Tag Archives: immigration

Why on earth did Pretti bring a gun to a protest?

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Alex Pretti did something foolish and illegal at the protest in Minneapolis. He interfered with law enforcement agents. There will be debates for days if not years about whether his illegal interference with the cops, the discovery of his gun, and his violent resistance justified them shooting him.

In considering that issue, I urge readers to consider it not from the warm comfort of their recliner while watching slow-motion videotapes interspersed with football highlights, but from the perspective of cops who are being taunted, spat upon, name-called, and threatened with being run over by organized protesters in the bitter cold, who suddenly discover in a scuffle that one of those protesters has a gun hidden in his pants.

(I’m glad to report that speculation that the gun was planted on Pretti by the cops appears to be disproven.)

But let’s put to one side the issue of whether the shooting was justified. Even now, we still don’t have enough facts to make that determination.

Let’s instead consider a threshold issue: Why did Pretti bring a gun?

Note that it’s not illegal in America for ordinary citizens to own a gun. And it’s not illegal to protest non-violently.

It’s not even illegal to bring a gun to a protest (despite claims to the contrary by a Trump Administration official).

In short, whatever illegalities Alex Pretti committed at the protest, he did nothing illegal in putting a gun in his pants and going there.

But why did he? Why did he hide a loaded gun in his pants?

Ordinary people carry guns routinely for lots of reasons. Most of those reasons are poor ones, in my judgment, but not illegal ones. Some ordinary people carry guns simply because it makes them feel secure or even masculine. Some ordinary people carry guns because it plays into boyish fantasies.

And a few ordinary people carry guns because they have legitimate reasons to think they may need them for lawful self-defense and they have the expert skill and excellent judgment to use them properly in that mode.

Pretti seems not to be in the latter category. Rather, he brought a gun to the protest because it made him feel secure or masculine or fulfilled boyish fantasies. Sadly, those feelings and fantasies cost him his life.

Before leaving this incident, there’s a tribal juxtaposition here that is worth noting. Conservatives typically defend and even celebrate owning and carrying a gun, while liberals typically decry the same. Conversely, liberals typically defend and even celebrate protests of law enforcement, while conservatives typically decry the same.

So, conservative and liberal tribalists are left in a quandary when somebody brings a gun to a protest of the immigration laws. Conservatives wonder, do we defend the gun-toter even if he’s protesting? Liberals wonder, do we defend the protester even if he totes a gun?

I like the fact that this quandary forces the tribes to think past tribal identities. Conservatives are forced to acknowledge that owning and carrying a gun may be lawful but there are circumstances where it isn’t smart or right. Liberals are forced to acknowledge that protesting may be lawful but there are circumstances where that, too, isn’t smart or right.

In short, judging an act often requires thought beyond merely identifying the tribe of the person performing that act.  A bit more thought and a bit less tribalism would be helpful these days.

Two foolish women taunted an overwrought cop, and now one is dead

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David Brooks holds himself out as a moderate Republican. I suspect, however, that the last Republican he voted for was George H.W. Bush – the senior Bush who was elected 38 years ago.

Disgracefully but predictably, PBS pairs Brooks with Jonathan Capehart in a point-counterpoint format. PBS pretends that this little tête-à-tête constitutes balance – an avowed far-left gay Black man versus a faux Republican moderate who, in reality, hasn’t voted for a Republican in decades.

But Brooks made a good point in a recent piece on the shooting in Minneapolis. First, Capehart performed his predictable over-the-top song and dance about murder-murder-MURDER!!!

Then Brooks quietly observed that, in a better day, principled people would believe what they see on videotape. Today, however, it’s the opposite. Rather than believing what they see, people are seeing what they believe.

People watching exactly the same videotape believe they watched a murder, or believe they watched a cop shoot someone in self-defense, based on their pre-existing political persuasion.

Today’s political partisans are like sports fans. When two people are watching the same game but rooting for opposite teams, they typically both believe their team is getting cheated by the refs.

