pinned down and you can’t fight back, they’ll pepper spray you in the face. So how many thugs does it take to beat you up in order for you to be considered to be complying with law enforcement? I’m asking the MAGA people out there.

[28:55] And the fact that, you know, we’re playing this broken record again, where this lawless administration comes out trying to drag the victim through the mud as if we don’t see the videos. You know, they can’t control the videos. That’s one of the things that I like about these protests in Minnesota is that they record everything.

[29:22] Because right now, Minneapolis is being occupied. They’re being occupied by federal law enforcement. They’re hotheads and they shouldn’t be working. I tell you, if we ever get through this situation, I’m going to see to it that none of those people involved ever work in law enforcement ever again. They’ll either be in prison or they will be blackballed from working as a cop or even as a mall security guard in the future. But the ICE is being used by the Trump administration, most likely Stephen Miller, for their racist Gestapo-like tactics and trying to intimidate people and trying to encourage—what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to poke the bear in order so that Trump can then institute the Insurrection Act and send the military in. And he’s doing that. He wants to do that because he is an asshole who wants to get retribution for everybody that’s ever wronged him. Ever.

[30:31] And the little Goebbels, Stephen Miller Goebbels, is playing into that because he’s got his own agenda, his own white Christian nationalist agenda, trying to deport all these illegal aliens, criminal illegal aliens.

[30:55] And I’ve been down this road before with these jackasses, these police thugs that think that they know they could do whatever the hell they want. I worked with one one time back in the 90s when I was working different jobs. One of the jobs that I worked as worked as risk management for a major grocery chain. And what that entailed was I was to work certain stores in order to stop shoplifters. That was my job. I would observe people, and if I saw them take any product off the shelves and try to walk out without paying for it, it was my job to stop them.

[31:39] And one of these stores that I worked at was in a dicey neighborhood, on the edge of a dicey neighborhood. The neighborhood surrounding this grocery store had the lovely moniker of Uzi Alley. Even though the neighborhood, the place that was on the other side of the creek, next door to this grocery store was a high-rent district, a separate suburb from the city that was full of wealthy people. That’s where the governor of Ohio lived, etc. And so they would have us work this store because there was always an opportunity to stop somebody from stealing something because there was always somebody there that was stealing something because it was a destitute neighborhood.

[32:37] And so one day I noticed this guy was, you know, and we didn’t, and I want to make it clear that we did not racially profile people. I didn’t just follow black people. I just didn’t follow Hispanic people. The people that I followed and observed were people that had a certain behavior of a shoplifter, such as getting a cart and putting stuff in the top and then going down a blind alley and then coming out and there’s nothing in their cart because they stuffed it in their pants. The other thing that I would do is I would watch the baby formula aisle because we had people that would steal baby formula, not for babies. They would sell it at a local bodega down the road for, you know, 50 cents on the dollar to get money, to get cash.

[33:38] And then of course then we had the the usual people that would try to uh steal cigarettes or cigars from the cases that they had at the at the time they had at the uh uh next to the check stands meat was another thing that we always watched people would steal meat so one day we had this guy and I can’t remember what he stole, if he stole a formula or meat, it was one of those things.

[34:11] And you could tell that he was down on his luck. His clothes were kind of dirty. He didn’t have a belt. He had a piece of rope that held his pants up. And I believe he was a white guy. Yeah, he was. He was a white guy. So he did his thing. He stole his thing.

[34:32] And it was supposed to, I was chasing the guy. I chased him out of the store. It was dark. So I was not allowed to leave the store. But we had a special duty Columbus police officer that worked with us. And the special duty officers worked a lot of these stores because it was a way for them to make extra money. It wasn’t as dangerous as working extra shifts on the police department. There was still some little bit of danger to it, but it wasn’t overly dangerous. It was shoplifting. You’d stop shoplifters, or if there was a fight that broke out, you’d break up a fight. This particular special duty officer that I worked with, he liked to harass people that parked wrong in the parking lot because he had nothing better to do. So this guy with the rope around his waist, holding up his pants, takes off. I stop at the store door. The cop that sees me running runs after the guy. And he’s gone for a few minutes, five or ten minutes.

[35:49] Comes back with the guy. His pants are barely on. The rope is kind of loose. And he’s in handcuffs. And the cop brings him back in. And we take him up into the office where we process the shoplifters.

