NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Wish You Weren’t Here In a single stroke, Ron DeSantis tore the mask off hypocrisy of the smug faces of the liberal elites who love crowing about the virtues of “diversity” and the evils of “whiteness.” By Roger Kimball

Posted By on September 18th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/17/wish-you-werent-here/

It is curious how deeply the comic and the sinister are woven together in the woke dramas of our time. 

Consider, to take the latest example, the embarrassing little panic to which the well-pressed and affluent denizens of Martha’s Vineyard treated the public. 

Our agents are still out there counting the number of nauseating “Hate has no place here” and “No human being is illegal” signs on the front yards of posh Vineyard estates. To a man, woman, and everything in between, the neighbors of Barack and Michelle Obama in their 12 million seaside compound are echt correct. All of them, within the limits of statistical probability, hate Donald Trump. They all voted for Joe Biden. They support windmills (so long as they are not visible from the Vineyard), carbon-neutral energy policies, and a “woman’s right to choose” (though not of course if the female is yet-to-be-born: she gets no choice), etc., etc. 

It would be easy to draw up a menu of things the pampered people of Martha’s Vineyard support and deplore. 

One of the things they support is greater “diversity” and its primary motor, vastly increased immigration. They think Joe Biden was right when he said that the United States could very easily accommodate two million immigrants from Central America. 

They pooh-pooh reports of chaos on our Southern border. Neither Kamala Harris, in whose portfolio the border was originally placed, nor Joe Biden has even bothered to visit the border. Why should they care? They like it when thousands of poor migrants huddle into places like Brownsville, Texas. When journalists such as the New York Post’s Miranda Devine began revealing that the Biden Administration was secretly shipping planeloads of illegal immigrants around the country, including into tony venues like the Westchester, New York, airport in the dead of night, their bored reaction was to pour themselves another chardonnay. 

But then Florida Governor Ron DeSantis decided to attract their attention. He rounded up 50 illegal immigrants, mostly from Venezuela, who had made their way to Florida and put them on a plane to Edgartown, Massachusetts, the beating heart of Martha’s Vineyard. (And that’s just the beginning.)

The reaction of the loving, open, soft-palmed, Democrat-voting residents? “The horror, the horror”: Mr. Kurtz’s expostulation at the end of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness about sums it up. 

Floundering Florida pol Charlie Crist said that DeSantis’ action “shocks the conscience of any fair-minded human being.” Hillary Clinton said that it was an example of “human trafficking,” while other talking heads decried it as pure “evil.” Documentary filmmaker and anti-American propagandist Ken Burns has just made a film about the Holocaust that explains how the murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis was, at bottom, if you look at it the right (i.e., the Left) way, the fault of America. Interviewed just as the story about the migrants-come-to-Martha’s-Vineyard was breaking, Burns said that DeSantis, by sending illegal immigrant to Martha’s Vineyard, had taken a page from that “authoritarian playbook” and was “weaponizing human beings for a political purpose” just as you-know-who had done in World War II. 

Surreal, isn’t it?

FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Islamic Republic’s ‘morality’ murder and US appeasement By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on September 18th, 2022

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-islamic-republics-morality-murder-and-us-appeasement/

 The killing of Mahsa Amini in Tehran last week should serve as a reminder to the United States about the regime that it’s desperate to enrich with tens of billions of dollars in exchange for another disastrous nuclear deal. And the angry street protests that have erupted around the Islamic Republic since then should signal to the P5+1 that now is the time to help weaken, not strengthen, the grip of the ayatollahs on the populace.

Amini, a 22-year-old woman from Saqez in Iran’s Kurdistan Province, was on a trip with her family to the country’s capital on Tuesday, when she was arrested by the “morality police” for not having her head covered properly. According to eyewitnesses, she was beaten as soon as she entered the van that was transporting her to the station for “education.”
By Friday, she was dead. One can only imagine the kind of torture she endured before she was taken to the Kasra Hospital in northern Tehran. Photos that emerged of her lying in a coma matched the medical center’s statement that when she was admitted on Sept. 13, she showed “no vital signs.”

This notice was removed from the hospital’s social media pages after hardliners called its staff “anti-regime agents.” In parallel, police denied having beaten Amini to death, insisting that she had passed away from a heart attack.
Compounding the lie that nobody bought—least of all her family, who said that she had been perfectly healthy and never suffered from cardiac problems—President Ebrahim Raisi, as much of an Islamist extremist as his mullah handlers, reportedly requested that the Iranian Interior Ministry open an investigation into the incident. The charade would be laughable if it weren’t so typically evil.