Of course, that can’t be true. On balance, the refs are either fair, or biased one way, or biased the other way. But people’s emotions cloud their judgment. It’s especially pernicious that they’re unaware of this phenomenon. That’s bad enough in sports; it’s tragic and often unjust in law enforcement.

Of course, after making this good point, Brooks went on to bash President Trump. There’s a reason, after all, that Brooks has a forum at PBS and The New York Times.

As of today, a few more facts have come it. I don’t know what Brooks is thinking right now, but I’ll tell you what I’m thinking.  

First, a couple of background facts. Context matters.

The cop (I’ll call him a “cop” for convenience, though I know he’s not a policeman, and I do so without derogation) was the victim of another car incident last year. His arm got tangled up inside the car of a person he was apprehending as the person drove off. The cop was dragged 300 feet down the paved road by the accelerating car. He was lucky to survive.

Does that matter? Maybe not in a legal sense. After all, it was a completely different incident that occurred many months ago. But it suggests that the man was probably sensitive to the danger in such a circumstance. I sure would be.

Here’s another background fact. The left has made a studied show of resistance to enforcement of the immigration laws. They’ve flung names at ICE cops such as Nazis, fascists and worse. They’ve physically obstructed them, and occasionally physically attacked them with rocks and bottles. That’s criminal behavior, even though it does not justify a lethal response.

They’ve also used their cars to obstruct the cops and, as I’ve just reported above, on at least one occasion they dragged a cop 300 feet with their car.

Their objective has been to provoke the cops into victimizing them. Lefty influencers have explicitly urged protesters to put their bodies on the line.

If they can provoke the cops into violence in their enforcement of the immigration laws, goes the thinking on the left, people will come to believe that the laws being enforced are bad.

It’s a very old strategy. It often works, especially when the news media is sympathetic to the cause.

A final background fact. The Administration has taken a confrontational approach to immigration enforcement. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it may be warranted in view of the lackadaisical approach taken for many years. But confrontational approaches do have a tendency to produce, well, confrontations.

Whatever approach is utilized, it might be useful to combine it with an employee card-check system where employers are required to check the immigration status of their employees. Substantial fines could be imposed on companies who hire illegals. Such a system has been talked about for years and partially utilized, but politicians too often bow to business lobbies who want to hire illegals for cheap labor.  

On to the incident itself. At least two videotapes are available. One was taken by a bystander, and the other is the body cam that was being worn by the cop who fired the shots.

The bystander’s video is taken from a stationary position. It shows a cop approaching the car, putting his hand on the driver’s door handle, and ordering her:

“Get the fuck out of the car.”

The car moves backward a few inches. The front wheels turn hard right and it juts forward. Only then, you can see another cop at the left front of the car. He shoots three times. We later learn that his shots leave one bullet hole through the windshield. At least one shot went in through the driver’s open side window as the car moved past him.

The shot through the driver’s side window suggests that, whatever danger the cop was in at the time he shot through the windshield, the cop by then had gotten out of the way, for he was then alongside the car.

The video taken by the cop’s body cam provides more context as the cop circles the car. The woman’s wife was at the scene and had gotten out of the car. Smirking, the wife taunted the cop repeatedly:

“Come at us! You want to come at us?”

A refection of the cop is visible in the shiny finish of the car, and he appears to be a sizable man. The wife taunts him again:

“Go get yourself some lunch, big boy!”

As the cop circles to the front of the car, the shots come quite suddenly. The situation was tense but exploded unexpectedly, to me as the viewer anyway, with (1) the wife starting to open the passenger side door and shouting “drive, baby, drive,” (2) the car lurching forward, and (3) three shots ringing out quickly.

I cannot tell whether the cop legitimately feared for his life when he fired the first shot. I can say, however, that he was very ready to pull his gun and shoot, because he did so very fast. As for the second and third shots, see my discussion above.

It’s still early, and not all the facts are in. Maybe they never will be.

But here’s my tentative assessment. Two lefty troublemakers went looking for trouble. They used their car to block armed cops on an icy street from doing their jobs, and they taunted the cops with personal insults. One cop reacted with a profanity. Another cop – who’d been dragged 300 feet by a car in such a situation – reacted with his gun when the car lurched toward him as he was circling it and he heard “Drive, baby, drive!”

