In the southern border states a humanitarian crisis involves 8,000 illegal immigrants crossing into their cities each day threatening infrastructure, safety and health of local citizens.
In Martha’s Vineyard it takes only fifty. rsk
https://www.jns.org/opinion/americas-holocaust-failure-through-the-lens-of-21st-century-politics/?utm_source=Old+Daily+Syndicate&utm_campaign=d8b02fdf1d-
Ken Burns’s new documentary focuses on immigration law and anti-Semitism in ways that both illuminate and distort the lessons of history while largely giving a pass to FDR.
Every generation views history through the prism of its own experiences and interests. So, it was probably inevitable that when Ken Burns, America’s great documentary filmmaker, took up the story of the Holocaust, it would be told primarily in terms of ideas that resonate with the PBS audience for which it was produced. There is a great deal of truth and, as always with Burns’s films, brilliant visuals, moving witness testimony and powerful storytelling, in his “The U.S. and the Holocaust,” which premieres on Public Broadcasting stations on Sept. 18 and airs for three nights. But while made at the request of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and with the assistance of the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation, it is also a film very much of this political moment.
The narrative is framed primarily as one about immigration rights with events in Europe only gradually taking over the story over the course of the three two-hour-plus episodes. It begins with the Emma Lazarus poem on the Statue of Liberty and goes on to discussions of mass immigration in the 19th century, the restrictions and country quotas imposed during the 1920s. It relates the impact that immigration laws, as well as anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic sentiments on the U.S. failure to let in more than a small percentage of the Jews who sought escape from the death sentence that faced them in Nazi-controlled Europe.
It concludes with the passage of more liberal immigration laws in the 1960s and then a montage, including protests about the collapse of security at America’s southern border; former President Donald Trump’s demand that a border wall be built; the 2017 neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va.; the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting; and then the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 , 2021. It ends with warnings by talking heads that America’s thin veneer of civilization could, like Germany’s, collapse more quickly than we think.
The inescapable conclusion is that Burns and his team are, as is the case with even the best of his films (and some of his efforts like “The Civil War,” “Baseball,” “New York” and “Jazz” are among the greatest documentaries ever produced), interested in both telling a compelling story and in reinforcing the pre-existing biases of public television networks’ liberal viewing audience and the issues that matter most to them.
Anti-Semitism isn’t merely hateful sentiments; it’s a political organizing principle that has attached itself to a number of different ideologies.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2022/09/16/bidens-human-hot-potatoes-starting-to-turn-libs-on-one-another-n1630056
We’ve all been laughing our backsides off at the plight of the poor leftwing millionaires whose exclusive island enclave has been inundated with — the horror! — 50 of the millions of illegal aliens they’ve invited into our country. It was delicious to see tony Martha’s Vineyard caught up in the teeth of a Humanitarian Crisis!
Luckily, the plucky island folk were able to clear their walk-in closets of last season’s duds and bake an organic fair-trade casserole to bring to the church in which the “asylum seekers” had been contained. And pat themselves on the back for their exemplary humane response, naturally. Remember, they are much finer folk than those semi-fascist peasants in the red border states.
Local news outlets gushed over the liberal hospitality that was proudly on display. “After migrants arrived in Martha’s Vineyard, a community gathered to welcome them,” swooned WBUR. “On Martha’s Vineyard, another morning dawns as residents rally to help migrants,” sighed The Boston Globe (before surreptitiously changing the headline).
But that’s pretty much where the Vineyardians’ hospitality ended. Nary a waterfront mansion opened its doors to the poor huddled masses its inhabitants claimed to love and want. No doubt, more than one “No person is illegal” lawn sign was surreptitiously taken inside. Now, news has come that the unsightly brown people will soon be shunted off the hallowed island to a military base in Cape Cod and from there, perhaps Boston.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/09/desantis_made_politics_fun_again_when_he_sent_illegal_aliens_to_marthas_vineyard.html
“Saul Alinksy wrote his rules for a malevolent purpose, which was to turn America into a Marxist nation. That doesn’t mean, though, that his rules aren’t good techniques. Conservatives should use them whenever possible. ”
Rule 4 of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” Rule 5 is “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” And Rule 6 is “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” When Texas governor Greg Abbott finally decided to send to New York and Washington D.C. a small percentage of the illegal aliens pouring into Texas thanks to Biden’s lawless presidency, he was taking a page out of Alinsky’s book, and it was wonderful to see. However, when Ron DeSantis sent volunteer illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard, he raised the game to a new level.
