The ideology has certainly gone over the edge when one of the nation’s most far left newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle, criticizes the current expression of the belief. The occasion was a meeting of a parent committee that advises the city school board where it [...]]]> How extreme has the Diversity fixation become in liberal America?

The ideology has certainly gone over the edge when one of the nation’s most far left newspapers, the San Francisco Chronicle, criticizes the current expression of the belief. The occasion was a meeting of a parent committee that advises the city school board where it evaluated the diversity value of a gay man and found him deficient.

The article appeared on the front page of the February 14 edition of the Chron with the headline “To school board, gay dad isn’t diverse enough.”

The members of the committee — three white, three Latina, two black and one Tongan — discussed the issue for two hours of admitting gay dad Seth Brenzel (pictured) to their group. Interestingly, even though Brenzel was present for the entire meeting, he was talked about but never was invited to speak on his own behalf.

More than 200 readers of the Chronicle article commented, with many sounding unimpressed with the behavior of the board members.

The Chronicle article compared the meeting to the TV show Portlandia which portrays “liberalism gone to ludicrous extremes.”

Here’s a clip that shows how Diversity is a strong value in Portlandia:

A Daily Mail article about the school board issue reminded readers that the San Francisco education establishment voted last month to change the names of one-third of the city’s schools, including high schools named after George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The two presidents are now considered insufficiently virtuous according to modern woke standards.

Here’s the Chronicle article:

San Francisco’s school board is wasting time on ridiculous debates as students remain home, By Heather Knight, San Francisco Chronicle, February 13, 2021

A gay dad volunteers for one of eight open slots on a parent committee that advises the school board. All of the 10 current members are straight moms. Three are white. Three are Latina. Two are Black. One is Tongan. They all want the dad to join them.

The seven school board members talk for two hours about whether the dad brings enough diversity. Yes, he’d be the only man. And the only LGBTQ representative. But he’d be the fourth white person in a district where 15% of students are white.

The gay dad never utters a single word. The board members do not ask the dad a single question before declining to approve him for the committee. They say they’ll consider allowing him to volunteer if he comes back with a slate of more diverse candidates, ideally including an Arab parent, a Native American parent, a Vietnamese parent and a Chinese parent who doesn’t speak English.

Was this an episode of “Portlandia,” the TV satire about liberalism gone to ludicrous extremes? No, it was just another Tuesday night at the San Francisco Board of Education, a group that would provide great entertainment if the consequences weren’t so serious.

Parents teach their children to treat everyone fairly. To not be rude. To listen more than speak. To do research before forming opinions. To not waste other people’s time. To focus on what’s important. To acknowledge mistakes. It’s too bad school board members haven’t learned these lessons over the past dreadful year of distance learning for the more than 52,000 children in their charge.

“What’s wrong with these people? They’re committing political malpractice and educational malpractice seemingly at every meeting,” said Supervisor Rafael Mandelman, a gay man who represents the Castro and said he’s heard repeatedly about gay students in city schools facing bullying and discrimination. “But we don’t want someone queer with an actual seat at the table?”

The Alice B. Toklas LGBTQ Democratic Club on Friday slammed the board for its “misguided fumbling towards a goal of diversity.”

The person who was perhaps the most stunned was Seth Brenzel, the gay dad whose daughter is a fourth-grader at Glen Park Elementary. “At any moment, I expected a commissioner to address me,” he said, “because there I was.”

Knowing his face was beamed live across the city on Zoom, Brenzel kept a neutral expression as the board discussed his race, gender and sexual orientation — and whether they were a worthy mix for the Parent Advisory Council.

“I thought maybe somebody would ask me a question. Like, ‘Hey, Seth, why do you want to be a member of the PAC?’ Or, ‘Hey, Seth, can you tell me about your volunteering in the district?’” he said. “None of that happened.” (Continues)

Why do Democrats think releasing dangerous prisoners was a good idea?? Do criminals have a political [...]]]> Just when you think that Democrats can’t go any lower in disregarding the basic responsibilities of government, there’s this: New York state has flung open the cell doors of its jails to allow dangerous felons to walk free.

Why do Democrats think releasing dangerous prisoners was a good idea?? Do criminals have a political lobby these days?