Is this tragic? Yes. Was it preventable? Yes. Is it murder? No.

Will the next Jewish diaspora to America help us win another world war?

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Guess what these men have in common: Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, and Edward Teller.

Everyone knows about Einstein. He won a Nobel Prize for his work on the photoelectric effect, did revolutionary work on the relativity of time and space (all in his mind without a laboratory), fled Nazi Germany in 1933, had wild hair in his later years, and, most importantly, co-authored a letter to President Roosevelt explaining the potential for a nuclear bomb.

That letter is credited with persuading Roosevelt to launch the Manhattan Project. The ensuing nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to WWII. By avoiding a full-scale invasion, the bombs probably saved over a million Japanese, American, British, Australian and Chinese soldiers and civilians.

Einstein became a U.S. citizen in 1944, a year before the bomb was first tested at Los Alamos.

Leo Szilard was the other co-author of that letter. It was Szilard who conceptualized the notion in 1933 that incredible amounts of energy could be released in a nuclear chain reaction by splitting the uranium atom. It might have been the greatest Eureka! moment in science since the day Isaac Newton conceived of gravity when he was hit on the head with a falling apple. Szilard fled Europe in 1938 and became a U.S. citizen five years later.

Hans Bethe was a prominent physicist of the early 20th century. He fled Germany in 1935 at age 29 and became a U.S. citizen in 1941. Like Szilard, he worked on the Manhattan Project. He won the Nobel Prize in 1967 for his work on nuclear reactions over the course of a prolific career, and died in 2005 at age 98.

Edward Teller fled Germany in 1935 and became a U.S. citizen in 1941. He, too, worked on the Manhattan Project. He was later dubbed “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” (While the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs used nuclear fission, the hydrogen bomb uses fusion, which delivers much more bang for the buck. Hydrogen bombs have been successfully tested, but never used in warfare.)

OK, one thing these men obviously have in common is that they were all great physicists.

Here’s another thing, perhaps less obvious: They were all Jewish. Indeed, that’s the reason they fled pre-WWII Europe and came to the beacon of hope that is called America. (It should be noted that not all the physicists on the Manhattan project were Jewish. Project leader Robert Oppenheimer was raised in an American Jewish family but did not regard himself as Jewish. Enrico Fermi was an Italian immigrant raised in a Catholic family.)

The Nazis were pretty stupid, considering they fancied themselves clever and strategic. They drove away the greatest physicists of the day – right into the welcoming arms of their adversary.  

The result was poetic justice.

Germany’s persecution of the Jews deprived the Nazi war machine of their scientific talents. Imagine if Germany had kept the Jewish scientists at home in Germany to help them invent the bomb before America did. Those V-2 rockets they used to bombard London could have been loaded with nukes.

Fast forward a few generations. We now have some new Nazis to contend with, called radical Islam. Like the German Nazis, these neo-Nazi Islamicists fancy themselves pretty clever and pretty strategic, though at the moment the Trump-Netanyahu alliance has them on the ropes.

Here’s an interesting thought experiment. What if the radical Islamicists somehow manage to subdue what they call “the Little Satan” of Israel? Where will the Israeli physicists and other scientists go?

Not to Europe, which is a hotbed of antisemitism.

They’ll go where brilliant, hard-working people have always gone – they’ll go to America.

In America, we don’t care if they’re Jewish, Lutheran or Buddhists, and we don’t care if they’re Black, white, brown or yellow. We don’t care about who they are, we care only about what they can do.

What that next wave of Jewish immigrants can do is to help us – help humanity – win another world war, this one against radical Islam. In the meantime, they can help us cure cancer or generate limitless electricity or put a man on Mars.

Here’s the bigger point. It’s too simple to say that immigration is bad, or good. It all depends on the skill set of the immigrants. I’ll happily take another Einstein.

Minnesota Vikings are not changing their name to the Minnesota Somali Pirates – yet

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The Babylon Bee – America’s unofficial newspaper of record – said they are indeed, but it turns out to be satire.

