…that the people who most need to read articles like this (I’m not going to pull-quote it; it deserves a quick read) will be the last to actually read it.
Of course, those who have been through the history of the various characters in this blog’s comment section know that while the tendency flowered under Trump, it didn’t start in 2015.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is checking out after a meal at an Indian restaurant in the north ‘burbs. Hostess Elora BANNERJEE is running BERG’s card, as he notices Moonbeam BIRKENSTOCK, Cat SCAT and LEAKEY the Beagel climbing out of an Uber. BERG frantically drums his fingers, waiting for the card-reader to approve the transaction – which it does, just as the three progressive activists walk through the door.
BIRKENSTOCK: Merg!
BERG: Oh, hey, Moon…
BIRKENSTOCK: Shut up. The MNGOP just voted to for bullying!
BERG: You mean, for a bigger, stronger person being able to use their size and power to exert their will over others?
SCAT: Yeah! They votes for…
SCAT: Hey! You’re interrupting!
BIRKENSTOCK: That was rude! How dare you use size and volume to yell over someone who’s…
LEAKY: Zat vas anozzer interrrrhuption!
BIRKENSTOCK: How dare you!
BERG: OK, so glad to see you disavow people interrupting other…
BIRKENSTOCK: Shut up. So while you Republicans were pushing a bill that legalized bullying…
BERG (stifling a yawn, badly) by stopping the erasure of women in their own sports by men who’ve in many cases not even begun the years-long process of hormonal transition, which never actually completely erases mens’ physical advantages…
BIRKENSTOCK: SHUT UP! What were you doing to fix the economy?]
BERG: I bet this is the point where you drop some kind of tweet from the DFL’s social media intern…ope, there you go…
BERG: So the party that squandered a $19B surplus, hiked taxes, blew up the budget, raised fees on everything from tabs to parking, and shrugged their shoulders and said there’s nothing they can do about an acceptable level of fraud and corruption, and participated in the ruinously inflationary spending binge of the past four years, has done exactly what to “make life more affordable?”
(The three look back and forth. SCAT produces a bullhorn from a capacious MPR tote bag).
BANNERJEE: (Pulling a bottle of mace from under the desk) Oh, no you don’t. Put that thing away.
SCAT: But…
BANNEREE: Now!
(The three sheepishly comply as BERG makes his escape).
And SCENE.
Joe Doakes, formerly of Como Park, emails:
I’ve been saying the American government should put Americans first and only after all of our problems are solved, consider taking care of people in other nations. After watching the Zelensky blow-up in the Oval Office, I’ve concluded I was wrong. The American government should take care of Americans. Period.
The American government should never give war guarantees to other nations. That promotes “moral hazard” by making Europeans think they can act irresponsibly because America will step in to defend them. It’s the classic little brother picking a fight knowing big brother is right around the corner. Zelensky demanded war guarantees in the form of American troops to fight Russian troops on Ukrainian soil. Trump – to his credit – was smart enough not to give in. Hell, the only reason there was a White House ceremony at all, was so Trump could claim he wasn’t “giving” Ukraine aid for free, he was getting mineral rights in return, similar to our deals in the Middle East (we have troops stationed in Saudi Arabia to defend the royal family from enemies in Iran and uprising by their own people; in exchange, we get access to their oil, literally a blood-for-oil deal-with-the-devil made 100 years ago).
Now that the minerals deal has blown up, Trump has the perfect opportunity to walk away from defending Ukraine in specific and Europe in general. Withdraw from NATO, let Europe sort out its own problems, we have enough of our own. And not just Europe. About that Saudi deal – do we still need it? Are the terms still fair to us? I’d like DOGE to take a look at all similar arrangements, worldwide.
More than military aid, the American government should never give financial aid to other nations. Money is “fungible,” meaning the funds the foreign government would have spent taking care of its own people can now be shifted to buying a new Rolls Royce for the dictator. That’s not fair to Americans. Other nations’ own governments should take care of them. If their governments are unable to take care of their people, that’s what charity is for. Americans are the most generous, most giving people in the world, but we want to know that our charity is doing good, not simply lining pockets.
