Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
You'll be hearing more of this "great replacement theory" in the days ahead. It's not a conspiracy as much as a real theory that can be tested against evidence. Cathy Young, for example, debunks it, here: "The Replacement Theory -- And Terrorist Practice" (Via Memeorandum).
Fox News --- and Trucker Carlson in particular --- have come under heavy fire since the killings. I quit watching his show, but obviously the Democrat Party's open borders policies are predicated on the supply a steady stream of illegal alien public welfare supplicants to build a permanent leftist-socialist-immigrant voting coalition.
I did catch this segment at the time, last year, featuring Mark Styen (with video snippets of Tucker). Good times, heh:
I quit watching Tucker sometime last year --- and mind you, this was after months of watching his show religiously during the thick of the "pandemic spring" 2020.
First, I was just bored. But then I saw people freakin' out about how he'd become a "New Right" extremeist. Once he went to Hungary to air his program with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, all of my interest tanked. I can take a lot of populist nationalism, up to a point, but Tucker crossed the line.
So now, it turns out, the New York Times has published the first part of an investigative series on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," now trending at Memeorandum.
Tucker Carlson burst through the doors of Charlie Palmer Steak, enfolded in an entourage of producers and assistants, cellphone pressed to his ear. On the other end was Lachlan Murdoch, chairman of the Fox empire and his de facto boss.
Most of Fox’s Washington bureau, along with the cable network’s top executives, had gathered at the power-class steakhouse, a few blocks from the office, for their annual holiday party. Days earlier, Mr. Carlson had set off an uproar, claiming on air that mass immigration made America “poor and dirtier.” Blue-chip advertisers were fleeing. Within Fox, Mr. Carlson was widely viewed to have finally crossed some kind of line. Many wondered what price he might pay.
The answer became clear that night in December 2018: absolutely none.
When “Tucker Carlson Tonight” aired, Mr. Carlson doubled down, playing video of his earlier comments and citing a report from an Arizona government agency that said each illegal border crossing left up to eight pounds of litter in the desert. Afterward, on the way to the Christmas party, Mr. Carlson spoke directly with Mr. Murdoch, who praised his counterattack, according to a former Fox employee told of the exchange.
“We’re good,” Mr. Carlson said, grinning triumphantly, as he walked into the restaurant.
In the years since, Mr. Carlson has constructed what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful. Though he frequently declares himself an enemy of prejudice — “We don’t judge them by group, and we don’t judge them on their race,” Mr. Carlson explained to an interviewer a few weeks before accusing impoverished immigrants of making America dirty — his show teaches loathing and fear. Night after night, hour by hour, Mr. Carlson warns his viewers that they inhabit a civilization under siege — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures, and by tech companies and cultural elites who will silence them, or label them racist, if they complain. When refugees from Africa, numbering in the hundreds, began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the Trump administration, he warned that the continent’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.” Amid nationwide outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, Mr. Carlson dismissed those protesting the killing as “criminal mobs.” Companies like Angie’s List and Papa John’s dropped their ads. The following month, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” became the highest-rated cable news show in history.
His encyclopedia of provocations has only expanded. Since the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Carlson has become the most visible and voluble defender of those who violently stormed the U.S. Capitol to keep Donald J. Trump in office, playing down the presence of white nationalists in the crowd and claiming the attack “barely rates as a footnote.” In February, as Western pundits and politicians lined up to condemn the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, for his impending invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Carlson invited his viewers to shift focus back to the true enemy at home. “Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist?” Mr. Carlson asked. “Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?” He was roundly labeled an apologist and Putin cheerleader, only to press ahead with segments that parroted Russian talking points and promoted Kremlin propaganda about purported Ukrainian bioweapons labs.
Alchemizing media power into political influence, Mr. Carlson stands in a nativist American tradition that runs from Father Coughlin to Patrick J. Buchanan. Now Mr. Carlson’s on-air technique — gleefully courting blowback, then fashioning himself as his aggrieved viewers’ partner in victimhood — has helped position him, as much as anyone, to inherit the populist movement that grew up around Mr. Trump. At a moment when white backlash is the jet fuel of a Republican Party striving to return to power in Washington, he has become the pre-eminent champion of Americans who feel most threatened by the rising power of Black and brown citizens. To channel their fear into ratings, Mr. Carlson has adopted the rhetorical tropes and exotic fixations of white nationalists, who have watched gleefully from the fringes of public life as he popularizes their ideas. Mr. Carlson sometimes refers to “legacy Americans,” a dog-whistle term that, before he began using it on his show last fall, appeared almost exclusively in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer, The New York Times found. He takes up story lines otherwise relegated to far-right or nativist websites like VDare: “Tucker Carlson Tonight” has featured a string of segments about the gruesome murders of white farmers in South Africa, which Mr. Carlson suggested were part of a concerted campaign by that country’s Black-led government. Last April, Mr. Carlson set off yet another uproar, borrowing from a racist conspiracy theory known as “the great replacement” to argue that Democrats were deliberately importing “more obedient voters from the third world” to “replace” the current electorate and keep themselves in power. But a Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his show found that it was far from the first time Mr. Carlson had done so.
“Tucker is ultimately on our side,” Scott Greer, a former deputy editor at the Carlson-founded Daily Caller, who cut ties with the publication in 2018 after his past writings for a white nationalist site were unearthed, said on his podcast last spring. “He can get millions and millions of boomers to nod along with talking points that would have only been seen on VDare or American Renaissance a few years ago.”