I think.

The Bee’s piece was in the heavy wake of a story that Somalis in Minnesota bilked the government out of something like a billion dollars. I say “billion” not in the way I say “gazillion.” The figure is actually, literally – and by “literally” I don’t mean figuratively – something like . . . a billion dollars.

Their scheme was to send bills to the Minnesota state government for providing various forms of welfare relief to the public. It took off during Covid when the government all but legalized fraud because the best way to defeat a pandemic is to close the schools, print money, and drop it from helicopters.

Somali groups would set up phony organizations pretending to provide whatnot, from affordable housing to food for children, and send the government fake invoices for it.

Which the government happily paid.

There were lots of clues for a long time that the whole thing was a scam. The Wall Street Journal reports “The massive fraud was an open secret. Merrick Garland, who served as U.S. attorney general under Joe Biden, called it the largest pandemic-relief hustle in the nation” (emphasis added).

But this was Minnesota, full of “nice” Minnesotans and especially full of a governor who was very full of himself and fulsome aspirations. His name was Tim Walz, aka the 2024 Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate.

Rather than pursuing the abundant clues and whispers – nay, the smoking guns and shouts – of fraud, Walz waltzed on, out of deference to a key Democrat constituency – Somalis.  

Today’s Somalis in America, you see, are the descendants of Somalians who were enslaved in America three hundred years ago and discriminated against ever since and so they deserve special favors like legalized fraud.

Well, no, that’s not quite right. Today’s Somalis in America arrived in just the last decade or two. They fled a bloody war-torn Somalia to come to American in order to earn a piece of the American Dream.

Well, no, that’s not quite right either. They fled a bloody war-torn Somalia, alright, but they came to America to be beneficiaries of the modern American welfare state which flowers in nice Minnesota.

Well, no, even that’s not quite right. They fled a bloody war-torn Somalia and came to America to rip us off – while accusing us of racism all the while.

Two lessons can be learned from this. The obvious one is that the modern welfare state is out of control. It all but begs to be ripped off. The people paying for the rip-off are you and me, and it’s not pennies – it’s billions.

The second lesson is more controversial. Here’s a good summary of it:

[R]adical Islam has shown that their desire is not simply to occupy one part of the world and be happy with their own little caliphate; they want to expand.  It is a – it’s revolutionary in its nature.  It seeks to expand and control more territories and more people. 

And radical Islam has designs, openly, on the West – on the United States, on Europe.  We’ve seen that progress there as well.  And they are prepared to conduct acts of terrorism – in the case of Iran, nation-state actions, assassinations, murders, you name it.  Whatever it takes for them to gain their influence and ultimately their domination of different cultures and societies. 

That’s a clear and imminent threat to the world and to the broader West, but especially to the United States, who they identify as the chief source of evil on the planet.  

That statement was by Secretary of State Marco Rubio (whose parents were legal Cuban immigrants) in a recent interview.

Americans like to think that their diversity is a strength, and, up to a point, it is. But that strong diversity consists of groups such as Protestants from England, Catholics from Italy, Huguenots from France, Amish from Switzerland, and Jews from Poland. It even consists of Buddhists from China and Hindus from India.

Something that all those groups have in common is tolerance for other religions and, mostly, tolerance for other cultures. The concept of “infidel” is foreign to these groups.

Muslims are often different. The concept of “infidel” is alive and strong in Islam. They’ve sought to conquer Europe since the seventh century, and nearly succeeded several times. Even now – maybe especially now – many publicly name-call America “the Great Satan.”

Even Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, the Soviet Union and today’s communist China never called us “the Great Satan.” We Americans are semi-amused by that moniker, but the Muslims flinging it are dead serious.

They see the indigenous religions and culture of their adopted nation as evil. That’s a clever feat since, after all, their culture and religion failed in the place they fled, they came here voluntarily, and we welcomed them – complete with their religion and culture that looks down on us. But that’s how they see our cultures, our religions, and us.

