Yesterday, I wrote that the fact is that creating and preserving civilization requires a baseline level of cruelty to create a bubble in which it can exist.
It was a good piece, I think (and the people who commented thought so as well), and an important rejoinder to the tedious, tear-jerking we are constantly subjected to when liberals whine about Trump's immigration policies. It is, in other words, worth a read as a supplement to this post.
The basic idea is simple: civilization is based on enforcing a set of rules and crushing all external threats.
Civilization rests on a foundation of necessary cruelty in the same way that Michelangelo's David required a hammer and chisel to come to life, and its preservation depends on armed guards and constant vigilance. The Lourve may hold some of the world's great art, but we just got a lesson on what can happen when the barriers to barbarians getting their way fail.
Barbarians are, in a sense, always at the gates, and more than a few are always within them. We live in a fallen world. No doubt many of the people who have crossed the border illegally are good and decent people simply seeking a better life. Many might even contribute to society more than they take from it. More than a few of the people being deported would have contributed a lot more than any Antifa protester.
But you can't vet 8 billion people, so you make rules that are by their nature blunt and "unfair." Because the alternative is worse.
Believing that we can avoid this necessity is a luxury belief, and a destructive one. And in the long run, it is cruel to everybody involved because ignoring reality undermines the civilization itself.
What most people miss is that Jack Nicholson was the hero of A Few Good Men, although even the writers may not have fully understood the extent to which this is true. It really does take the Marine Corps to man the walls lest civilization fall, and that means that good people will pay a high price—often the ultimate price—to do so. And sometimes that price is unbearably high.
But there is another side to liberals' failing to understand the harsher realities of life, and that is their unwillingness to face the harsh prices THEY are willing to pay to keep their illusions alive.
Again, look at the immigration debate. We are subjected to countless tearjerker stories about innocent illegal aliens being manhandled by ICE agents, and some are true I suppose. But in fact, most of them are only partially true, such as this one I picked nearly at random because I just saw it:
— Eric Lee (@EricLeeAtty) November 17, 2025
It's quite the sob story, complete with American flags, family love and grief, and all the bells and whistles. The framing makes you tear up, as it is meant to.
Except...buried in there is the fact that the same illegal immigrant for whom you are crying also committed a horrific crime—armed carjacking. He is reformed! He has a family! Blah blah blah.
Changes things a bit, doesn't it?
But that is only a tiny fraction of shading the truth. We keep being told all about how open borders have opened up a world of possibilities for migrants who were living in squalor and fear, but not a single person who sends me sobs stories ever discusses the dirty underbelly of the migration crisis. For instance, the human trafficking operation FUNDED BY US TAXPAYER DOLLARS!!! that imported 300,000 kids and handed them over to random strangers.
Remember when the Biden admin ran a child trafficking operation at our border and lost track of 300,000 migrant kids?
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 19, 2025
The Trump admin already found over 30,000 of them.
People from the Biden admin need to go prison for this.pic.twitter.com/nT1bv8CWVT
That just got swept under the rug. As are the illegal aliens driving big rigs on our roads, or the massive crime and drug epidemic, or the housing crisis, or the draining of our public finances, or the massive toll on our education system, and so many other consequences of the Biden immigration policy.
A 17-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico has been charged with attacking a woman with a hammer in a Texas park, allegedly attempting to kidnap and sexually assault her while she was jogging. pic.twitter.com/gWoqNThfhL
— aka (@akafaceUS) November 19, 2025
When a marijuana farm was raided a few months ago, the media and left erupted in outrage that ICE was attacking "agricultural workers" (who will pick our pot?!), and seemed not to care that there were minors working at the farm—unaccompanied minors—illegally working there alongside pedophiles.
The left is erupting in outrage about deportations, calling them cruel, but were foursquare behind a policy that enriched cartels, facilitated massive sexual abuse along the path to the border, and that handed over hundreds of thousands of kids to people who used them as sex slaves and illegal workers.
None of that is the necessary cruelty that preserves civilization; it is the kind of chosen cruelty that destroys them.
I will not be lectured to about "cruelty" by people who were fine with Biden's policies. They were not compassionate in the least. Migrants were lured here at taxpayer expense, and millions were literally dumped off at bus stops in border towns when the holding facilities got full.
People who pride themselves on having good hearts while shutting off their brains are not more moral; they are moral cowards who look away from reality and are unwilling to make the hard choices necessary to build a civilization that works and endures.
Yes, I don't want more cruelty to exist than absolutely necessary, but the only way to make a judgment about what is and is not necessary is to look reality in the face and deal with it.
