Will Spiraling Border Crisis Destroy Biden’s Presidency?

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/08/will-spiraling-border-crisis-destroy-bidens-presidency/

It’s not three months into a four-year term, but Joe Biden’s presidency is already heading for the rocks. Surging waves of immigrants have overwhelmed the U.S.’ southern border. With public anger growing, Biden now has been forced to tacitly recognize President Donald Trump’s border success.

Just this week, Biden let it be known he’s considering restarting Trump’s border wall construction — just to “fill in” parts of it, his administration says. Right.

In fact, it’s desperation because the Biden-Democrat open border policy has been an epic disaster, one that could result in huge Democratic losses in 2022 and a lame-duck presidency for Biden.

An AP-NORC poll shows 56% of those queried disapprove of Biden’s handling of immigration and 55% disapprove of his border security policies. Significantly, this is a glaring weak spot in Biden’s otherwise solid support from independents, who disapprove of his policies cited above by 62% and 67%, respectively.

Americans have been shocked by images such as this touching video on Wednesday of a lone crying boy left behind by his group to wander the Mexican desert near the border. That’s Biden’s policy in a nutshell.

And, sadly, it’s entirely predictable.

When Will Liberals Reclaim Free Speech? My fellow liberals in academia have abandoned ‘the great moral renovator of society and government.’By Jonathan Zimmerman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-will-liberals-reclaim-free-speech-11617813301?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Mr. Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-author, with cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, of “Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn.”

‘Professor, why are you so conservative about free speech?” Several students have asked me versions of this question recently, which speaks volumes about universities right now. I’m a liberal and a Democrat: I’m pro-choice, pro-ObamaCare and vehemently anti-Trump. But I’m also a strong supporter of free speech, which marks me as a right-winger on campus.

That’s because my fellow liberals have largely abandoned free speech to conservatives. Turn on Fox News, and you’ll see “cancel culture” decried in bright lights. But in the liberal press—and most of all in the liberal academy—free speech has become a rhetorical third rail. Sure, we’ll invoke it when Republican state lawmakers try to ban critical race theory. But in our own house, free speech is seen increasingly as a tool of repression rather than liberation.

Here’s how the argument usually goes: White people love free speech, because it lets them say any hateful thing they want. But the real burden of it falls on racial minorities, who are forced to absorb constant slights and slurs against their very existence. That’s why we need to police racist speech: to protect its victims.

The problem is that people will inevitably differ about which speech qualifies as racist. The term has become our own scarlet letter, an all-purpose way to prohibit ideas you dislike. So we need to defend the free-speech rights of everyone, even avowed racists. The best response to hateful speech is to raise your own voice against it, not to ban it.

Just Decades After the Holocaust, the Woke Mob Targets Jews and America y Gil Troy

https://www.algemeiner.com/2021/04/07/just-decades-after-the-holocaust-the-woke-mob-targets-jews-and-america/

Commemorating Yom HaShoah — Holocaust Remembrance Day — in New York always felt vaguely foreign, even un-American, to me. Heavily-accented, emotionally-scarred Europeans would describe the dark days in that dark continent, forgetting that we were different. We American Jews lived in the land of light, the center of the New World — the Free World.

The Nazi evil happened over there, in that swamp of hyper-nationalist poisons that produced two world wars — then unfairly blamed the chaos on the Jews. As a second-generation American Jewish kid, I instinctively identified with the victors not the victims, the super-powered GI Joes magnanimously distributing cigarettes and chocolate, not the broken, emaciated concentration camp Jews desperately grabbing the goodies.

How lucky we were to feel that — and how fleeting that feeling was. This Yom HaShoah, I am thinking about how many of my fellow Americans have spent the last few years Europeanizing America, making the land of the free and the home of the brave look like the land of the fanatic and the home of the bully, where the left and right can agree on little — except that the Jews are somehow at fault and inherently flawed.