That pattern is no accident. To a degree not broadly appreciated outside Fox, “Tucker Carlson Tonight” is the apex of a programming and editorial strategy that transformed the network during the Trump era, according to interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists. Like the Republican Party itself, Fox has sought to wring rising returns out of a slowly declining audience: the older white conservatives who make up Mr. Trump’s base and much of Fox’s core viewership. To minimize content that might tempt them to change the channel, Fox News has sidelined Trump-averse or left-leaning contributors. It has lost some of its most respected news journalists, most recently Chris Wallace, the longtime host of Fox’s flagship Sunday show. During the same period, according to former employees and journalists there, Fox has leaned harder into stories of illegal immigrants or nonwhite Americans caught in acts of crime or violence, often plucked from local news sites and turbocharged by the channel’s vast digital news operation. Network executives ordered up such coverage so relentlessly during the Trump years that some employees referred to it by a grim nickname: “brown menace.”
A Fox spokeswoman rejected those characterizations of the network’s strategy, pointing to coverage of stories like President Biden’s inauguration and the war in Ukraine, where a Fox cameraman was killed in March while on assignment. In a statement, Justin Wells, a senior executive producer overseeing Mr. Carlson’s show, defended the host’s rhetoric and choice of topics: “Tucker Carlson programming embraces diversity of thought and presents various points of view in an industry where contrarian thought and the search for truth are often ignored. Stories in ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ broadcasts and ‘Tucker Carlson Originals’ documentaries undergo a rigorous editorial process. We’re also proud of our ongoing original reporting at a time when most in the media amplify only one point of view.”
Mr. Carlson has led the network’s on-air transformation, becoming Fox’s most influential employee. Outside Fox, Mr. Carlson is bandied about as a potential candidate for president. Inside the network, he answers solely to the Murdochs themselves. With seeming impunity, Mr. Carlson has used his broadcast to attack Fox’s own news coverage, helping drive some journalists off the air and others, like the veteran Fox anchor Shepard Smith, to leave the network entirely. In Australia, the editors of some Murdoch-owned newspapers watch Mr. Carlson’s show religiously, believing it provides clues to Mr. Murdoch’s own views. According to former senior Fox employees, Mr. Carlson boasts of rarely speaking with Fox’s chief executive, Suzanne Scott, but talking or texting regularly with Mr. Murdoch. And in an extraordinary departure from the old Fox code, Mr. Carlson is exempt from the network’s fearsome media relations department, which under Roger Ailes, Fox’s founder, served to both defend the channel’s image and keep its talent in line.
Mr. Carlson is powerful at Fox not merely because he is the network’s face but because he is also its future — a star whose intensity and paranoid style work to bind viewers more closely to the Fox brand, helping lead them through the fragmented post-cable landscape...
This is what the Times does, publish these lurid portraits of basically someone who is right now totally mainstream --- *the* mainstream. I mean, there's a reason he's the most popular cable host on T.V.
And the Times will float off leftist conspiracy talking points and half-baked attacks that don't pass the most rudimentary fact checks.
For instance, when asked during Senate testimony if there were chemical weapons biolabs in Ukraine, Victory Nuland --- the Biden administration's Undersecretary of State for Affairs --- confirmed Ukraine's research facilities, saying, "Ukraine has biological research facilities which, in fact, we are quite concerned Russian troops, Russian forces, may be seeking to, ah, gain control of --- so we are working with the Ukrainians on how they can prevent any of those research materials to fall into the hands of, ah, Russia forces..."
You don't get more high-up confirmation on that unless it's coming out of the president's mouth himself.
This woman is a State Department veteran going back two decades, and was Obama's Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs. She knows *exactly* what's going on over there, and in fact, she's been one of the most important U.S. governmental officials entangling U.S. foreign policy in the Ukraine-Russia crisis' long-running morass.
All of this is fresh-baked propaganda for the politicos and party hacks of the Democratic Party left. It's all battlespace preparation ahead of November. Fuck 'em.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., is promoting a new package of left-wing economic policies, including national rent control and expanding welfare to illegal immigrants across the country, as part of a massive new proposal aiming to achieve a “just society.”
The freshman lawmaker, who champions the multi-trillion-dollar Green New Deal proposal to combat economic inequality and climate change, has now proposed a package of bills aimed at solving perceived economic injustice.
“A just society provides a living wage, safe working conditions, and healthcare. A just society acknowledges the value of immigrants to our communities. A just society guarantees safe, comfortable, and affordable housing,” the website for the package says. “By strengthening our social and economic foundations, we are preparing ourselves to embark on the journey to save our planet by rebuilding our economy and cultivate a just society.”
That “Just Society” proposals are made up of six different pieces of legislation that deal with issues including housing, welfare, poverty and human rights.
“The Place to Prosper Act” would prevent year-over-year rent increases of more than three percent. Meanwhile, “The Embrace Act” would allow illegal immigrants to claim the same welfare benefits as U.S. citizens and those immigrants here legally,
“Notwithstanding any other provision of law ... an individual who is an alien (without regard to the immigration status of that alien) may not be denied any Federal public benefit solely on the basis of the individual’s immigration status,” the bill reads.
A federal public benefit is defined as: “any grant, contract, loan, professional license, or commercial license provided by an agency of the United States or by appropriated funds of the United States; and...any retirement, welfare, health, disability, public or assisted housing, postsecondary education, food assistance, unemployment benefit, or any other similar benefit for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or family eligibility unit by an agency of the United States or by appropriated funds of the United States.”
A similar bill “The Mercy in Re-entry Act” uses similar language to stop the granting of public benefits based on whether a person was convicted of a criminal offense...
Yes, let's joke about what a "crazy person" she is, but imagine, if folks don't take this seriously, what will happen if the Democrats win power in 2020.