[36:07] And the cop is questioning him because now, because he had to chase after him and arrest him, he’s got to run an ID check to see if he has any warrants. He asked for what his name and his date of birth was. And unfortunately, this gentleman had a speech impediment, either because of dental issues or maybe he was mentally challenged. I’m not sure. But he stuttered and he didn’t speak clearly. And the cop decided to show his ass. And he yelled at the guy about talking right, talk English. And the guy tried to tell him again. And finally, the cop just supposedly had enough, took out his little can of pepper spray. Now, the guy’s handcuffed and he sprayed the guy in the face with the pepper spray, then took his shirt. The guy was wearing a loose fitting shirt and pulled it over his head to keep that pepper spray on his face. And the guy is yelling and screaming because it hurts so bad.

[37:25] And I was very upset. And I said, why did you do that, man? That wasn’t necessary. And he said, oh, it was great. He said, you should have seen me chasing after him. That rope came down and I stepped on it and he fell on his face. It was so funny. Ha, ha, ha, ha. And he starts laughing. So later that night, or the next day, really, after that incident, I informed my boss. About the incident and that I didn’t think it was appropriate. Well, my boss was an ex-Columbus police officer, been in administration, got a job as security at this grocery store chain. And he said, well, you know, he had to have some fun. It’s all right. The guy didn’t get hurt. He’s OK. We’ll just let it go for now. And he took my report and then basically threw it away.

[38:25] So I know guys like these ice guys. I’ve worked with guys like these ice guys. They’re jackasses. They’re assholes.

[38:34] They’re little men cowards who, because they have a certain power and they carry a gun, they think that they’re hot shit and they want to shove that shit in your face as much as possible. So that happened that Alex Pretti was murdered by one or more ICE agents. And then I had a friend of mine. Well, he’s still a friend, but he’s a conservative. He voted for Trump. He commented on a meme that had been posted that had Ashley Babbitt, The woman that was shot in the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, when the MAGA loons were trying to take over the Capitol to stop the 2020 election, had her picture next to Renee Goode. And it said something I couldn’t find it again. So but it said something about where’s your outrage about the woman on the left as much outrage as you had for the woman on the right. And you and if you didn’t have as much outrage, you’re a hypocrite.

[39:57] So then after this Alex Pretti was murdered, my friend shared a meme on his Facebook page that had a picture of, and I had to look it up because they didn’t have names attached to it. And the picture didn’t, I didn’t recognize the woman, but it was Laken Riley and Alex and said, you know, these nurses were murdered. Where was your outrage for the nurse on the left? And basically the same thing. If you’re not as equally outraged, then you’re a hypocrite. Well, this is my take on Ashley Babbitt. Ashley Babbitt was breaking the law at the time that she was shot.

[40:51] But the person who shot her, the law enforcement officer who shot her, warned her to get back and not keep coming through. She was trying to, there was a broken window in the door at the House of Representatives chamber, and she was trying to get through that window because she wanted to help the people that she was with take over the House of Representatives and try to stop the certification of the 2020 vote. So she was in the midst of an insurrection. So she was breaking the law.

[41:30] And the cop did warn her before he shot her. And in the information that I found, his last name was Bird, said he made his name public in August of 2021, interview for NBC News. He said, once we barricaded the doors, we were essentially trapped where we were. There was no way to retreat, no other way to get out. If they get through that door, they’re into the House chamber and upon the members of Congress that were still there. He stated that he had pulled the trigger as a last resort after the mob of protesters ignored his repeated orders to get back and that he did not know at that moment whether Babbitt was armed or not or that she was a woman. Byrd commented, I know that day I saved countless lives. I know members of Congress as well as my fellow officers and staff were in jeopardy and in serious danger. And that’s my job. And come to find out that Ashley Babbitt was not armed with a gun or anything like that. She did have a pocket knife in her pocket. But the officer that shot her did not know if she was armed or not. And they had to assume that they were in jeopardy because they were in a locked room with no escape, no retreat, and these people were still trying to come through the door.

[42:56] And if they were aware, they knew that the people that had attacked the Capitol had been beating the cops that were there, and somebody had erected a gallows for Pence. So for all he knew, they were about to be murdered. And so he did what he was trained to do, and that was protect the congresspeople that were in that room. And Babbitt happened to be the one that got shot. And I also read in the article, the news article, from the time that she was shot in the shoulder.

[43:34] And unfortunately, she bled out before she got help. So it wasn’t necessarily like Renee Good at all in that Babbitt wasn’t shot in the face. And she wasn’t just standing there minding her own business. She was actually in the process of committing a crime. It’s just like if somebody, if you’re at your house and somebody’s breaking into your house trying to come through a window and you had a gun, you would be justified in using it, whether they had criminal intent or not.

