I wrote a book on the BP oil disaster, & there’s a critical parallel with ICE protests in Minnesota that almost everyone is missing. When the Deepwater Horizon explosion dominated Twitter for months, the narrative was simple: BP cut corners on safety. That story was comforting. It was also wrong. Dead wrong. The disaster wasn’t caused by too little safety. It was caused by safetyism. Before the explosion, HR and HSE departments overwhelmingly filled with women who never worked a dangerous job in their life became obsessed with eliminating all injuries offshore. Not major hazards. Not catastrophic risk. ALL injuries, even minor cuts & bruises. Tens of millions of dollars. Thousands of hours of paperwork. Endless training modules. Everyone,from dishwasher to captain, was empowered to shut down a drilling operation costing millions per day to prevent a sprained ankle. Meanwhile, people with deep technical expertise, guys who actually understood blowout risk, were sidelined or fired for saying the obvious: That HR induced exhaustion causes accidents. That drowning crews in paperwork makes them miss real danger. That spending money on back-injury training means less money preventing explosions. Like the protesters in Minnesota, HR and Safety became powerful, organized, coordinated via expensive software, mobile & completely detached from reality. One crewman reported a serious onboard fire that nearly killed someone. Nothing happened for weeks. When he kept pushing a manager told him to STFU. He called HR to report the “verbal abuse.” Within hours, an executive helicopter full of HR Quick Reaction Team launched from Houston. They didn’t investigate the fire. They investigated him, the guy who called HR. Their conclusion? The man reporting the fire was “repeatedly harassing the crew to report the fire.” He was fired. A company-wide HR memo publicly shamed him. All in the name of “safety.” Here’s the truth they refused to accept: offshore drilling is dangerous. You cannot extract tens of millions of barrels of oil without injuries & yes, sometimes death. Now apply that lesson to Minnesota. Law enforcement is dangerous. You cannot deport tens of millions of people without injuries & yes, sometimes death. Yes, Renee Good was shot. Yes, Alex Pretti was shot. Yes, ICE operations result in injuries. And yes more people will be hurt by ICE this year. But HR didn’t eliminate injuries offshore. They just reclassified them for statistics, exhausted the workforce, and made people afraid to report real problems setting the stage for a major explosion. That’s exactly what’s happening now. ICE agents are being forced to waste time protecting identities, managing feelings, navigating activist “volunteers” & hesitating rather than acting decisively when seconds matter. Every minute an agent loses sleep worrying about this is a minute less rested. Every hour spent on crowd-management training is an hour not spent on training to manage violent criminals. And worse.. I’m a ship captain. I was trained to make the hardest choice: to do the most good for the most people. I was taught that one day I might have to send a fire team into a space they won’t come back from to buy passengers ten more minutes to reach lifeboats. That’s the job. Numbers matter. Yes, Renee Good was shot. That’s tragic. But it pales next to the hundreds killed by violent illegal immigrants under Biden. It’s nothing compared to the thousands who died between the Darién Gap and Mexico. It’s microscopic compared to the 400,000 fentanyl deaths many in ICUs like the one Alex Pretti worked in. Yes, some children were separated from families. But FAR fewer than the number raped, killed, or abandoned between the Darien Gap & Mexico under Biden The hard truth is this: Safetyism caused the BP explosion. Safetyism has killed millions. Safetyism is killing this nation right now. ICE protestors aren’t saving lives, they are pushing the body count higher.