ICYMI: For months, CBP leadership has spoken about the current border security & humanitarian crisis at the border. They’ve testified before Congress. They’ve been interviewed by the press. Months later, the influx of illegal crossings continues to overwhelm CBP resources. pic.twitter.com/9hA3noSRMJ
This veggie tale didn't have a happy ending for some attempted smugglers: #CBP officers at the Otay Mesa port of entry discover more than 3,300lbs of marijuana mixed in with a cargo load of broccoli following a K9 alert. Details: https://t.co/GL1qkkM1Abpic.twitter.com/WbqsTwJRaQ
Reporting from Washington — The Trump administration moved Monday to effectively end asylum for any migrant who arrives at the U.S.-Mexico border, an enormous shift in U.S. immigration policy that could block hundreds of thousands of people from seeking protection in the U.S. — and is certain to draw legal challenges.
The new rule, published in the Federal Register and set to take effect Tuesday, would bar asylum claims for nearly all migrants from any country. It would do so by prohibiting claims from anyone who has passed through another country en route to the U.S., which essentially would cover anyone other than Mexican residents.
Only in rare cases, such as when a migrant applies for asylum elsewhere and is denied, would a person be eligible to apply for protection in the U.S.
The rule would, in effect, nearly wipe out U.S. asylum law, which establishes a legal right to claim protection for anyone who arrives at the U.S. border and can make a case that they face torture or persecution at home. The law applies regardless of how a migrant reaches the border.
The law currently provides a major exception in cases in which the U.S. has negotiated a “safe third country” agreement with another government. Under those agreements, such as the one the U.S. has with Canada, migrants must apply in the first safe country they reach.
The new proposal would short-circuit that, effectively requiring migrants to apply in any country they land in, whether the U.S. formally considers that country safe or not.
The new rule was issued by the Justice and Homeland Security departments, which administer the asylum system, and it was written to take effect immediately when it’s formally published on Tuesday. It would apply only to those arriving to the U.S., not migrants already in the country.
The sweeping change drew an immediate threat of a legal fight.
“This rule is inconsistent with both domestic and international law, and we intend to sue immediately to block it,” Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU’s national Immigrants’ Rights Project, said.
“If allowed to stand, it would effectively end asylum at the southern border and could not be more inconsistent with our country’s commitment to protecting those in danger.”
The rule would most directly affect Central American families and unaccompanied minors, who account for most of a recent surge in migrants arriving at the border. But it applies to any nationality, including the large numbers of Haitians, Cubans and Africans who transit South and Central America and Mexico in order to claim asylum at the border.
“With limited exceptions, an alien who enters or attempts to enter the United States across the southern border after failing to apply for protection in a third country outside the alien’s country of citizenship, nationality, or last lawful habitual residence through which the alien transited en route to the United States is ineligible for asylum,” the rule states.
The rule would place a major burden on Mexico, which has already been inundated with a record number of asylum requests. Mexico’s Commission for Aid to Migrants projects that it will receive 80,000 asylum requests this year, up from 29,648 last year and 2,137 five years ago.
Last month, Mexico agreed to ramp up its immigration enforcement, and in exchange, Trump agreed to hold off on imposing tariffs on Mexican imports for 45 days. Many in Mexico reacted angrily on Monday, saying Trump had reneged on that agreement and had unilaterally imposed a policy that would hurt Mexico.
At a news conference, Mexican Foreign Secretary Marcelo Ebrard said Mexico disagrees with the new rule, but said he did not see it as a violation of the June immigration deal because Mexico does not have a safe third country agreement with the U.S.
“Our country has made it very clear that we will not enter into any phase of negotiation on a safe third party agreement without the express authority of [the Mexican] Congress,” he said.
Ebrard avoided answering a question about what will happen to migrants currently waiting in Mexico for their chance to apply for asylum in the U.S. Those migrants who have already been screened by U.S. officials and are waiting in Mexico until their court hearings under the administration’s Remain in Mexico plan will be able to complete the asylum process in the U.S., he said.
Acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan said the rule was necessary despite a recent $4.6-billion bill to address humanitarian challenges at the border, and would deter migrants crossing through Mexico “on a dangerous journey.”
“The truth is that it will not be enough without targeted changes to the legal framework of our immigration system,” McAleenan said in a statement Monday.
I swear I can't believe leftists and Democrats made immigration an campaign issue before the elections?!!
This is President Trump's wheelhouse. The illegal alien invasion is going to infuriate the Republican base. I can't say about California, where we're practically a lost cause, but if you look at Texas or some states in the Midwest, it's not going to play over well.
And even in California's GOP-held House districts, not all of our diverse populations are for open borders. Again, my hunch is Dems are making a big mistake, and if it's truly Soros money that's financed leftists operatives in Honduras, I'll practically pop my eyeballs lol.
Donald Trump’s remarks in recent days about a caravan of Central American migrants heading toward the United States have stirred up a political frenzy — in the process distorting reality and ignoring basic factshttps://t.co/IPYP88KUb7
Hey, it's a good thing we have Fox News to put things in perspective. The Mollie Tibbetts murder, by an illegal alien who's been in the country for years, is a much bigger story, in my opinion. That one should implicate the Democrats in impeachable crimes. But here's the headline at WaPo, via Memeorandum, "In Trump's right-wing media universe, it was a day like any other."
And yes, let's listen to Sean Hannity's monologue. You know he's right:
So it was a ruse. The hysteria over the separation of illegal-alien asylum-seekers from their children (or their purported children) was in large part pretextual. The real target of rage was the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting all illegal border-crossers for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry.