Getting government out of the war guarantee and charity businesses would not only save a ton of money, it is the first step in restoring constitutional government. Zelensky handed Trump the perfect opportunity and Elon Musk’s team is the perfect tool. Now is our chance.
Joe Doakes
I see value to alliances…
…that act with integrity, themselves, and are first and foremost in America’s best interests.
I think a NATO that acts with integrity – like, maintaining its capability to defend itself – is in America’s interest.
The NATO we have today? Not so much.
An alliance with Poland, Finland and the Baltic states? Places that care about upholding Western civilization against enemies military and social, and back it up not only with spending and hardware but national attitude? Logistics notwithstanding, that would, or could, work.
When I started this blog, 23 years ago this month, I had a few assumptions about politics:
I was wrong about all of them – including at least part of that third bullet: Jeff Bezos, whose Washington Post has for the past 15 years considered Jennifer Rubin “conservative”, frankly shocked me just a tad. Read the whole thing.
Am I cynical enough to wonder what the “but” is? Hell yeah. If Jennifer Rubin was “conservative”, maybe Robert Reich is “pro free market” and Fareed Zakaria is a “personal liberty” guy. Who knows?
But conservative-ish populism seems to be gaining ground in our culture -and maybe, just maybe, dragging some institutions with it.
More later in the week.
This sums up the moment we’re in as well as anything I’ve seen.
Worth a watch.
…don’t you dare claim there’s intrinsic bias in Twin Cities media:
So many ways to word that: “uphold federal immigraiton law”, “stop abuse of the healthcare system”, “drop non-qualified non-citizens from taxpayer-funded healthcare”, among others.
But they just have to imply malice.
You think you hate the media enough? You…well, you know where this goes, right?
Dunking on the MNDFL’s social media intern isn’t “punching down”. It’s “squishing something with my foot”.
But this one tells us a lot about the DFL.
The intern is looking at something in the GOP platform:
Forget for a moment that they deflected from the GOP’s correct assertion that the DFL calls post-partum care “anti-abortion” – the crisis pregnancy center may be as noir of a béte to the MNDFL as Trump himself.
But look at the bit the intern highlighted: it’ll show you how depraved the DFL is. The highlighted bit in the GOP platform asserts that *fathers should have rights* as well as obligations”.
The DFL’s position is that not just the fetus, but the father, is just a clump of cells.
Every time I think I hate the DFL enough, I find out I’m not even close.
Do pseudo-religious cults reflect the times in which they develop? Or does popular culture make the various cults the symbols of the times?
I’m sure there’s an online sociologist or philosopher, somewhere, who has thought this before – feel free to point them out – but what the heck. It’s my blog, I’ll derive if I want to.
Think about the major cults that’ve made news over the past five or six decades:
The Manson Family formed in the Sixties – communal pseudo-hippies, living on LSD, intertwined with California popular culture – and in some ways marked the end of the Sixties.
The Peoples Temple – like an EST seminar run amok? All about the seventies.
Heavens Gate? Even though it ended with a mass suicide in ’97, it flourished (after a fashion) in the eighties, for reasons that seemed to match the decade.
The Branch Davidians? Synonymous with the ’90s – in a decade of groups that fought the law and the law won, they were the big kahuna of them all.
The 2000s? My theory breaks down a little here, unless you count militant Wahhabi Islam which, conveniently for my theory, dominated American culture more than any cult in history.
And with the war over and lost, we can go back to normal…
…well, not “normal”.
It’s all setup for my theory that this particular cult may be perfectly set to define the 2020s, or vice versa, so far.
Joe Doakes formerly of Como Park emails:
The President issues Executive Orders which apply to the whole nation. Opponents shop around for a sympathetic judge to block the orders.A federal judge for the District of Massachusetts blocked the federal employee buy-out offer at the request of employee unions.
A federal judge for the Western District of Washington blocked the Executive Order against birthright citizenship.
One federal judge for the District of Columbia has blocked the DOGE team from scrutinizing Treasury Department payments, and a different one in that district has blocked release of the names of FBI agents assigned to the J6 investigation.
And that’s just in the last two weeks. The Trump administration faced 22 nation-wide injunctions in his first term.