One of this moment’s greatest Jewish tragedies is that while our enemies put their differences aside to target us, most Jews can’t put our differences aside to defend ourselves.

In a sick way, hating Nazis on Yom HaShoah is easy. The Holocaust was Jew-hatred at its crudest: it was blatant and bloody. Condemning this genocidal expression of fascism — and all its Neo-Nazi heirs today — keeps most American Jews in their comfort zone. Liberals’ generalized hatred of the right reinforces their self-defensive hatred of right-wing antisemitism.

Legacy Media Corruption Is At The Heart Of Our National Conflict The Georgia example is instructive in illustrating exactly how much of our conflict is downstream of the broken media. By Emily Jashinsky

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/07/legacy-media-corruption-is-at-the-heart-of-our-national-conflict/

The media’s false reporting about new election legislation in Georgia whipped up a controversy that left millions of people grossly misinformed, frightened voters, mired major corporations in high-stakes public relations frenzies, distracted the political discourse, and furthered the country’s divisions. In short, it’s a perfect example of how the media is fueling our national conflict.

In this case, the media uncritically regurgitated Georgia Democrats’ partisan hyperbole, treating a narrative the party strategically crafted to defeat the legislation as fact and turning it into a long and false national news cycle. That news cycle left the public with an impression that the legislation was objectively racist.

That impression scared and motivated the public, leading employees to pressure executives into action. Worse, the false coverage led millions of people to believe that a major political party representing half the country was seeking to reinstate Jim Crow.

The coverage from our country’s major publications was so bad that after a few days, even liberals like Minnesota Rep. Dean Phillips and Will Saletan of Slate began pushing back. Those responsible for the bad coverage, which is the bulk of the legacy press, appear to be facing no consequences.

Over at RealClearPolitics, Carl Cannon wrote a poignant column on the offensive absurdity of invoking Jim Crow in this context.

“When Donald Trump likened his being impeached to a lynching, living relatives of Willie Edwards and Emmett Till called this comparison ‘ignorant’ and ‘insensitive’ and ‘offensive.’ They were right,” Cannon wrote. “But now Biden is invoking racist history, and doing it to score partisan political points. Millions of Americans who voted for him hoped they were done having to listen to such blasphemy from the White House.”

Sadly, the media parroted that partisan spin, legitimizing the Democratic Party’s narrative by presenting it under the banner of journalistic neutrality. For a clearer glimpse at the consequences, read this New York Times report on the internal frenzy at corporations like Delta and Coca-Cola, which spent days fumbling to respond under pressure from the media, activists, and staff.

That pressure stemmed entirely from misinformation peddled by the legacy media. Without the media’s legitimization of a partisan narrative, concerned employees wouldn’t have been reaching out, the external pressures of a PR threat would have been negligible, and the corporations could have focused on the business of taking us on spring break and making our mixers.

Unstoppable: The Incredible True Story of Siggi Wilzig

https://unstoppablesiggi.com/

Winner – Best of Los Angeles Award’s “Best Holocaust Book – 2021”

“A must-read that hopefully will be adapted for the screen. Greene lets Wilzig’s effervescent spirit shine through, and his story will appeal to a wide variety of readers.” – Library Journal

Unstoppable is the ultimate immigrant story and an epic David-and-Goliath adventure. While American teens were socializing in ice cream parlors, Siggi was suffering beatings by Nazi hoodlums for being a Jew and was soon deported along with his family to the darkest place the world has ever known: Auschwitz. Siggi used his wits to stay alive, pretending to have trade skills the Nazis could exploit to run the camp. After two death marches and near starvation, he was liberated from camp Mauthausen and went to work for the US Army hunting Nazis, a service that earned him a visa to America. On arrival, he made three vows: to never go hungry again, to support the Jewish people, and to speak out against injustice. He earned his first dollar shoveling snow after a fierce blizzard. His next job was laboring in toxic sweatshops. From these humble beginnings, he became President, Chairman and CEO of a New York Stock Exchange-listed oil company and grew a full-service commercial bank to more than $4 billion in assets.