The law is new, but the carnage is accumulating fast. Tucker Carlson’s brief segment noted several examples, one of which was an illegal alien who was released from jail after allegedly killing a mother of three. Breitbart News had details which bear consideration because they are so off the charts:

New York Jailbreak: Illegal Alien Freed After Allegedly Killing Mother of Three on Christmas Eve, Breitbart.com, by John Binder, December 27, 2019

A New York state law that allows accused criminals to be freed from prison the same day they are arrested for violent crimes has freed an illegal alien accused of killing a mother of three on Christmas Eve.

Jorge Flores-Villalba, a 27-year-old illegal alien, according to Assemblyman Colin Schmitt, was arrested after he allegedly admitted to hitting and killing mother of three Marie “Rosie” Osai, who was a legal immigrant from Haiti, in a Christmas Eve crash on Long Island, New York.

“I was driving and I did strike a person,” Flores-Villalba allegedly told law enforcement officials. “I didn’t call the police. I was afraid because I don’t have a license.”

After being charged with felony fleeing the scene of a deadly accident, Flores-Villalba was arraigned and then freed without bail on Christmas day — less than 24 hours after Osai was allegedly killed. (Continues)

For more examples, see Daniel Horowitz’ article in Conservative Review: New York’s crime laws imploding: 7 insane prison release stories.

Here’s Tucker’s take:

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, a massive change in New York this year that very few anticipated, bail laws changed. Cash bail has been abolished even for several felony crimes, and not surprisingly, criminals are taking advantage. Case in point.

A man called Gerod Woodbury was arrested last week and charged with robbing four banks since the end of the year. But it turned out to be his lucky day. Thanks to new bail laws, Woodbury was out the next day, no bail.

According to police — and this is the part you could have guessed — within a day he had robbed another bank. That would be his fifth bank robbery in just two weeks.

Nicole Malliotakis is a Republican candidate for the Congress of the United States. She’s also a New York State Assemblywoman and former candidate for the Mayor of New York City. She joins us tonight.

Nicole, you’ve joined us a lot to sort of chronicle the decline of the city and the state of New York. This seems like a quantum leap in the wrong direction.

NICOLE MALLIOTAKIS, (R-NY): Look, this is an overhaul that no state in America has seen and as a matter of fact, you named just one incident but there are so many more that we can talk about.

On Christmas Eve, you saw an illegal immigrant who was driving unlicensed who killed a mother of three, and he left the scene. He was caught and they released them back into the street.

We had a number of people assaulted including a police officer, Orthodox Jewish women who were assaulted in an admitted hate crime. We saw a woman in the streets of New York City punched — had her teeth punched out, all these individuals were released, and two of the three of them were rearrested within the same week.

This is what’s happening in the State of New York under a very bad law that needs to be fixed and it needs to be fixed immediately. And we’re here in Albany, and we’re pushing for that — those changes.

And you know, the governor has not really given us a straight answer. He is saying that there’s something wrong with it. But he doesn’t want to fix it and needs to be fixed immediately to consider, first of all, someone’s criminal history, to consider their danger to society, to restore judicial discretion, to protect witnesses, which this bill actually makes you release witness information to defendant within 15 days of the arrest.

All these things need to be addressed, and people need to go to my petition and sign now at nicoleforny.com.

CARLSON: I guess I’m a little bit confused here. I mean, who’s the constituency for this? Is it bank robbers? Is it people punch who women in the face and knock their teeth out? I mean, are they the voters that Cuomo is worried about? I mean, who is for this?

MALLIOTAKIS: Well, you know, interestingly enough, you have the Democrats from all levels of government, the city, Mayor de Blasio, who wants to see Rikers Island closed is looking to release people from our jails.

We have people in the Federal level like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, my opponent for Congress; Max Rose, both came out and supported this and supported the closure of Rikers Island and this is all part of the problem. People are afraid. . .

CARLSON: Wait. Let me stop you there. Max Rose, the purported moderate member of Congress is in favor of this?

MALLIOTAKIS: You know, and he is not a moderate and I think people are learning that right away. But look, he said he supported the bail reform that Cuomo proposed. He also supports the closure of Rikers Island, and he is joining AOC and the squad and Nancy Pelosi and voting with them regularly.

But besides that, the thing here is that the people of New York know it’s wrong. The Democrats know it’s wrong. The governor is saying that something needs to be done and yet we’re here now, second week in session, and nobody has done anything to address it, and it’s been us, the Republicans that are putting forward legislation for fixes.