How can we have a nation of fair and impartial equal justice under the law, if judges in random jurisdictions can overturn the law of the whole land at whim?
Justice Thomas criticized the practice of nation-wide injunctions in Trump v. Hawaii, saying, “. . . if their popularity continues, this Court must address their legality.” Seems to me that time has come.
Joe Doakes
That time has definitely come.
After almost five years, the City of Minneapolis “plans” to “do” “something” with the former Speedway in “George Floyd Square”.
I’m adding emphaiss to the quote below for a reason:
The City of Minneapolis has received four applications to redevelop The People’s Way, which was formerly a Speedway gas station at the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue.
The gas station turned into a gathering place in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. For the past four years, the community has used the site for twice-daily meetings, annual events honoring George Floyd, gardening and other activities, according to the city’s Request for Qualifications presentation.
City Councilmember Andrea Jenkins represents the area and she told 5 EYEWITNESS NEWS not much is known about what the private groups would do with the property, but said it is a positive step toward progress and growth at George Floyd Square.
I’m gonna guess we know one thing about them: They’re dues-paying members of Minneapolis’s DFL/DSA non-profit/industrial complex.
And if you look at Rise & Remember, Minnesota Agape Movement, P3 Foundation and Urban League Twin Cities, you’ll realize not only that nobody ever went broke betting against the City of Minnepolis transferring money to its political class, but that whatever “happens” at George Floyd Square is going to be both exquisitely expensive and a magnet for blight.
Rise and Remember – run, among other people, by George Floyd’s aunt.
Minnesota Agape Movement – headquartered in George Floyd Square. Their “team” page is blank.
P3 Foundation – if I’ve got the right one, they appear to be national nonprofit that is into all sorts of things.
The Urban League needs no introduction.
Anyway – it’s going to wind up being a “community space” that turns into a graffity-coated monument to blight. But the non-profits will get their payoff. So tomayto/tomahto, I guess.
So – AlphaNews and Liz Collin released Minneapolis has Fallen a little over a year ago.
One of the signal scenes in the movie happened when Assistant Chief Blackwell testified that the “Maximal Restraint Technique” – which a series of current and former MPD officers testified was part of MPD traininig, and which Chauvin’s mother pointed out in her son’s MPD training manual – was not part of MPD training.
Blackwell is suing Collin and Alpha over this claim.
To wit:
I’m more against police brutality than most conservatives – but to a non-lawyer, it seems like the evidence pointing toward a new trial is approaching critical mass.
Berg’s Seventh Law has been getting a workout this week.
For starters – as I pointed out all through the run-up to the election – the Democrats and DFL jabbered relentlessly about voting to “save democracy”, while promising to gut free speech, freedom of conscience, the right to self-defense, privacy and separation of powers.
And perhaps it’s good news for 2026 that they seem to have learned nothing:
In the meantime, notwithstanding the 16 years of babbling about “impending waves of right-wing violence”, it is inevitably the left that leans into it:
I’ve been a Trump skeptic all along. But if I’d known that Trump’s win eight years ago were going to bring out Big Left’s true inner nature this hard, I might have opened my mind up a little earlier.
One of the more satisfying stories of this past year was watching the accelerating decay of the mainstream media’s influence over society.
And this was one of my favorite examples:
Watching the orwellian “Joy” campaign get pelted with rhetorical rocks and garbage by the commoners was one of the greatest, er, joys I’ve had, at least politically, in recent years.
I haven’t paid a lot of attention to Anderson Cooper’s New Years Eve broadcasts from Times Square since Kathy Griffin was still an A-lister – or, maybe, starting her descent toward the Z-list.
But perhaps the biggest story of this past year, along with and tied to Trump’s re-election, is the change in the culture over the past few months.
Suddenly, it’s…well, not “safe”, per se, to attack our narratives’ sacred cattle. But people are starting to play around with the idea.
Which brings us to Whitney Cummings – a comedian about whom I’ve never felt any compulsion to comment at all [1].
Can anyone imagine a comic, other than Dave Chapelle or Ricky Gervains, riffing on mainstream TV like this, even a year ago?
The good news is, it feels like the cultural pendulum is swinging.