Siggi’s ascent from the darkest of yesterdays to the brightest of tomorrows holds sway over the imagination in this riveting narrative of grit, cunning, luck, and the determination to live life to the fullest.

END NATIONALISM-END AMERICA: JOHN FONTE

https://americanmind.org/features/lefts-war-free-speech/end-nationalism-end-america/

Today’s globalist dogma is incompatible with our country’s survival.

Twenty-First-century progressive liberalism sees the American nation as a problem. There are three core points of contention: 1) the concept of nation-state sovereignty; 2) the actual American nation itself—its culture, history, and people; and finally, 3) the prospects for constitutional republican self-government in America.

From Democratic Sovereignty to Global Governance

For decades, mainstream liberal foreign policy experts who have served at the highest levels of American government (John Kerry, Strobe Talbott, Harold Koh, Anne-Marie Slaughter) and in the academic world (G. John Ikenberry, Robert Keohane) have advocated transferring aspects of national sovereignty from nation-states, including ours, to global institutions. Indeed, President Obama himself told the United Nations General Assembly in 2016: “We’ve bound our power to international laws and institutions—I am convinced that in the long run, giving up freedom of action—not our ability to protect ourselves but binding ourselves to international rules over the long term—enhances our security.”

Harold Koh, the State Department’s chief legal advisor under Obama, recommended that U.S. courts “download” international law into American law, stating that it is “appropriate for the Supreme Court to construe our Constitution in light of foreign and international law.” Anne-Marie Slaughter, an international lawyer who served under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, argued that nations should cede a degree of sovereign authority “vertically” to supranational institutions such as the International Criminal Court. She declared that transnational networks “can perform many of the functions of a world government—legislation, administration, and adjudication—without the form,” thereby creating what the American Bar Association has endorsed as the “global rule of law,” with transnational law logically superior to the U.S. Constitution.

Liberal scholars have recognized that global governance is often at odds with democratic self-government. The liberal internationalist argument is that nation-state democracies like the United States cannot be relied upon to develop fair “global rules” because they ignore the interests of non-citizens.

Texas Attorney General Sues Biden Administration For Releasing Criminal Aliens By Jordan Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2021/04/07/texas-attorney-general-sues-biden-administration-for-releasing-criminal-aliens/

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined by the state of Louisiana, sued the Biden administration over the president’s executive orders directing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to release convicted criminal illegal aliens into the United States.

In the lawsuit filed in district court, Paxton argues ICE is violating federal law by releasing “dangerous illegal aliens already convicted of felony offenses” into the United States after the Biden administration issued memos making it more difficult for migrants who are not a “national security threat or criminal offender with an aggravated felony conviction” to be issued detainer requests ordering their deportation. This change, the lawsuit states, is the direct result of a “broader shift in federal policy that began on the first day of the Biden Administration and has resulted in a ‘crisis on the border.’”

“President Biden’s outright refusal to enforce the law is exacerbating an unprecedented border crisis. By failing to take custody of criminal aliens and giving no explanation for this reckless policy change, the Biden Administration is demonstrating a blatant disregard for Texans’ and Americans’ safety,” the Republican said in a press release on Tuesday. “Law and order must be immediately upheld and enforced to ensure the safety of our communities. Dangerous and violent illegal aliens must be removed from our communities as required by federal law.”

While the policy before Biden exercised executive power stated that ICE could send the Texas Department of Criminal Justice detainer requests ordering criminal aliens to be deported upon their release, the new directive pushes ICE to cut back on detainer requests and forces the state criminal justice department to “release criminals into the community or continue housing them at the expense of Texas taxpayers.”

The ‘Clean Up’ Phase of Biden’s Presidency Is About to End By Matthew Continetti

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-clean-up-phase-of-bidens-presidency-is-about-to-end/

“Biden has spent these early months dealing with the lingering reminders of the man he replaced. But this chapter of his presidency might be drawing to a close.”