In April, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal entry. Henceforth, virtually all aliens caught entering the country illegally would be held for prosecution, rather than being released on their own recognizance for a later noncriminal deportation proceeding, to which few ever showed up. (This new enforcement policy would have come as a surprise to anyone who had fallen for the advocates’ decades-long lie that illegal entry is not a crime.) Under the new policy, even if the adult had brought a child with him across the border—the usual accoutrement of an asylum-seeker, for reasons explained below—the adult would still be prosecuted. The adult would be held in a U.S. marshal’s facility pending trial, while the child would be placed in a dormitory run by the U.S. Health and Human Services department, since children cannot be held in criminal lockups.
Images of child border-crossers, separated from their adult companion and crying or looking upset—and the experience would undoubtedly be traumatic for most young children—triggered nonstop coverage of Trump administration cruelty. MSNBC and CNN set up border encampments from which reporters and pundits pontificated on the child-separation crisis. Nazi and Holocaust analogies flew around the Internet; faculty petitions invoked the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Mexico and four other Latin American countries filed a human rights complaint against the U.S. Politicians and religious leaders lined up to denounce White House racism and anti-immigrant hatred.
On Wednesday, Trump called their bluff. He signed an executive order that would house illegal-alien adults with minors in Department of Homeland Security or other government facilities. The zero-tolerance policy, however, would continue. Democratic politicians and illegal alien advocates immediately cried foul. “Make no mistake: the President is doubling down on his ‘zero tolerance’ policy,” Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, said in a statement Wednesday. “His new Executive Order criminalizes asylum-seekers . . . . Locking up whole families is no solution at all—the Trump Administration must reverse its policy of prosecuting vulnerable people fleeing three of the most dangerous countries on earth.”
The Harvard Kennedy School’s Juliette Kayyem told CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday night: “The real problem is Sessions’ decision to prosecute [illegal border crossers] 100 percent.” A CNN anchor on Thursday morning asked U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, if his position was: don’t criminally charge each person who illegally crosses the border. Schiff responded: “We don’t have to criminalize everyone that’s coming here seeking asylum.” NPR interviewed the director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, Michelle Brané. “Families will be just as traumatized, children will be just as traumatized” under the executive order, she said on Thursday morning. “Exchanging one form of trauma for another is not the solution”; getting rid of the prosecutorial mandate is.
And the open-borders lobby possesses a powerful weapon for doing just that. The extraordinarily complex thicket of interpolated rules and rights that govern U.S. immigration policy (the result of decades of nonstop litigation by the immigration bar) contains a series of judicial mandates that defeated even the Obama administration’s tepid efforts to bring some semblance of lawfulness to the border. A long-running class-action lawsuit in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, originally styled Flores v. Reno, has held that alien minors cannot be confined by the government for longer than 20 days. This 20-day cap contributed to the flood of Central American child-toting asylum seekers that picked up steam during President Obama’s second term. Asylum petitions typically take months, if not years, to adjudicate, given the long backlog of such cases in the immigration courts. If an adult crosses the border alone and utters the magic asylum words—a fear of persecution in his home country—he could in theory be held in detention until his asylum claim was adjudicated. If, however, he brings a child with him and makes an asylum pitch, he puts the government to a choice: detain the adult separately until his claim is heard and release the child after 20 days, or release both adult and child together.
The Obama administration usually chose the second option...
Xinran Ji, 24, had big dreams. But demons demolished them.
The bright hopes of young Xinran Ji, a University of Southern California engineering student from Inner Mongolia, died in 2014 at the hands of a then-19-year-old "Dreamer" and his thug pals. Mexican illegal alien Jonathan DelCarmen, who first jumped the southern border at age 12, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder last summer in the savage robbery and fatal beating of Ji -- who was walking home from a study group after midnight.
No, it wasn't President Trump, ICE agents, Republicans or conservative talk show hosts who racially profiled Xinran Ji. It was "Dreamer" DelCarmen and his partners in crime: Alberto Ochoa, 17, Andrew Garcia, 18, and Alejandra Guerrero, 16. The gangsters targeted Ji because he was Asian and assumed he "must have money." Guerrero had sent Facebook messages about wanting to "flock" (rob) white and Chinese people. Off-campus neighborhoods around USC are dominated by Mexican Mafia affiliates that target foreign students and shake down local businesses owned by law-abiding immigrants.
"Dreamer" DelCarmen and his friends stalked Ji on a street corner in south central L.A. before bashing him in the head with a baseball bat and a wrench. The attack was caught on multiple security cameras. Ji managed to stagger home to his apartment, leaving a quarter-mile trail of blood behind him.
Sometime during the night, Xinran Ji died in his bed. And the aspirations of his family, who sacrificed everything to send him to America to pursue his studies, perished with him.
"Dreamer" DelCarmen and his friends drove off to a nearby beach to rob two more innocent people in a city and state that have defiantly declared themselves "sanctuaries" for people in the United States illegally -- not for the best and brightest like Xinran Ji, but for lawless barbarians like Jonathan DelCarmen.
"It's like heaven fell down," Ji's father told Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge George Lomeli at Garcia's sentencing hearing.
"His life was taken by these demons," Ji's aunt added. "They robbed and killed an innocent youth with very vicious means, and this was inhuman."
Garcia received life in prison without the possibility of parole. Ji's parents' sentence was far worse: a brutal, violent and permanent separation from their only child. In Washington, D.C., however, some families matter more than others. And victims of indiscriminate open borders, like Xinran Ji, don't exist.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, proud promoter of sanctuary policies for illegal immigrants, led more than two dozen Democrats in turning the State of the Union address into "Take an Illegal Alien to Work Day."
Platitudes whitewash bloody reality.
"I want to be clear: DREAMers are Americans," declared Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., who invited an illegal alien from El Salvador who now works at Apple. "They contribute to our economy, our communities and our strength and stability as a nation."
Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., brought a Mexican illegal alien, Cesar Montelongo, now enrolled in the M.D.-Ph.D. program at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.