The other news, neither good nor bad but definitely worth paying attention to: these swings need to be solidified. Talk about Trump ushering in permanent change is only not premature if we make it stick.
[1] That’s not entirely true. Cummings briefly had a TV series, “Whitney“. I saw about ten minutes of it, and it was pretty dreadful, but somehow it eked out two seasons.
Anyway – Ed Morrissey walked into the studio and said “I just heard, Whitney’s dead”. I responded. “Thank God. It’s about time”.
Ed looked at me, a little horrified. “The TV show?”, I asked?
“No. Whitney Houston.”
Vivek Ramaswamy ruffled a whole lot of feathers over this past weekend with his comments about the culture of South Asian immigrants.
Stipulated in advance – there is a lot of abuse of H1B visas, to provide a relatively cheap and, by modern standards, just a little indentured labor force. That may need some fixing.
But when you start comparing second-generation Indian immigrants?
He’s not really wrong.
You should open and read the entire tweet – but I’m going to pull this quote:
A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,” or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,” or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in “Family Matters,” will not produce the best engineers…[Families should emphasize] movies like Whiplash, fewer reruns of “Friends.” More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less “chillin.” More extracurriculars, less “hanging out at the mall.”
Most normal American parents look skeptically at “those kinds of parents.” More normal American kids view such “those kinds of kids” with scorn. If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve.
Now close your eyes & visualize which families you knew in the 90s (or even now) who raise their kids according to one model versus the other. Be brutally honest.
That drew some, er, sporty responses from what media calls “MAGA”. No doubt you’ve heard ’em.
But if you leave aside the abuse of H1B visas, and the pretty spotty record of outsourcing engineering and software development to India (whose engineering culture is often well-credentialed but stiff, hierarchical and frequently more focused on legalistic i-dotting and t-crossing than results), he’s not wrong.
This guy – one of the less-useless voices in academia – puts it well (and again, you’d do well to read the entire tweet):
But again, I’ll pull the quote:
An entertaining aspect of the past few days’ race war is that the elite Asian/Indian immigrant critique of middle-class white American scholastic culture (“You guys are lazy af, and focus totally on playing football and getting laid”) is IDENTICAL to the middle-class white American critique of Black and Mexican scholastic culture.
As a political scientist, there’s an important point here: bigotry doesn’t just go in one direction. For most people, the more forward-caste person – the bastard ahead of them in society – will always be a ruthless, stiff, amoral, dead inside, thieving, SOB who is a trash lover. But, the more poor and rural person? A dumb, inbred, animalistic, backward, criminal, low-IQ, ridge-runner.
And it should hardly bother “MAGA” too much to notice that Ramaswamy agrees with them – modern American academic culture in general would have to stand on tiptoes to get to “mediocrity”, and that pathology is even leaking into the once-sacrosanct “STEM” fields.
But it’s not just academic culture.
Immigrants, as Reilly notes, have always had to kick it up a notch to get to “even” in America. Indians – like Chinese, Koreans, VIetnamese, Philipinos, and before them Italilans, Jews, Germans and all the others, all the way back – have done it exceptionally well.
The concentration of Indians in technology (and, this past few years, politics) should be taken as a challenge – to our education system, sure, but to our family culture as well.
SCENE: The rotunda at the Minnesota State Capitol. A press conference is underway. Standing at the podium, in front of a “Satanic” display, are three members of the Twin Cities Church of Satan:
A smattering of reporters are gathered.
POCKERT: I’m Edmund Pockert, the legal counsel for the Twin Cities Church of Satan.
GUMPKE AND BACHMANN-DUMPF: (awkwardly, loudly) Hail Satan!
POCKERT: Mr. J-Talon666 and Ms. QueenOfTheDark will now answer questions.
CHANNEL 11: Mr. and Ms. What?
POCKERT: Those are the names our representatives go by.
CHANNEL 9: So what’s going on with this display?
GUMPKE: This display is ack-shu-ally our way of striking a blow for religious pluralism.
BACHMANN-DUMPF: We love to notice the hypocrisy of Christians who melt down when other people exercise religious freedom.
MPR NEWS: When you say “melt down”…?
BACHMANN-DUMPF: Christians always have a cow and melt down when we assert our rights.