Tucker Carlson pointed out in his monologue (see below) that Martha’s Vineyard is one of the richest and most aggressively Democrat regions in America. Its residents, from Barack Obama on down, had no problem with Biden destroying America’s southern border. They also thought it was fine when Biden placed the illegal immigrants who came flooding across the border onto planes and buses, and then, in the dark of night, shipped them out to Republican communities all over America.
https://www.city-journal.org/what-does-walenskys-apology-really-mean?wallit_nosession=1
The indigenous wisdom of the Yukon suggests that if wolves are pursuing your sled, it’s a good idea to throw out a piece of meat to buy time. This advice comes to mind in trying to understand what happened last month, when Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), once one of the U.S. government’s most respected public agencies, made a public apology for its failures during the Covid pandemic. “For 75 years,” Walensky told a press gathering on August 15, “CDC and public health have been preparing for Covid-19, and in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations.”
Walensky said that the mea culpa was prompted by preliminary findings of an internal panel she appointed in April to improve CDC management. Its conclusions are not yet public. Her confession puzzled Washington’s political and bureaucratic establishment, and uncritical national media has mostly ignored her statement. After such a bombshell, one would expect appearances on television and plentiful commentary. But so far, the establishment and press are treading carefully. Why? Perhaps because they know that this initial disturbance to the pond might send ripples in their direction.
Consider that, just four days before Walensky’s statement, the CDC undid much of the guidance it had spent more than two years inventing, justifying, and enforcing. On August 11, the CDC substantially relaxed its Covid guidance by dropping social distancing, suggesting that masking is needed only around sick people or those with an active case, and dropping the need to quarantine for unvaccinated individuals, suggesting instead a five-day period of self-imposed isolation. Routine testing by employers and schools is no longer part of CDC guidance. The CDC largely removed schools, businesses, and institutions from an enforcement role on social distancing, masking, and quarantining and reduced its suggested booster frequency to once a year.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-sanctuary-city-spectacle-migrants-busing-ron-desantis-marthas-vineyard-greg-abbott-florida-texas-border-11663366052?mod=opinion_lead_pos1
It’s hard to imagine a bigger spectacle of American political failure than this week’s histrionics over migrants. GOP Governors used political stunts to draw attention to the burden of handling runaway migration at the border, while Democrats pretended to be horrified and change the subject from their own border failures. Migrants have become political props for both parties.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey have been sending migrants to Democratic cities since May to make a political point about their struggles with unchecked migration. This week Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis escalated, as is his fashion, by flying about 50 Venezuelans to Martha’s Vineyard off the Massachusetts coast. Mr. Abbott then bused 100 foreign nationals to Vice President Kamala Harris’s residence in Washington.
President Barack Obama has a home on Martha’s Vineyard, while Ms. Harris said as recently as Sunday that the border is “secure” when everyone knows it isn’t. The GOP point was to make the political personal. The gambits are an attempt to get media attention to showcase the hypocrisy of Democrats who run “sanctuary cities” without bearing the costs of migration, and the Governors have certainly done that.
New York Mayor Eric Adams, who presides over eight million residents, said Wednesday that his city is “nearing its breaking point” after receiving about 10,000 migrants since May. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker declared a state of emergency Wednesday and authorized National Guard troops to help out after a mere 500 migrants made it to Chicago. Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser has also declared an emergency.
Contrast those numbers with the more than 250,000 migrants who have arrived this year around Yuma, Ariz.—a city of about 100,000. Migrant apprehensions at the border are already at 1.9 million this fiscal year and will probably hit a record this month. These migrants descend on border states first, and cities like Del Rio, Uvalde and El Paso bear too much of the burden.
https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/highest-number-in-us-history-border-patrol-logs-8000-migrants-entering-us-each-day/
Immigration authorities are reporting the highest-ever daily number of migrants entering the United States along the southwest border, according to internal Department of Homeland Security communications reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
Border Patrol officers are logging roughly 8,000 migrant encounters a day, the highest daily number in U.S. history, the communications show. Such a massive surge in migrants has left agencies such as Customs and Border Protection scrambling to implement new processing systems.
The record number of migrant encounters highlights the little progress the Biden administration has made in solving the border crisis. The news comes as the White House blamed former president Donald Trump for the crisis earlier this week, accusing the previous administration of leaving President Joe Biden with a “broken” immigration system. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre defended the president and claimed the Biden administration is taking “unprecedented action” at the southern border. Those actions, according to the White House, include new border technology and anti-smuggling task forces.
https://unherd.com/2022/09/the-american-medias-racism-fantasy/
It was the kind of correction you love to see. The story that originally broke in the final days of August, about a young black athlete being racially heckled in front of a crowd of thousands at Utah’s Brigham Young University, was not just exaggerated but completely false. The n-word was not shouted, let alone repeatedly, at Duke volleyball player Rachel Richardson when she went up to serve. A crowd of more than 5,000 people did not stand idly by during an act of malignant racism. The United States is not, apparently, a socially backwards hellscape where people openly scream slurs at packed sporting events without compunction or shame.