[44:12] The person coming through the window did not have permission to be coming through the window. So the death of Ashley Babbitt is not the same as the murder of Renee Good at all. It’s tragic. Both of them are tragic for sure, but they’re not the same thing. And then, like I said, they tried to then compare Lakin Riley’s murder because she was studying nursing at the University of Georgia with Jeffrey Preddy, the nurse at the VA that was murdered. And they were also not the same thing. Lakin Riley was murdered in February of 2024. Her killer was arrested the next day. and it turned out that he was an undocumented immigrant. His trial was in November of 2024, and he was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

[45:17] So Lake and Riley’s killer was held to account for that murder. It was also used by people on the right as to demagogue undocumented people in general when the data shows that undocumented people are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens. Because naturally, if you know you are in a country illegally, you don’t want to draw attention to yourself, so you’re not going to commit crimes if you can help it.

[45:53] And there are plenty of people that have done that. They came here, overstayed their visa, or they came here illegally, and they pay their taxes, their sales taxes or whatever taxes. They raise families, everything. They don’t cause any trouble. They don’t commit any crimes. Yes, they did commit a crime coming in illegally, but it’s not one where you, it’s a civil case. It’s not a criminal case. The mention about the nurse, then they are also talking about Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd in 2020. And trying to say that he wasn’t held to account or people on the left forced him to be held to account. And the thing is, to point out, is that there are two tiers of justice in the United States, unfortunately.

[47:00] There’s the justice system for poor people, undocumented immigrants, people like that. And then there’s the tier four police officers and rich white guys and corporate executives, people with money. There’s that. So Derek Chauvin and four other officers were fired the next day

[47:25] after George Floyd was murdered when the video of the killing came out on social media. In April of 2021, the next year, Chauvin was convicted of unintentional second-degree murder, third-degree murder, second-degree manslaughter, and on June 25th, he was sentenced to 22 and a half years in prison.

[47:50] Mainly because the murder of George Floyd wasn’t intentional. See, that’s the reason why it’s a 20-year prison sentence and not life imprisonment like the killer of Lake and Riley got.

[48:07] Chauvin also later pled guilty to federal civil rights charges of using unreasonable force and ignoring his serious medical distress and was sentenced to 22 additional years in prison. And the other thing to remember, too, was Chauvin wasn’t a guy living in his mom’s basement that liked to wear tactical gear and played Call of Duty and thought he was a badass military guy. Chauvin was a 19-year veteran of the Minneapolis Police Department. And the other interesting point, too, is he spent almost no jail time before his trial. He turned himself in, was arraigned, booked and arraigned, and then was released on bail, which is something that did not happen to Lake and Riley’s killer. And then you’re going to say, well, Doug, he was flight risk or blah, blah, blah. But the thing is, they were not treated the same. It’s not the same. Again, Lake and Riley dying, that was a tragedy. But it wasn’t any different than any random murder in a city or anywhere in this country that happens every day. There is no difference between what happened to Lake and Riley and what happened to other people that weren’t that, you know, that weren’t killed by the cops. Put it that way.

[49:35] You know, some random person murdered somebody. Well, we just had that happen today here where I live. Some teenager got shot and killed. Happens every day somewhere. You know, with the proliferation of guns. And then you have that little boy that runs the border protection, Bovino, talking about, you know, you shouldn’t bring a gun to a protest. And Kash Patel, the so-called FBI director, saying that too. It’s like, where were these, you know, these are these, these are the same guys. All these people are the same people that are making apologies for the ICE and the thuggery. These are the same people that protested mask mandates and like had don’t tread on me tattoos and flew those flags. It’s like, it’s just, talk about hypocrites. That’s the hypocrites. They had the NRA come out with a statement just this week saying, oh, we need to have more investigation. You know, these are the Second Amendment people.

[50:56] You know, this guy, Alex, that was murdered, he was exercising his Second Amendment right. And the ICE officers took that away from him.

[51:08] Took away all his rights. When you murder somebody, you take away all their rights.

[51:14] So forgive me if I don’t believe the lying asses coming out of D.C. And trying to drag victims of their thuggery through the mud to make it cover lawlessness. And something needs to change because what I see happening, if something doesn’t change soon, is it’s going to escalate even more and you’re going to have the people of Minneapolis, that are going to fight back in a more severe way than they are now. It’s just a natural progression because you keep poking the bear, eventually the bear’s going to snap back.

[52:02] And so these cosplay Call of Duty guys wearing their nice tactical gear that can’t serve on regular police departments because they’re mentally challenged. They need to be removed from that city. The funding needs to be cut. ICE needs to be shut down immediately before this gets any worse. And it will get worse if somebody doesn’t do something soon. Secular Left is hosted, written, and produced by Doug Berger, and he is solely responsible for the content. Our theme music is Dank and Nasty, composed using the Amplify Studio. For more information on the topics in this episode and the links used, visit secularleft.us. If you want to support the show, share it with your friends or visit our merch store at secularleft.us.shop. See you next time.