POCKERT: Always.
ALPHA NEWS: So, how do you respond to allegations that the “church of Satan” is less about religious freedom and more about getting a juvenile rise out of mainstream Christians.
BACHMANN-DUMPF: Well, it is their own fault. They always have a cow and melt down and freak out go into emotional tailspin and get loud and crazy and deranged and lose their shi…
GUMPKE: They are very predictable.
CENTER OF THE AMERICAN EXPERIMENT: So a local blogger and talk host left this satirical response to your display:
(GUMPKE and BACHMANN-DUMPF stand, gobsmacked and confused, for a moment. )
GUMPKE: (finally breaking the silence) Well, this is typical. A Christian freaking out…
CHANNEL 4: This doesn’t appear to be – what was your term – “freaking out”.
ALPHA NEWS: Yeah, more like “satire” or “parody”, speaking to the notion that “Satanism” exist just to try to mock and ridicule regular Christians.
BACHMANN-DUMPF: Is this even legal? Can they do that?
POCKERT: (nods silently)
GUMPKE: It’s our view that this just contributes to the climate of hate against Satanists…
PIONEER PRESS: But it’s just mockery – not a whole lot different than this display, itself
POCKERT: OK, this converence is over.
(The three shuffle away from the podium).
And SCENE
“Life is full of ironies – if you’re stupid”
— PJ O’Rourke
Remember 2010-2012? When Democrats snarled that there was no way, no how that there were “death panels” buried in Obamacare?
And those of us with some experience in the healthcare industry responded “of course, there are, and have been ever since government poked its nose into controlling the healthcare system”?
The “people” jumping for joy over the murder of Brian Thompson for running a company that administers the metaphorical institutional “death panel”, exacty as foretold, are the same class of gerbils who said that was no way, no how anything Obamacare was about. Ever!
2. Keep on letting it stew. Let the “steam” build:
3. Go “I’m shocked, shocked that there’s a crime problem!
4. “Ride to the rescue” with a meaningless band-aid that doesn’t come close to addressing the cultural crisis you, yourselves, fomented:
Of course I’m not the first or only one to notice this:
Apparently “chaos” and “crime” aren’t polling well enough to overcome the loss of the ‘Trifecta’.
Am I the only one that heard about Taylor Lorenz’s “Joy” at the murder of Brian Thompson…
…and thought “that certainly puts a new spin on the Harris campaign’s theme?”
One “joy” I try to deny myself is excessive schadenfreud. Pinky swear.
But I’ll confess, I feel quite a bit of it seeing Lorenz’s sociopathic level of self-unawareness splashed about the place:
Less schadenfreud, Mitch. Less schadenfreud.
The woke mob is doing its best to try to simpify the Daniel Penny / Jordan Neely case into a matter of “if we’d only given him what he needed, he’d be alive and impersonating Michael Jackson today”.
For all its squawking about humanism, modern progressivism tries to boil humanity down into a series of material equation; if you give a “black or brown body” (as opposed to a human) food and a roof over their head and 12 years of an approved curriculum, they’ll turn out just fine.
It’s a seductive reductionism at best, and kind of cynically inhuman at worst.
But it’s not purely a product of our cultural left.
Among the many offshoots of the Penny/Neely case is the emergence of Neely’s father – who by all documentary accounts was a pretty horrible excuse for a father, even by “father of mentally ill drug addicted street person” standards. He’s come out of the cold to file a lawsuit against Penny. It’s the New York way.
Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire commented about it on his podcast last week, as the suit was filed.
Walsh pointed out the fact that the senior Neely was, by all the available evidence, a bad, mostly absent father who appears to be looking to cash in on the misfortune of a son he didn’t seem to have made a whole lot of time for when he was alive.
So far, so good.
But then he followed up with [paraphrasing closely, here] “kids who have good parents don’t grow up to be mentally ill crackheads harassing people on the subway”.
What “give people enough handouts or they’ll fail” is to the left, “living the prescribed life” is to the right; as if getting married at 23 and having a traditional household guarantees your kids will turn out just fine.