"I hope Cesar's presence reminds President Trump what's at stake in the debate over DACA: the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent young people who want to contribute to our country's future."
Democrats and pro-amnesty radicals protest any glint of sunlight shed on the destructive consequences of not enforcing our nation's immigration laws. They claim it's unfair to focus on single cases or "anecdotes," even as they promote DACA recipients as a holy, unassailable class of "honor roll students, star athletes, talented artists and valedictorians."
This propaganda, to which open-borders Republicans have fecklessly capitulated, is an offense to decency and truth...
She saw the news of the raids happening around the country and felt helpless. Scared. She had lived here for more than a decade, following her father’s advice: Work hard and stay out of trouble.
But suddenly it felt as though trouble was looking for her. Lorena Napola worried about her four children. What if she were hauled away? Who would make sure they got to school? To doctors’ appointments? To church?
The questions weighed on her in recent weeks. She saw on the news a mother in Arizona get picked up by federal agents for deportation. Napola thought the woman seemed normal. Unassuming. She was without papers. Like her.
Napola’s friends spoke of rumors: Dark trucks filled with people in dark uniforms raiding nearby neighborhoods. She knew President Trump campaigned to crack down on illegal immigration and now he appeared to be a man of his word.
So she went to see Andres Paredes, a leader at her local Mormon church. Three of her children are U.S. citizens, she told him. Would he care for them if la migra came and she were deported?
Paredes, a quiet man who came to the United States from Peru decades ago, drew up power of attorney papers that gave him authority to make school, medical and other decisions for her children in case she and her husband were deported. Napola felt relief that her kids would be cared for and sadness that it had come to this.
“They are my life,” she said. “They are everything.”
As the papers were signed, Paredes said, his heart broke. He has signed power of attorney with two families.
“It’s a big responsibility,” he said softly. “I’m not sure it’s entirely sunk in yet.”
The fear among immigrants in the United States illegally has reached such a pitch that some have altered their lifestyles, won't answer the door if someone knocks and pay close attention to reports of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions on social media and the news...
She committed identity theft, stealing someone's Social Security number. Has lived illegally in the U.S. for over two decades. She should've been deported years ago.
A Phoenix woman in the country illegally who was considered a low priority for deportation by the Obama administration has been taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Immigrant advocates say her detention reflects the severity of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration.
Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, 36, had lived in the country since she was 14. She was arrested in 2008 during a workplace raid ordered by then-Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio at Golfland Sunsplash amusement park in Mesa, Ariz., and convicted of felony identity theft for possessing false papers.
A mother of two, she continued to live in Arizona and checked in with ICE every six months. On her scheduled meeting Wednesday morning, she arrived at the ICE field office in Phoenix surrounded by supporters. An immigration attorney later told the crowd outside that Garcia de Rayos had been arrested.
Leftist UC Berkeley students and outsiders rioted last night to prevent Milo Yiannopoulos from delivering a David Horowitz Freedom Center-sponsored speech demanding the end of “sanctuary campuses” that harbor illegal aliens. Milo's address, which was canceled amid violent mob attacks, fire-setting, and wanton property destruction, had been scheduled to mark the launch of the Freedom Center’s #nosanctuarycampusforcriminals campaign.
“One thing we do know for sure: the Left is absolutely terrified of free speech and will do literally anything to shut it down,” Yiannopoulos, tech editor at Breitbart News, said after being safely evacuated from the campus.
“This is what tolerance looks like at UC Berkeley,” Mike Wright, a Berkeley College Republicans member told SFGate as smoke bombs exploded nearby. He said paint was thrown on his person. “It’s sad.”
“The so-called ‘sanctuary movement’ is a concerted effort by left-wing administrations in major cities to thwart the purposes of the Patriot Act, undermine federal immigration law, and cripple the efforts of the Department of Homeland security to protect American citizens from terrorist threats,” David Horowitz, founder and CEO of the Freedom Center, said on Jan. 31.
“Thanks to the efforts of left-wing activists and administrators, this seditious movement has now spread to our colleges and universities.”
Backed by the Freedom Center, Yiannopoulos, an outspoken gay, Jewish, Greek-born British citizen who ardently supports President Trump, was on campus to demand that federal grants to UC Berkeley be withdrawn and that university officials like UC President Janet Napolitano and Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks who endanger their students with their illegal alien-shielding policies be prosecuted.
UC President Napolitano, formerly President Obama’s Homeland Security Secretary, is under the microscope because, as head of the taxpayer-supported University of California system, she is deliberately harboring hundreds of illegal aliens attending UC system schools. She has forbidden campus police from working with immigration law enforcement and provided $5 million to aid the illegals UC is sheltering from ICE.
The University of California system even provides legal aid to illegal alien students who wish to keep breaking U.S. immigration laws.
The executive director of the University of California Undocumented Legal Services Center at the UC Davis School of Law explained to Rolling Stone in December what a sanctuary campus was.
“Basically it’s a concept that says, ‘You’re safe here, and your immigration status, we won’t ask,’” said Maria Blanco. “’We won’t turn you over. We won’t turn your records over.’”
Not all the rioters were from Berkeley.
Many of those dressed black bloc-style so police can’t identify them appear to be associated with the “antifa” movement. Antifa may be short for anti-fascist but these thugs, usually a mix of anarchists and communists, use violent fascistic tactics against their targets. These terrorists do not tolerate opposing views. Before the riots broke out those gathered carried signs that read “hate speech is not free speech.” Signs from the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PLS) also showed up in Berkeley.
Antifa is also involved in the protests and melees at airports nationwide launched in opposition to President Trump’s Executive Order 13769 which as of Jan. 27 temporarily banned visitors from a handful of terrorism-plagued Muslim nations.