Maybe part of the reason for their contempt for us is that they see us as suckers.

Muslims therefore tend not to seek assimilation into American culture, a culture they despise. They seek, more than the Irish, more than the Asians, more than the Jews, to maintain their particular identity and distinct culture.

And to impose it on us.

We’ve already seen what happens when Islam reaches a critical mass in a Western nation, as it has in France and is nearing in England. Within our lifetimes, it is likely that the Notre Dame and St. Paul’s will be converted into mosques.

You think that’s ridiculous? Bear in mind that the first great Christian cathedral was in Constantinople – the incredible Hagia Sophia. When Constantinople fell to the Muslims, they eventually changed the name of the city to Istanbul but they immediately mutilated the Hagia Sophia into a mosque by ripping out the altar and burning the Christian crosses and all other Christian symbols and art. The Hagia Sophia remains a mosque to this day. (BTW, where’s the Pope on this?)

Muslims conquer and they convert, at the point of a sword if necessary, and sometimes even if not.

Like most Americans, it goes against my grain to think we should discriminate against a particular religion and particular regions of the world in deciding who can immigrate into our nation. But this is an exception, and a very important one.

Rubio is right. We ignore him at our peril.

This just in: Illegals are criminals

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For years, the legacy media (hereinafter the “Leg-Meds”) parroted the Democrats’ line that the population of immigrants can be divided into the “documented” ones and the “undocumented” ones.

The euphemism “undocumented” finally became a joke, and so the Leg-Meds and the other Democrats eventually surrendered to the word “illegal.”

However, within that category of “illegals,” they clung (bitterly) to the notion that about 99.9999999% were “law-abiding” and only the remaining 0.0000001% were criminals.

That lie was called out yesterday by President Trump’s new press secretary. This 27-year-old woman owned the Leg-Meds. Here’s the exchange:

REPORTER: Of the 3,500 arrests ICE has made so far since President Trump came back onto office, can you just tell me the numbers? How many have a criminal record versus those who are in the country illegally?

KAROLINE LEAVITT: All of them [have a criminal record] because they are criminals as far as this administration goes.

She’s right. Here’s the text of 18 U.S.Code Section 1325:

(a)Improper time or place; avoidance of examination or inspection; misrepresentation and concealment of facts

Any alien who (1) enters or attempts to enter the United States at any time or place other than as designated by immigration officers, or (2) eludes examination or inspection by immigration officers, or (3) attempts to enter or obtains entry to the United States by a willfully false or misleading representation or the willful concealment of a material fact, shall, for the first commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18 or imprisoned not more than 6 months, or both, and, for a subsequent commission of any such offense, be fined under title 18, or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.

This quoted section clearly and unambiguously sets out criminal penalties including prison time for illegally entering the country. Imprisonment is only for crimes. You can’t be imprisoned for a mere civil violation of the law.

(If the entry was legal, but the ongoing presence in the country is not, as with a student overstaying his visa, the issue is more complicated. That’s probably why the next subsection sets out civil penalties — rather than criminal penalties — for that circumstance. But the vast majority of illegals are not students overstaying their visas; they are people who snuck across the border.)

Therefore, people who enter this country illegally are illegals – and criminals. It is accurate to refer to them as such. The most precise term for them would be “criminal immigrants.”

Increase legal immigration

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Guess what these people have in common:

  • Albert Einstein
  • Enrico Fermi
  • John Audubon
  • John Muir
  • Elon Musk
  • Nikola Tesla
  • Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • Irving Berlin
  • Arnold Schwarzenegger
  • Levi Strauss
  • Dikembe Mutombo
  • Liz Claiborne
  • Mariano Rivera
  • Melania Trump
  • Andrew Carnegie
  • Audrey Hepburn
  • Yo-Yo Ma
  • Ayn Rand
  • Elie Weisel
  • Sergey Brin
  • Bob Marley
  • Sammy Sosa
  • Carlos Santana
  • Henry Kissinger
  • Rupert Murdoch
  • Alexander Hamilton

You’ve probably guessed it – each was born outside the United States, and immigrated here. Most became full, legal American citizens after undergoing the citizenship process, including passing history, civics and English language tests that most American college graduates would flunk.