One rarely emerges empty-handed from an hour or two in the C-SPAN archives. I spent some time the other day watching a 2009 episode of Q&A, where Brian Lamb interviewed Christopher Hitchens. A passing reference to the debate over post-9/11 interrogation methods reminded me that it is far too early to make oracular judgments about Joe Biden’s presidency — much less to classify him as a “transformative” president like Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. The event, decision, speech, or law that will define Biden in American history has yet to happen.

Presidents spend the first months of their tenure in office dealing with issues and problems left over from the previous administration. George W. Bush, for example, wanted his first tax cut to increase economic growth after the bursting of the tech bubble. Barack Obama’s first tasks after taking the oath were stabilizing the financial system and lessening the fallout of the Great Recession. Donald Trump had to manage, in his inimitable style, the portfolio of ISIS, the southern border, and North Korea that Obama handed him in January 2017.

And yet all of these chief executives will be remembered not for what they accomplished before the arbitrary and overblown milestone of the “first 100 days,” but for how they responded to challenges that did not appear until long afterward.

Biden’s Infrastructure Bill Aims to End Single-Family Zoning By Stanley Kurtz

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-infrastructure-bill-aims-to-end-single-family-zoning/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=blog-post&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=top-bar-latest&utm_term=first

With the introduction of his massive, $2.3 trillion “infrastructure” bill, President Biden’s campaign to end suburban single-family zoning has begun. If you think this issue was debated and resolved during the 2020 presidential campaign, you are mistaken. It’s true that Biden’s campaign platform openly and unmistakably pledged to abolish single-family zoning. As soon as President Trump made an issue of that pledge, however, Biden went virtually silent on the issue and the Democrat-supporting press falsely denied that Biden had any designs on single-family zoning at all. Now that he’s president, Biden’s infrastructure bill openly includes programs designed to “eliminate” single-family zoning (which Biden calls “exclusionary zoning”).

How, exactly, does Biden plan to end single-family zoning? According to the fact sheet released by the White House, “Biden is calling on Congress to enact an innovative new competitive grant program that awards flexible and attractive funding to jurisdictions that take concrete steps to eliminate [‘exclusionary zoning’].” In other words, Biden wants to use a big pot of federal grant money as bait. If a county or municipality agrees to weaken or eliminate its single-family zoning, it gets the federal bucks.

The wildly overreaching Obama-Biden era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation — which Biden has pledged to revive — works in a similar fashion. The difference is that by adding another gigantic pot of federal money to the Community Development Block Grants that are the lure of AFFH, Biden makes it that much harder for suburbs to resist applying — and that much more punishing to jurisdictions that forgo a share of the federal taxes they’ve already paid so as to protect their right to self-rule.

Cotton Backs Arkansas Legislature’s Override of Hutchinson’s Veto By John McCormack

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/cotton-backs-arkansas-legislatures-override-of-hutchinsons-veto/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=right-rail&utm_content=corner&utm_term=first

U.S. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas backs the Arkansas legislature’s action to stop doctors in the state from performing gender-transition surgeries on minors or prescribing puberty-blocking hormones to minors who identify as transgender. 

“I support our legislature’s action to protect children from dangerous, life-altering, irreversible harms,” Cotton tells National Review in a statement.

In order to enact the law, the state legislature on Tuesday overrode the veto of Republican governor Asa Hutchinson.

On Tuesday night, Hutchinson was grilled by Fox News host Tucker Carlson about the veto.

“Let’s let parents and doctors make decisions,” Hutchinson said. 

“Then why don’t we allow 18-year-olds to drink beer in Arkansas? Why don’t we allow them to get tattoos? Why don’t we allow 15-year-olds to get married?” Carlson replied. “You vetoed a bill that would’ve protected children — not adults, children, to whom a different standard applies — from a life-altering, permanent procedure.”