Don’t get me wrong – it certainly helps raise people whose heads are screwed on straight. A traditional two-opposite-gender-parent family that prays together, stays together, eats dinner, celebrates holidays together (regardless of everyone’s politics) and keeps life in persepective , all other things being equal, is going have a way better than even chance of raising kids that turn into normal, healthy, productive, well-adjusted adults. And that certainly wasn’t Neely’s chidhood.
But if you think it’s a guarantee?
Allow me to introduce you to mental illness, the world’s most merciless bitch.
The serious, debilitating ones – crippling depression, schizophrenia, extreme bipolar disorder and the dog’s breakfast of others – don’t care about how you were raised.
And for all the focus mental illness gets today, modern science still knows more about the dark side of the moon than about how the brain mis-wires itself.
You can be like this guy – from a well-off family, who grew up with all of life’s meaningful advantages, only for bipolar disorder to swerve him from an elite music program to a life of radical and sometimes violent personality swings, homelessness, occasional jail, living with his parents, gigging around a small town for extra money, and (after a brief flash of recovery when “they got his meds right”) an untimely death.
Or this guy, who grew up in a fairly normal if quite well-off family with both the means and the sincere motivation to raise a good kid – who slipped psychologically waaaaay off the rails and spent decades self-medicating, chemically and emotionally, to an extreme that harmed everyone within his personal blast radius, who eventually (and seemingly inevitably) succumbed, survived by parents who seemed broken hearted but to have seen and felt it coming for what must to any parent must have seemed an eternity. As I said five years ago:
And when I became a parent, his story – the whole family’s story, really – terrified me; it was possible, no matter how you loved your children, for the unreasoning, cackling spectre of mental illness and its sidekick, addiction, to take that kid from you no matter what you did and how hard you clung to the hope you could do something about it.
And I’m sorry to say I’m reminded of him in a story a family I know is living right now – a child who grew up in a pretty traditional, normal family, into a pretty normal traditional life. Married at 22, two beautiful and talented kids…
…who had a drinking problem. Which they gave up some time ago. Which seemed to allow a whole platoon of demons to come out to play. This person has since spent the past couple of years chasing around the country seemingly at random, has “come out” as the opposite gender, and is clearly in dire need of a qualified, competent, and perhaps supernaturally wise intervention (from which the “opposite gender” thing will almost certainly shield them).
Is it because this person had bad parents?
No. It’s not. Quite the opposite.
Bad parenting and the disintegration of the traditional family have incubated a lot of pathologies in this society. But not all of them.
So when Matt Walsh says Neely’s father was a disgrace – of course there’s no argument.
But when the big lesson he takes away is “this doesn’t happen to children of good parents?”
It’s not just simplistic and reductionist. It’s smug and ignorant.
They warned us that if we voted Republican, extremists would roam the streets murdering their enemies, as their fellow extremist droogs rejoiced.
And they were right.
The meme has traveled about that UHG denies claims at double the national average. That may be true, and that may be utterly without context, and neither I nor the gerbils posting the memes know one way or the other.
Of course, most of the people rejoicing (not exaggerating) Thompson’s murder do it by way of saying it’s high time we adopt “single payer” government healthcare.
Of course, if they think a UHG denial causes problems, wait’ll they get a load of the “cost cutting” measures single-payer systems are moving into.
Not sure its directly related to the Trump election – but if there is a cultural realignment going on below our society’s electoral surface, this new ad from Apple is a sign of it.
For the past couple of decades, the only acceptable way to present fathers – of any race, of late – is as incompetent boobs who are married to improbably gorgeous and capable women.
And what this said about America is…not good. Advertisers get paid to read the zeitgeist correctly. And for most of this past several decades, that zeitgeist, as apparent to advertisers of products directed at women, was “Men are to social and personal life what waxy yellow buildup is to your kitchen floor”. The notable differences were in products aimed at men – mostly beer and home improvement stores, which treated men as, well, potential customers.
A few years ago, I ran a home-made study of TV ads, measuring the percentage of ad characters by their role in the ad:
Not sure I even need to tell you what the gender and ethnic breakdown was.
The problems is, of course, that these are the messages by which our society socializes children. Is it any wonder GenZ boys are checking out of social engagement?
And that they voted disproportionally for Trump?