Ditto for the response of the regime—a member of the U.N. Women’s Rights Council—to the demonstrations that ensued upon news of Amini’s demise and continued throughout her burial in Saqez on Saturday. During the funeral, women removed their hijabs and mourners chanted “Death to the dictator,” referring to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ironically, reports that Khamenei was severely ill with a bowel obstruction, along with rumors that he may even have died, were countered on Saturday with an appearance by the octogenarian cleric at a religious ceremony.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why the World Economic Forum’s Plutocracy Should Be Dissolved by J.B. Shurk

Posted By on September 18th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18908/world-economic-forum

No matter how noble its stated intentions, the “Great Reset” is at its heart a program for driving political power away from individual citizens and toward the controlling interests of a small international class of financial elites…. For citizens to reclaim power, they must not only embrace the basics of free markets once again but also rekindle a fondness for questioning the motivations of political authorities.

It is not just kings, generals, and popes who possess great power. Wherever a person, group, or institution is capable — through enticement, coercion, or brute force — of bending an individual’s free will, the structures and instruments of power exist. A local school board, after all, may well have more immediate and intimate influences over a person’s family than the United Nations Human Rights Council and its revolving door of despots who tend to promulgate international resolutions shielding their own crimes.

Limited regulation keeps the costs of market transactions low. Respect for private property and fair and impartial application of commercial laws encourage capital investment. Refraining from taxing the fruits of an individual’s labor fosters an exponentially more productive labor force. Providing populations with the tools to pursue and obtain knowledge and skills at minimal expense promotes not only an educated workforce but also politically competent citizens.

The small number of multinational corporations that control most television and print news sources around the globe also control the sociological levers capable of manufacturing or shifting public opinion. Power in any form — political, economic, cultural, spiritual… must always be guarded against as a potential foe.

“The welfare of the people has always been the alibi of tyrants….” — Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion and Death.

The great mass murderers of the twentieth century attest to this truth. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Mao killed tens of millions, but they did so, they assured the world, not for their own glory but for the benefit of “the people.”

It is no secret that money influences politics, no matter how profusely politicians may assert their civic independence from the lobbyists and benefactors filling their campaign war chests.

Tens of thousands of laws, rules, and regulations make it nearly impossible for any entrepreneur to navigate markets without inadvertently committing infractions or becoming a future target of an ever-growing army of regulatory code enforcers. Citizens are taxed on their wages, incomes, purchases, property, investments, improvements, sales, etc., and should they still possess anything of worth upon their ultimate demise, some agent of the State is likely to take one final cut of their bequeathed estates. The same unit of labor is thus taxed repeatedly along the government’s conveyor belt of confiscation.

Notably, today’s plutocrats have little interest in truly free markets…. The World Economic Forum, for instance, demands governments take urgent action to combat or address climate change, cybersecurity, online misinformation, artificial intelligence, overpopulation, the use of hydrocarbon energy, farm ownership, food supplies, the elimination of private vehicle ownership, and the imposition of citizen control protocols to defend against future pandemics. Regulation of people and markets is now of paramount importance to those with wealth and power.

MY SAY: Comments turned off

HOW MANY PEOPLE DOES IT TAKE TO CAUSE A HUMANITARIAN CRISIS?

Posted By on September 17th, 2022

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

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

JONATHAN S. TOBIN America’s Holocaust failure through the lens of 21st-century politics

Posted By on September 17th, 2022

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.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Biden’s Human Hot Potatoes Starting to Turn Libs on One Another By Athena Thorne

Posted By on September 17th, 2022

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.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

DeSantis made politics fun again when he sent illegal aliens to Martha’s Vineyard By Andrea Widburg ******

Posted By on September 17th, 2022

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.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

What Does Walensky’s Apology Really Mean? The CDC director confessed last month that the agency had failed during Covid—but her mea culpa is likely designed to protect against serious reform. Carl J. Schramm

Posted By on September 17th, 2022

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.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

A Sanctuary City Spectacle Migrants have become props for both political parties amid the failure of U.S. immigration policy.

Posted By on September 17th, 2022

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.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Joseph Simonson :Highest Number in US History: Border Patrol Logs 8,000 Migrants Entering US Each Day

Posted By on September 17th, 2022

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.