Unfortunately, it’s a correction that many people are probably never going to see — or if they do, they won’t believe it.
Like many stories of its oeuvre, this one began on Twitter, when Richardson’s godmother Lesa Pamplin claimed in a series of since-deleted posts that the young volleyball player had been subject to racist abuse throughout the game: “My Goddaughter is the only black starter for Dukes [sic] volleyball team,” she wrote. “While playing yesterday, she was called a [n-word] every time she served. She was threatened by a white male that told her to watch her back going to the team bus. A police officer had to be put by their bench.”
Pamplin hadn’t been at the game herself, but the claim was incendiary. The story was soon picked up by mainstream outlets, which treated the alleged harassment — and discovery of its perpetrator — as verified fact. From USA Today: “Brigham Young fan banned after directing racial slurs toward Duke volleyball player.” The Washington Post: “BYU bans fan, relocates volleyball match after racist slurs, threats.” The New York Times: “Racial Slur During College Volleyball Game Leads to Fan Suspension.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18906/iran-cyber-attacks
The small country of Albania appeared to have more courage and stronger leadership than the Biden administration: it recently sent a strong message to the Iranian regime after Iran’s cyberattacks against Albania in July. Albania severed diplomatic relations with Tehran and ordered Iranian diplomats and embassy staff to leave within 24 hours.
“This extreme response… is fully proportionate to the gravity and risk of the cyberattack that threatened to paralyze public services, erase digital systems and hack into state records, steal government intranet electronic communication and stir chaos and insecurity in the country”. — Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama, Reuters, September 7, 2022.
“The IRGC clearly makes the country one of the best and most advanced nations when it comes to cyberwarfare. In a case of escalation between Iran and the West, Iran will likely aim to launch a cyberattack against critical infrastructures in the US and its allies, (targeting) energy infrastructure, financial institutions and transportation systems.” — Institute for National Security Studies.
Cyber warfare could have consequences at least as severe as military actions: cyberattacks can take control of or disrupt an entire nation’s infrastructure — public services, hospitals, transportation, internet, municipal or governmental institutions, the energy sector, steal people’s private information, take control of another country’s missiles, unmanned vehicles (drones), and even its military’s intelligence, command, control and communications.
That is just what the West needs: the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism and cyberattacker extraordinaire, soon to have an unlimited quantity of nuclear weapons, precision ballistic missiles to deliver them, and up to a trillion dollars – and in a deal negotiated by — of all countries — Russia! And the US government seriously thinks that this mix will prevent war? Let us instead follow the example of spunky Albania, punish bad behavior rather than reward it, and make sure that Biden’s atrocious new “Iran deal,” reportedly “off the table at least for the time being,” is off the table forever.
Not only is the Biden administration is turning a blind eye to the Iranian regime’s terror activities and plots abroad, it has also been completely silent about the mullahs’ escalating cyberattacks.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18907/european-energy-in-crisis
In response to Russia severely restricting or cutting off gas supplies, EU governments will take dramatic actions over the coming months. Germany recently announced it would keep two of the nuclear plants it was shuttering as backups, just in case. EU leaders will then go back to the voters and describe the amazing job they did while failing to mention they were the ones who made the decisions that put their countries in this crisis in the first place.
The entire current crisis was avoidable if the EU had developed a rational plan instead of one based on a daydream, no matter how enticing.
The U.S. needs urgently to examine what is happening in Europe and develop a rational energy transition plan. Any long-term solution must include strategies for reliable power production, affordable sustainable energy and a massively strengthened electrical grid.
Europe’s plan was built on the hope that consumers would accept higher prices, that Russia and Putin would be reliable, and that battery storage technology would be robust enough to cover the times when “the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine.”
This strategy, sadly always doomed to failure, provides a cautionary tale for “solutions” based solely on hope.
The U.S. should not repeat the same mistakes as the EU by continuing down a path that cuts domestic fossil fuel production, bans gasoline-powered vehicles, and ignores that the power generation capacity and energy infrastructure are not in place to achieve an unrealistic and unfortunately unsustainable green agenda.
Europe is facing a growing energy crisis. Individuals and industries are being battered by rising energy costs. On August 31, Russia shut down the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline to Germany for initially what was supposed to be 72 hours, but followed by an announcement of “technical difficulties” that would prevent a resumption. Russian energy giant Gazprom also announced that natural gas supplies to French energy company Engie SA would be immediately reduced. These actions have created significant uncertainty and the threat of much higher energy prices in Europe as the cold winter season approaches.