The Berkeley police had reportedly been given a “stand down” order which allowed rioters to generate mayhem. Later when the police declared the throng of troublemakers an unlawful assembly and ordered those present to leave, the mob chanted “you go first!”
After leaving the campus Yiannopoulos reflected on the night’s events in a video on his Facebook page...
Over at National Review, Andrew McCarthy writes that President Trump's executive order instituting a temporary ban on entry into the United States for foreign nationals from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen is statutorily and constitutionally sound:
Under the Constitution, as Thomas Jefferson wrote shortly after its adoption, "the transaction of business with foreign nations is Executive altogether. It belongs then to the head of that department, except as to such portions of it as are specifically submitted to the Senate. Exceptions are to be construed strictly."
The rare exceptions Jefferson had in mind, obviously, were such matters as the approval of treaties, which Article II expressly vests in the Senate. There are also other textual bases for a congressional role in foreign affairs, such as Congress's power over international commerce, to declare war, and to establish the qualifications for the naturalization of citizens. That said, when Congress legislates in this realm, it must do so mindful of what the Supreme Court, in United States v. Curtiss-Wright (1936), famously described as "the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations – a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress."
McCarthy, a former U.S. Attorney who prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case argues that the 1965 immigration act prohibiting discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin does not make Trump's order illegal:
With that as background, let's consider the claimed conflict between the president's executive order and Congress's statute. Mr. Bier asserts that Trump may not suspend the issuance of visas to nationals of specific countries because the 1965 immigration act "banned all discrimination against immigrants on the basis of national origin." And, indeed, a section of that act, now codified in Section 1152(a) of Title 8, U.S. Code, states that (with exceptions not here relevant) "no person shall receive any preference or priority or be discriminated against in the issuance of an immigrant visa because of the person's race, sex, nationality, place of birth, or place of residence" (emphasis added).
Even on its face, this provision is not as clearly in conflict with Trump's executive order as Bier suggests. As he correctly points out, the purpose of the anti-discrimination provision (signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965) was to end the racially and ethnically discriminatory "national origins" immigration practice that was skewed in favor of Western Europe. Trump's executive order, to the contrary, is in no way an effort to affect the racial or ethnic composition of the nation or its incoming immigrants. The directive is an effort to protect national security from a terrorist threat, which, as we shall see, Congress itself has found to have roots in specified Muslim-majority countries. Because of the national-security distinction between Trump's 2017 order and Congress's 1965 objective, it is not necessary to construe them as contradictory, and principles of constitutional interpretation counsel against doing so.
McCarthy also cites specific language in federal immigration law that specifically authorizes this kind of temporary restriction for national security purposes...
Los Angeles city and county leaders on Monday unveiled a $10-million fund to provide legal assistance for residents facing deportation, the region’s boldest move yet as it prepares for an expected crackdown on illegal immigration by Donald Trump.
If approved by lawmakers, Los Angeles’ two top government agencies could find themselves in the position of using public funds to challenge policies sought by the White House and Republican Congress.
The fund represents another provocative pushback against the Trump agenda in heavily Democratic California, but outside legal experts said the local government agencies are likely within their right to use the money for these purposes.
Los Angeles City Atty. Mike Feuer said the fund will ensure that there is “more fairness and more effectiveness in the immigration system.” He cited statistics showing that immigrants who have representation have a better chance at succeeding in court.
Still, some anti-illegal immigration activists criticized the move, saying it’s a waste of taxpayer dollars and interferes with the federal government’s immigration policies.
L.A. officials “should be focused on assisting the citizens, [not] taking tax dollars to pay for services to assist illegal residents countywide,” said Robin Hvidston, executive director of We the People Rising, a Claremont-based organization against illegal immigration. The money, she added, would be better spent on unemployed citizens, veterans, disabled and the elderly.
L.A. Justice Fund would receive at least $5 million total from city and county government. Philanthropic groups would donate the rest of the money. The California Endowment, the state’s largest private healthcare foundation, plans to give the fund $2 million, according to a foundation spokeswoman.
The legal fund, aimed at helping immigrants who can’t afford attorneys, follows similar efforts at the state and national level to provide protections for migrants...
They’re coming for Senator Sessions. The Alabama Senator, soon to be Attorney General, has been denounced by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, which bills its poison pen letter as coming from “civil and human rights organizations.” Just don’t ask which ones.
The “civil rights” organizations include the AFL-CIO, which had just denounced its own “ugly history of racism” last year, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, whose leaders have at times defended and excused the anti-Semitic and racist Islamic terror of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the National Council of La Raza, whose name means “The Race” and reflects its racialist agenda.
A thuggish union that concedes its own ugliness and two racist groups, one of which defends Islamic terrorists, are the worst possible people to pass any kind of judgment on Senator Sessions.
But it gets worse.
There’s the Center for Responsible Lending, funded by the Sandlers, who helped cause the economic crisis by peddling subprime mortgages. Lending doesn’t get more responsible than that. And there’s also the National Lawyers Guild, which started life as a Communist front group and arguably continues as such, praising North Korea’s “free healthcare and education systems.” Move over Cuba, North Korea has even more shovel-ready free health care for the oppressed comrades of the working class.
I don’t know why the Conference couldn’t manage to get Al Qaeda to sign on to their letter against Sessions. Maybe Osama bin Laden’s iPhone can’t get any bars at the bottom of the Arabian Sea.
But this motley crew of racists, traitors and terrorists has issued its ruling and found that, “Senator Sessions is the wrong person to serve as the U.S. Attorney General.”
The right person is Vladimir Lenin. Unfortunately he’s dead and not qualified to practice law.
