A Country of Meatheads

On Sunday, famous actor and movie director, Rob Reiner, and his wife, Michele, were tragically murdered in their Brentwood, California home. Even more tragic, the murderer turns out to be their son – 32-year-old Nick Reiner. It is well known that Nick has had a long history of drug addiction. He and his father even made a movie documenting his struggles with substance abuse. And this is where that inevitably ends – in tragedy. This is the way almost all these stories end – in tragedy.

Nick Reiner was born into Hollywood royalty. He came from wealth and fame. He was given everything he could ever want in his life. He didn’t have to work for anything. He didn’t have to earn anything. So, like many in this type of situation, he developed a drug addiction. Since everything else had been given to him, the only way he could feel any type of happiness was through drugs. It’s easy to picture how the scene played itself out on Sunday. After decades of getting everything that he wanted from his parents, he had become not only dependent on drugs, but dependent on his parents for everything. His life was going absolutely nowhere, and Sunday, probably for the first time in his life, his parents told him enough was enough. They were cutting him off.

When his parents told him that they were not going to give him anything anymore, suddenly, in his eyes, his parents became the bad guys. They became so evil that he felt the need and even the right to murder them. As soon as his parents were no longer the free ATM that they had been his entire life, he wanted to destroy them. Think about the entitlement and lack of gratitude he must have had to want to kill the people who for 32 years gave him everything he ever needed. He did not remember the extreme generosity they showed him. They had created the monster who eventually killed them. I don’t to blame Rob Reiner too much for his own death because he believed he was doing what was best for his son. But what he felt was best for his son was really the worst thing any parent could ever do for their child – give them everything that they ever want. That creates little entitled monsters. I think of the quote from Abraham Lincoln, when he said, “the worst thing you can do for those you love is the things they could and should do for themselves.”

There is a parallel with Rob Reiner’s situation and the mass migration into our country that we are dealing with. In Minnesota, 81% of Somali migrants are on welfare. 81% are living off the public dole. The United States taxpayers are giving 81% of the Somalis the money that they need to survive in this country. These people are not working and earning their way; they are not producing and improving our country; they are living off of welfare from our social services. And while the US taxpayers were paying for 81% of those Somalis in Minnesota to live in the greatest country on the planet, those same Somalis set up a multi-agency fraud ring which bilked $1 billion from the US taxpayers. That is the entitlement and lack of gratitude that is created when you give people everything that they need without expecting that they earn it.

When all that fraud was exposed, what was the response from the Somali community? No apologies, no contrition, no level of gratitude for the generosity that United States has shown them, no, none of that. The Somalis are calling the people who exposed this fraud, and those who are speaking out against it, “racists” and “Islamophobic”. In their eyes, the people committing the fraud aren’t the bad guys; they are the victims. The people who exposed the fraud and are taking away the fraud are the bad guys. That’s the way it works when you give people the things that they can and should get for themselves. That becomes the mentality. Not much different than Nick Reiner when his parents told him, ‘No more’.

We see this mentality in too many communities throughout our country. Good guys are portrayed as bad guys, and bad guys are portrayed as victims The gang bangers, the arm robbers, the drug dealers, are not the bad guys in the inner cities; the police who are arresting the gang bangers, the arm robbers, and the drug dealers are the bad guys. That’s what we’re told. The police officers who go out on the streets every night, risking their lives to keep the community safe are the bad guys when they arrest criminals. And the criminals are the victims.

Is it a mere coincidence that this mentality comes out of the communities which have some of the highest percentages of welfare recipients in our country? Those are the same communities whose buildings are covered with graffiti, littered with broken windows, and have been vandalized? If it’s not their tax dollars that are paying to keep the community clean and safe, so they feel no remorse when they destroy the community. People who point out that graffiti and vandalism are wrong, are the bad guys not the graffiti artists and the vandals. When BLM was burning down the major cities in our country, the BLM activists didn’t care that their city was being burned to the ground because they didn’t pay the taxes to build the city and won’t pay any to rebuild it. They weren’t the bad guys; it was the people who pointed out that looting stores and setting entire city blocks on fire is wrong who became the bad guys.

When everything is given to you, you develop a warp sense of value, you develop an entitlement mentality, you lose gratitude for everything that you have. Nick Reiner is going to spend the rest of his life in a jail cell. And he’ll do so because everything in his life has been given to him and the one time it wasn’t he lashed out violently and now two people are dead because of it.

The reason why the European immigration into our country in the late 1800s and early 1900s was so successful was because there was no welfare state. The people coming here were on their own. They had to earn their way. They had to work and support themselves and be productive and make the country a better place, or they would either die or go back to their country of origin. The government didn’t give any immigrant anything 100 years ago. They worked hard, they assimilated, and they became American because they loved America.

The 10 million illegal immigrants that came into our country during the Biden administration were given free housing, welfare, food stamps, EBT cards, free cell phones. They were given everything. And as human nature shows, there was not gratitude. They destroyed many of the four-star hotels they were housed in for free. They violently attacked many American citizens; they raped; they murdered; they sex trafficked, all in a country and against citizens who welcomed them in and gave them everything. And too many people in this country act towards this extreme criminality like the parents who constantly makes excuses for their child’s bad behavior because they don’t want to label their child as “bad”. So, they ignore it; they downplay it; they gaslight the victims. I sure the Reiners were guilty of this with Nick’s bad behavior growing up.

So, when Muslims do something horrible like steal billions of tax dollars or kill dozens of people in a terrorist attack or raped and murder a 20-year-old girl, we don’t call them out; we don’t blame them; we worry about offending them. We warn against Islamophobia after people from the Islam religion just murdered American citizens in the name of Islam, because we must be careful not to offend Islam, you know, the religion that motivated the murders. They hate America. America is the bad guy. They want to destroy America, even though America has been overwhelmingly generous to them. They will never remember our generosity. When they no longer need us, they will kill each and every one of us and paint us as the bad guys. Through our warped sense of generosity, we in the West are creating the monsters who will end up killing us, no different than Rob and Michele Reiner’s generosity creating the monster who ended up killing them.

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Mr. Garrett is a graduate of Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.