We Can't Make a Dog in the Manger the Tyrant of the Universe

One of the greatest bits of wisdom C.S. Lewis ever wrote was about a sentiment that has been as invasive and destructive as a deadly virus to a body, and, as is the usual case, Lewis's words seem to become more and more relevant as time goes on.

In the book "The Great Divorce," he writes of the people who declare that no one should experience any kind of ease or joy while the least of us are troubled or in pain:

“To demand of the loveless and the self-imprisioned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven…Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it: or else for ever and ever the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. I know it has a grand sound to say ye'll accept no salvation which leaves one creature in the dark outside. But watch the sophistry or ye'll make a Dog in the Manger the tyrant of the universe.”

In Western politics, it's this very sentiment that's caused more than a few to sell their own rights, well-being, and fellow countrymen down the river. It feels noble to do so, as if you're truly bearing a cross not meant for you to help lighten the burden of someone who does have to carry a heavy one, but as Lewis warns, this is fallacious thinking.

Case in point, James Talarico is trying to make people fall into that trap right now by using a boy named Liam Tadeo.

BREAKING: Liam Tadeo was just deported by ICE. https://t.co/njFi80XEcB pic.twitter.com/BOIQ42NdNM
— James Talarico (@jamestalarico) August 27, 2026

Of course, Talarico is bending the story to make it sound worse than it actually is.

Tadeo is the son of illegal immigrants. During a routine traffic stop in Austin, his father, Victor, was detained, and both he and his son were transported to the South Texas Family Residential Center to make sure the family stayed together. The father elected to have Liam deported with him to make sure they weren't ever separated.

According to KXAN, Victor is a repeat offender who's been arrested and deported before.

His mother, Maria, is not a legal United States citizen either!

The father of 5-year-old Liam Tadeo, the boy detained by ICE alongside his father in Austin earlier this month, is voluntarily deporting to Mexico.
His attorney said that will ensure Tadeo remains in custody of his… pic.twitter.com/VeXsx8prOW
— Joni Job (@jj_talking) August 27, 2026

This is a pretty cut-and-dried case. His parents are here illegally. They need to be deported. They wanted their son to go with them so their family wasn't separated, and that's that. Talarico's attempts to make it seem like ICE cornered a small child and shoved him out of a gate at the southern border is a horrible lie at best, and an irresponsible mischaracterization of our law enforcement officials at worst.

But the response he's aiming for is empathy to the point of suicide. The thinking he wants you to have is to feel sorry for a child to the point where you're willing to make enemies out of the people who are doing exactly what they were voted in to do. In a way, he wants people to be horrified at themselves for allowing such a thing to happen.

But this is the thinking Lewis warned us against.

The poor, desperate, needy, downtrodden, unlucky, and unfortunate will always be around. Each of us will take turns in one of those positions at some level of severity. As I type this, there are parents who saw the dawn after losing their child the night before. There's likely a family watching their home burn to the ground. A man somewhere is injecting himself with a drug that's kept him homeless and jobless for years, but he can't stop. A single mother is currently getting the news that she's being laid off, and she doesn't know how she's going to house and feed her children.

These are everyday occurrences, and yet the world keeps spinning, and humanity keeps moving forward. It has to, because if we stopped everything to help a troubled soul, humanity would never move forward. We wouldn't survive. We definitely would never advance.

For us, here and now, our country will never get back on track, heal, and advance if we don't get the people who are here illegally out of our country and begin restoring law and order, making our economy more stable, and our system more dependable. This is one of the big reasons the Trump administration was hired by the people in the first place. This was never going to be smooth. Sometimes it would get downright nasty, but it needed to be done.

Two things need to be realized about this situation.

First, Talarico doesn't actually care about this child or his plight. He's no better than a tool to people like Talarico, who will make a show of outrage and indignation about the entire situation until the situation no longer pays dividends. Then it'll be dropped and forgotten about. This is the natural life cycle of a Democrat cause celebre. Intense care, wall-to-wall coverage, unrelenting public shaming for those who disagree, and finally, irrelevance.

If you need an example, look to any mass shooting where the shooter ended up being non-white and/or an individual with an inconvenient ideological stance.

But secondly, we need to be a bit more hardened in our hearts about these kinds of stories. It seems cruel and heartless to see kids go through something like a deportation, especially one established in a state-side community, but mommy and daddy broke the law. They have to go, and they said the boy did, too. If they want to come back to the community they established themselves in, they can do so the proper way.

But rather than being something that generates outrage, this needs to be a message to the people looking to sneak across our border.

"Don't put your kid in this situation."

Now, enjoy this meme.