Hoping this is a sign that the ad industry is seeing that cultural swing too.
As I noted the other day when an NPR reporter tried to go all “Boss Lady” on President-elect Trump, the President had a snappy comeback:
According to Victor Davis Hanson, Mexican president Sheinbaum walked the idea of compromise back a notch:
But given long-standing, de facto Mexican policy to rely on and profit from an open U.S. border, it was not long afterwards that Sheinbaum claimed she had not been so accommodating.
Or, as she now put it of the Trump conversation, “I give you the certainty that we would never—and we would be incapable of it—propose that we would close the border.” And of course, she is right: Mexico never would wish for a secure U.S. border, although it is wrong that she is incapable of guaranteeing one should she choose to do so.
What, then, is going on?
Hanson goes on to explain what, indeed, is going on. Turns out the open border is in fact a key element of Mexican foreign and domestic policy:
While in office, former President Obrador often said strange things. Two of the most pugnacious were his high-five boast that some 40 million of his own citizens had fled Mexico to cross the border: “Just imagine. There are 40 million Mexicans in the United States—40 million who were born here in Mexico, who are the children of people who were born in Mexico.” (Obrador never explained why his own citizens would willingly flee their own country to a nation habitually caricatured in the Mexican press as racist and exploitive.)
Obrador also periodically delighted in interfering in US elections by urging Mexican expatriates in the U.S. to vote against all Republicans, presumably because they seemed at times to threaten to kill the Mexican golden goose of illegal immigration.
Indeed, in 2023, Obrador urged American Hispanics to never vote for Ron DeSantis’s presidential primary campaign—an irony given Mexico’s chronic complaint of Yanqui interference in Latin American politics.
Obrador believed, as many presidents before him no doubt concurred, that the 40 million expatriates and Mexican-American children, if they were distant from Mexico long enough, would romanticize the country, and so, like most immigrants, become a powerful lobbying force on Mexico’s behalf.
…
And it is also increasingly likely that Mexican-Americans will be more prone to vote for border security than open borders—again further proof that their self-interest as patriotic Americans trumps Mexico’s cynical attempts to use them as political pawns. If those trends continue, the American Left and the Mexican government may well lobby for a secure border, in fear they are only augmenting a growing MAGA constituency.
But it’s possible this past year has seen not just a sea change among Anglo voters, but among those millions of migrants:
But, given the huge numbers of human trafficking, the chaos, the drugs, the violence, and the financial costs of supporting millions, an open border is increasingly seen by Americans as not to their advantage—as we saw in the recent Trump victory. That reality, not the rhetoric of Mexican presidents, will govern all future negotiations—a truth that President Sheinbaum should digest before she sounds off about a border that she knows her country has done so much to deliberately destroy—and to America’s detriment.
If Trump and the GOP don’t follow through on this momentum, they all deserve to get washed out of office.
NPR’s token Aztlani, Maria Hinojosa, yelling “SLAY, QUEEN GIRLBOSS!” as Mexico’s socialist female president briefly flexed on Trump’s border plans:
How it’s going:
Yep. The whole world witnessed it:
Back in college, I did a little acting.
The highlight? I played Henry II i “The Lion in Winter”. And I had a blast.
One part of the role involved using makeup to turn 20 year old Mitch into 55 year old Hank Deuce. And since this was a small college theater, at a school that didn’t even offer a drama degre, there weren’t a whole lot of extra people playing “Makeup Girl”.
More than that, the professor, the late Patricia Lavin, was a formidable woman – she’d been the first female theatrical producer in LA back in the fifties and sixties, and had a long list of theatrical and film credits (she had done makeup work on the original “Planet of the Apes”, for one example) – who made sure that we learned how to do the nuts and bolts of theater.
Including makeup.
Which meant I, the very adolescent-macho Mitch, had to learn how to do his own makeup.
And looking at the photos of 20 year old Mitch playing 55 year old Hank II, I actually looked a fair bit like I do today (albeit with a lot more hair).
I thought about that when I saw this “comedian” talking about the Rep. McBride crisis:
So that’s what a woman is! Someone who can do makeup!
By that definition…
…well, do I even need to finish the sentence?
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