The list could go on for thousands of pages, but you probably get the drift.

And by the way, you can add to the list a full quarter of the American winners of scientific Nobel Prizes. American technological prowess owes a lot to immigration.

Legal immigration is a strength of America, and always has been. America has been the most attractive place on earth for immigrants for a long time – due in part to the role of immigrants in making it so.

Do build the wall. Do secure the Mexican border. Do deport at least the illegal aliens who are criminals. Do require businesses to check the immigration status of employees, and do impose substantial fines on those who hire illegal ones.

Illegal immigration over the last generation became a tool of the anti-American left. Leftists intent on destroying Western Civilization used it to import the tools of destruction. Only slightly less bad are Democrats who used it to recruit a Democrat constituency.

The rest of America has finally seen the destruction wrought. And ironically, the leftists misread the political sentiments of the only immigrants who can vote legally – the legal ones. Those immigrants who worked tirelessly to come here legally – and vote legally – tend not to sympathize with illegal ones who want to cut the line, and tend not to vote for leftists or Democrats who want to help them do so.

One of the most racist assumptions of the Democrats was that legal Hispanics favor illegal immigration simply because many of the illegal immigrants have brown skin.

OK, the Democrats overplayed their hand. But let’s not overplay ours. We would be foolish to turn away the brave, the entrepreneurial, the smart, the industrious, the legal.

The Denver mayor is an illegal unrepentant insurrectionist

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Denver mayor Mike Johnston, as I imagine him in his insurrectionist get-up

Resistance 2.0 is upon us, and it’s getting ugly.

The latest is from the formerly-mediocre and now-failed city of Denver, of which I am an embarrassed alum. The mayor promises to forcibly thwart the United States government’s enforcement of the United States immigration laws. He says he’ll send Denver police and 50,000 moms to head the feds off at the pass.

This valiantly woke mayor even promises to personally break laws and go to prison if necessary.

Here’s the back story:

Denver declared itself a “sanctuary city” back when liberals could make such feel-good declarations without any adverse consequences. But over time, the adverse consequences came good and hard, as did the illegal immigrants.

Armed with the knowledge that in Denver they would receive a hearty Mile Hile welcome and armed with the knowledge that they would not be deported (and, in many cases, armed with drugs and guns, too), the illegal immigrants came by the thousands.

Over 40,000. Denver now hosts the highest illegal immigration population per-capita of any city. Denver might not be a great city, or a great place to live anymore, but, as the host with the most, it’s a great haven for illegal immigrants.

Providing services for these illegals has strained the city budget to the point that the city has cut back on police and other emergency protection as well as basic services like street repair and snow plowing.

In a splendid exercise in irony and hypocrisy, Denver has tried to foist some of its illegals onto neighboring towns and cities. The libs of Denver thus pat themselves on the back for “welcoming” illegals into the city while simultaneously re-shipping them to cities that don’t.

The mayor declares that the city should continue to welcome illegal immigrants because it puts the city on “the right side of history.” As if history proves that illegal acts by illegal immigrants typically produce good and legal outcomes, so long as you express that conclusion in a flowery cliché. 

I have a question for these “right side of history” Democrats. Now that history has recorded that Republicans have won control of the Presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives, the Supreme Court, a majority of state governorships and a majority of state legislatures, how’s that “right side of history” argument working out for you?

Back to Denver. The mayor’s latest rhetoric goes a step beyond the “sanctuary city” status that is common in our Blue cities such as Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and so on – you know, the toilet towns. Those so-called sanctuary cities had merely announced that they welcomed illegal immigrants, and would not help the feds enforce the federal immigration laws against them.

The Denver mayor now goes a step further than that. He promises war. He says he will send armed local Denver police to intercept the federal law enforcement personnel at the town limits, and will recruit moms from local Denver neighborhoods to help. He promises to personally go to jail if that’s necessary to stop the United States government from enforcing the United States immigration laws.