You would think that the “144 undersigned organizations” representing billions in wealth and untold amounts of power and influence, could manage a more coherent smear campaign. Instead the letter rehashes the same old discredited smears. Senator Sessions’ joke about the KKK smoking pot is described as “speaking favorably about the Ku Klux Klan” even while admitting that “he was helpful in the Center’s successful effort to sue and bankrupt the Ku Klux.”
Sessions is accused of undermining “voting rights” by prosecuting the “voting rights activists” who were caught mailing hundreds of absentee ballots. These “voter suppression tactics targeting African Americans” came in response to complaints of fraud by African-American officials like Perry County Commissioner Reese Billingslea and John Kennard, Alabama's first black tax assessor, who said, "The only reason these people are hollering racism now is because they are in trouble for breaking the law."
Then under "Association with White Nationalist and Hate Groups," the letter, which seems to thrive on parading its own stupidity around, proves that Sessions must be a bigot because he had received awards from the "David Horowitz Freedom Center and Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy."
Sessions was honored by the Center for Security Policy at the Smithsonian Postal Museum with its Keeper of the Flame award, which recognizes “those individuals who devote their public careers to the propagation of democracy and the respect for individual rights throughout the world.”
Past recipients have included Dick Cheney, Joe Lieberman, Garry Kasparov and Ronald Reagan.
Perhaps the Conference could specify which white nationalist hate group Lieberman and Kasparov belonged to.
Senator Sessions received the Annie Taylor Award from the Freedom Center in 2014. The next year’s recipient would go on to be African-American Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.
It’s unknown which white nationalist hate group Clarke belongs to. Perhaps the Conference could ask the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose inept smear of Sessions it appears to have relied on, to tell them.
The Annie Taylor Award has gone to Iranian dissident Amir Fakhravar, journalist Oriana Fallaci, Baroness Caroline Cox and Democratic Senator Zell Miller. But perhaps the most notorious white supremacist to receive the award was Ward Connerly, the African-American chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute.
As smear campaigns go, the Conference’s letter is laughably terrible.
“Senator Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity,” it claims. That’s quite a claim and it isn’t backed up. If Sessions had spent the last 30 years going around shouting racial slurs, you would think that there would be more evidence of that to present in the left’s poison pen letters.
The Conference insists that the Attorney General has to be approved of by “every member of the public”. If that were the case, we couldn’t get a single Attorney General approved.
It states that Sessions supporting the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder raises questions about his fitness. Is the Conference really demanding an Attorney General who won’t uphold Supreme Court decisions?
The Conference’s letter is short on facts and heavy on innuendo. It’s clueless about its own charges. And mostly it opposes Sessions because he doesn’t agree with its radical policy agenda. The letter accuses him of opposing illegal alien amnesty and being skeptical about Global Warming which, according to the letter, “disproportionately affect low-income families and communities of color.”
World ends. Minorities hardest hit.
Further evidence of Sessions’ unfitness is found in that he voted to defund Planned Parenthood, opposed a push for Green Energy and Obama’s pardons for drug dealers. In short, he’s guilty of being a conservative Republican, not a radical leftist.
That’s really why the Leadership Conference opposes him, but it can’t come out and say so. The failed effort to smear Sessions as a racist isn’t about his record; it’s about blocking anyone on the right while cynically abusing a serious accusation for partisan political gain. No one who knows Sessions, including one of the accusers who serves as the basis for many of these smears, believes that he is a racist.
Furthermore the accusations are coming from actual racists like La Raza and the ADC. The ADC honored Helen Thomas after she called for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel. It was where Ralph Nader insisted that, “Jews do not own the phrase anti-Semitism.” The Leadership Conference shows no signs of having a problem with any of this.
Senator Sessions isn’t a racist. His accusers are.
California's Democrats and progressives are going to lose on this.
It's ironic because when states like Arizona cracked down with their own immigration enforcement laws, the Obama Democrats argued that immigration is solely a federal responsibility at the Supreme Court.
Now that the shoe's on the other foot, not so much.
California is quickly becoming a battleground for immigration policy as a cross-section of leaders across the state vowed to fight any plans by President-elect Donald Trump to deport thousands of people in the U.S. illegally.
Trump said during the presidential campaign that he’ll build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and deport people in the country illegally. He is expected to unwind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an initiative by President Obama that protects immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
California has some of the nation’s most liberal policies when it comes to handling immigrants here illegally. The state has allowed them to get driver’s licenses, health coverage for children and in-state tuition. Institutions like churches also support immigrants.
But the Golden State could be on a collision course with Trump if he pushes hard-line immigration policies enthusiastically backed by many of his supporters.
Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez led an interfaith prayer service Thursday night in which he reassured immigrants in the country illegally that the church would continue supporting them.
“In the past couple days since the election … we have children in our schools who are scared,” Gomez told the congregation. “They think the government is going to come and deport their parents.”
At a hastily convened meeting Friday at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti warned that the city will question Trump’s decisions on immigration.
“If the first day, as president, we see something that is hostile to our people, hostile to our city, bad for our economy, bad for our security, we will speak up, speak out, act up and act out,” Garcetti said.
The mayor also said police would continue to enforce Special Order 40, which bars officers from asking people about their immigration status.
Kamala Harris, in her first appearance since winning her U.S. Senate race, also held an event Thursday at CHIRLA to announce her support for immigrants and criticize Trump’s plan for a U.S.-Mexico border wall.
Several days of street demonstrations in Los Angeles and other cities have followed Trump’s election, with protesters denouncing the Republican’s views on issues such as immigration. About 200 people were arrested Thursday night in downtown Los Angeles, according to LAPD Officer Tony Im.
Another anti-Trump protest is planned Saturday for MacArthur Park.