He boasted that his rebellion would be like Tiananmen Square where anti-communists were run over by tanks.

But wait! Democrats like communism – Karl Marx, Mao, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, Pol Pot, the whole gang. The Democrats aren’t anti-communists, they’re anti-anti-communists. If the Democrats had been at Tiananmen Square, they would have been in the tanks, not under them.

And double but-wait! Didn’t the rebels lose in Tiananmen Square?

Ponder all this. The mayor of Denver says he personally will commit crimes for the purpose of preventing the United States government from enforcing United States laws; promised to enlist tens of thousands of armed local policemen and a citizens’ militia of 50,000 moms to join his rebellion; and promised to lose.

I wonder, will the mayor wear a buffalo horn hat?

I also wonder, won’t the mayor’s criminal interference with the United States government’s enforcement of the United States immigration laws within the United States (1) cause Denver’s the illegal immigrant problem to continue unabated and (2) worsen it by drawing even more illegal immigrants to Denver from other cities and towns?

The mayor later walked back his comparison to Tiananmen Square, perhaps because it dawned on him that the Democrats are on the side of the tank-riding communists, not the tank-crushed anti-communists. But he didn’t walk back his threat of secession or rebellion or insurrection.

Democrats, are you OK with this?

You say you want a revolution in Texas?

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Confederate dead at the Battle of Antietam
Antietam, 1862

The governor of Texas says his state is being “invaded” and that under the Constitution he has the right to defend his border.

On the first point, millions of people are indeed unlawfully crossing the border into Texas. Joe Biden refuses to do anything about it. In fact, he seems to be encouraging it. He stopped construction of Donald Trump’s border wall, reversed the “stay in Mexico” policy which required immigrants seeking asylum to remain in Mexico pending a decision by American authorities, and, to the extent he accidentally catches illegal immigrants, he usually lets them go with a polite request that they appear at a hearing scheduled years in the future.

Most don’t appear. It’s like catch-and-release fishing. They’re usually smart enough not to get caught twice.

The border policy is so asinine that you have to wonder if someone has the goods on Joe.

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Criminals roam free while God is put on trial and His son is branded a border-jumper

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On Easter Sunday, I awoke with the thought that I would go to church, something I seldom do. Not just any church but the one where I grew up. Where the pastor of my youth was an intellectual and spiritual giant, and a very nice guy. Where my parents were members and volunteers for half a century. Where they still reside – their ashes dwell in the adjacent glen.

So I looked up the church to find the time of Easter service. Their website was plastered graffiti-like with the phrase, “We are love” in translucent cursive so you could still see the words and pictures of the page. I wasn’t sure of the biblical source of that phrase, or exactly what it means, but it’s not a bad marketing slogan for a church.

On the other hand, it seemed a little cheesy and self-important. It reminded me of the virtue-signalling yard signs that sprouted like weeds a year or two ago, shouting that the inhabitants of the houses where they were planted were very, very good and smart people – much more smart and good than the reader of the sign.

I clicked into a page on the church’s website entitled “What We Believe.” I saw nothing there about Jesus or God. But I did see their boast that “We are extravagantly inclusive.” Of everybody except Jesus and God, apparently. At that point, I abandoned my Easter mission.

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Why are Haitians sent home but Mexicans and Central Americans get to stay?

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Joe Biden’s border policy would be comical if it weren’t so destructive and tragic. He in effect tells would-be immigrants, “Please don’t come but, if you do, we’ll let you in and let you stay.”

Predictably, they do come, they do get let in, and they do stay. Put another way, they come, they see and they conquer — all at the implicit invitation of the president. How long before they get dinner at the White House?

Millions come. Border towns are overrun. Sanitation is bad. Conditions are horrendous, filthy and unprecedented.

Twenty-six state governors begged Biden to take time out from (another) vacation to discuss the matter. On behalf of the American people they represent, the governors asked that our immigration laws be enforced – that these illegal immigrants be prevented from committing their illegal act of entering and staying in the United States, not to mention whatever additional illegal acts they may commit once they’re here. Biden ignored the governors.

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