Of the 742,000 people across the country protected under DACA, about 200,000 are in Los Angeles County, according to the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles.
Angelica Salas, CHIRLA’s executive director, said her office is being inundated with requests from immigrants about their status.
Marissa Montes, co-director of the Loyola Immigrant Justice Center, helps run a weekly meeting at the Dolores Mission in Boyle Heights. She said twice as many people — about 40 — showed up at this week’s forum Wednesday.
“People came out because of fear,” Montes said. “It was incredibly heartbreaking to tell people that I couldn’t tell them what was ahead.”
Good luck people.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection's coming for you, so just keep protesting and organizing and making yourself visible. It only makes it easier for the Trump administration to deport you.
As president, Donald Trump can move swiftly to gut President Obama’s signature immigration policies by ramping up deportations and ending a program that has given temporary work permits to immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.
Nearly a third of the 742,000 so-called Dreamers — those given protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program — live in California and are potentially at risk of losing legal status.
Using the same executive authority that Obama claimed to create DACA and other initiatives, Trump also can quickly fulfill his promises to severely restrict the number of refugees admitted each year and to effectively bar visitors from countries with large Muslim populations.
Trump said Thursday, after meeting with Obama at the White House and Congressional leaders on Capitol Hill, that immigration and border security would be among his top priorities when he takes office in January.
“People will be really, really happy,” he said. Asked if he would work with Congress to ban Muslim immigrants, Trump walked away without answering.
Trump’s aides have begun drafting instructions that he can issue on his first day in office for the nation’s 5,000 deportation officers to begin rounding up more people for removals, according to two advisors to his transition team.
“There is vast potential to increase the level of deportations without adding personnel,” said Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and a member of Trump’s immigration policy transition team.
By giving more authority to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, Trump easily could boost deportations by more than 75% in his first year in office, Kobach said.
That would meet the record set in 2012, at the end of Obama’s first term, when more than 400,000 people were deported. It fell to 235,00 last year after illegal immigration fell, and after agents were ordered to focus first on deporting criminals, repeat immigration violators and recent arrivals.
Under Trump, Kobach said, agents likely will return to raiding workplaces and checking workers’ status. That practice roiled immigrant communities in the final two years of George W. Bush’s presidency and was stopped when Obama came to office.
Trump may find it far more difficult to fulfill other prominent promises, however. They include building a tall wall along the entire border with Mexico and deporting millions more people.
Both proposals would require major appropriations from a Republican-led Congress that wants to cut spending, not increase it. It would require hammering out deals with Democrats who fiercely opposed Trump’s proposals on the campaign trail.
Trump has said the wall could cost up to $12 billion to build. An analysis published by MIT Technology Review estimated the cost at $38 billion, nearly the entire annual budget for the 22 federal agencies in the Department of Homeland Security...
The Greek city-states in the fourth-century BC, fifth-century AD Rome, and the Western European democracies after World War I all knew they could not continue as usual with their fiscal, social, political, and economic behavior. But all these states and societies feared far more the self-imposed sacrifices that might have saved them.
Mid-fifteenth-century Byzantium was facing endemic corruption, a radically declining birthrate and shrinking population, and the end of civic militarism—all the last-gasp symptoms of an irreversible decline. Its affluent ruling and religious orders and expansive government services could no longer be supported by disappearing agrarians and the overtaxed mercantile middle class. Returning to the values of the Emperor Justinian’s sixth-century empire that had once ensured a vibrant Byzantine culture of stability and prosperity throughout the old Roman east remained a nostalgic daydream. Given the hardship and sacrifice that would have been required to change the late Byzantine mindset, most residents of Constantinople plodded on to their rendezvous with oblivion in 1453.
We seem to be reaching that point of stasis in postmodern America. Once simple and logical solutions to our fiscal and social problems are now seen as too radical even to discuss. Consider the $20-trillion national debt. Most Americans accept that current annual $500 billion budget deficits are not sustainable—but they also see them as less extreme than the recently more normal $1 trillion in annual red ink. Americans also accept that the Obama administration doubled the national debt on the expectation of permanent near-zero interest rates, which cannot continue. When interest rates return to more normal historical levels of 4-5% per annum, the costs of servicing the debt—along with unsustainable Social Security and Medicare entitlement costs—will begin to undermine the entire budget.
Count up current local, state and federal income taxes, payroll taxes, property and sales taxes, and new health care taxes, and it will be hard to find the necessary additional revenue from a strapped and overtaxed middle class, much less from the forty-seven percent of Americans who currently pay no federal income taxes. The Obama administration has tried to reduce the budget by issuing defense cuts and tax hikes—but it has refused to touch entitlement spending, where the real gains could be made. The result is more debt, even as, paradoxically, our military was weakened, taxes rose, revenue increased, and economic growth remained anemic at well below 2% per annum.
Illegal immigration poses a similar dilemma. No nation can remain stable when 10-20 million foreign nationals have crashed through what has become an open border and reside unlawfully in the United States—any more than a homeowner can have neighbors traipsing through and camping in his unfenced yard.
Likewise, there are few multiracial societies of the past that have avoided descending into destructive ethnic chauvinism and tribalism once assimilation and integration were replaced by salad-bowl identity politics. Common words and phrases such as “illegal alien” or “deportation” are now considered taboo, while “sanctuary city” is a euphemism for a neo-Confederate nullification of federal immigration laws by renegade states and municipalities.
Illegal immigration, like the deficits, must cease, but stopping it would be too politically incorrect and painful even to ponder. The mess in Europe—millions of indigent and illegal immigrants who have fled their own failed states to become dependent on the largess of their generous adopted countries, but without any desire to embrace their hosts’ culture—is apparently America’s future.