And I’ve got to tell you, if it doesn’t get fixed, there’s going to be blood on Governor Cuomo hands.

CARLSON: Yes. And people are just going to continue to leave the state, of course, because it’s like, why would you live there? Nicole, thanks so much for joining us.

It seems Obama’s much touted arms deal with [...]]]> Evidence of President Obama’s dirty dealing continues to be uncovered. Author Lee Smith appeared on the Ingraham Angle show recently to discuss odd reactions among Democrats regarding Trump’s removal of Iranian terrorist Qasem Soleimani after Smith published an article with details of Iran negotiations, posted below.

It seems Obama’s much touted arms deal with Iran was only a postponement until the next administration — which would have been a bad surprise for Hillary, although it didn’t work out that way.

Here’s a video of Smith explaining the scheme with Laura Ingraham and Victor Davis Hanson:

Spare audio:

The zinger about Obama’s collusion with Iran occurs at around four minutes in:

LAURA INGRAHAM: Now, before we get back to Victor, you said in this new piece of yours that the goal for the Obama administration was never to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. It was to stop them from building it during the Obama term. That’s quite an accusation.

LEE SMITH: Well, I mean if you look at what happened — if you look at the sunset clauses meaning the different provisions built into the deal that were set to expire sometime after Barack Obama left the White House, that’s very clear. It tells you what they were doing. They were passing it on to the next administration.

The Lee Smith article that got Laura Ingraham’s interest is linked below:

Obama Passed the Buck. Trump Refused to Play. by Lee Smith, Tabletmag.org, January 13, 2020

The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watch

In the wake of the targeted killing of Iranian terror master Qassem Soleimani, an interesting fight has broken out—after Donald Trump failed to brief them in advance of the strike, Democrats began fulsomely criticizing the president. This led Republican lawmakers to accuse their counterparts across the aisle of pro-terrorist sympathies. Maybe Republicans are still sore that Barack Obama compared them to Iranian hardliners like Soleimani for denouncing his signature foreign policy initiative, the Iran nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Or maybe it’s something else.

Because the fact is that the Democrats are not pro-terrorist. They’re simply intent on protecting the historic agreement that legalized the nuclear weapons program of a terror state.

Democratic leadership is angry it wasn’t briefed before the operation, as were some Republican lawmakers critical of the scant information in the White House intelligence briefing on the attack. But there is reason to believe senior Democrats would have leaked it to the press, as they’ve done repeatedly over the last three years to prosecute their anti-Trump campaign. In particular, House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff and his staff have used CNN as a platform to push the discredited Trump-Russia collusion narrative. Why would Democrats endanger U.S. national security by leaking highly classified plans of a major operation against a terror leader? Because Soleimani was the centerpiece of the nuclear deal.

The JCPOA was the instrument Obama used to secure the administration’s ultimate goal—realigning U.S. interests with those of Iran. For the U.S. to be able to minimize its footprint in the Middle East, the Obama White House needed a proxy force—much like the Iranians use proxies to advance their interests. Soleimani managed Iranian proxies and Obama, who praised the late commander, believed he was capable of stabilizing the region on behalf of America.

In 2015, when the JCPOA went into effect, Soleimani was removed from the U.N. sanctions list, a provision that, according to press reports at the time, the Iranians saw as “nonnegotiable.” That’s how Obama wanted it, too.

As I explained in Tablet last week, Obama had subscribed to the myth that U.S. policymakers had built up around Iran over 40 years—that the third-world obscurantist regime was in fact a formidable power that the U.S. dare not challenge lest it risk an apocalyptic war. Seen from Obama’s perspective, a nation this powerful was—unlike the incoherent Arabs, OR tiny Israel—singularly capable of maintaining order. (Continues)

His previous book, The Strange Death of Europe, was excellent, and you can read my review in The Social Contract journal, Suicide by Immigration — Has Europe given [...]]]> Author Douglas Murray has just published a new book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, which analyses the increasingly irrational behavior of humans in groups.

His previous book, The Strange Death of Europe, was excellent, and you can read my review in The Social Contract journal, Suicide by Immigration — Has Europe given up on Itself?.

Murray’s new book appears to be similarly astute, and he appeared recently for an interview with Tucker Carlson to sort through the current craziness in society.

Too bad the discussion wasn’t longer. A more in-depth exchange between these two would be worthwhile to say the least.

Audio version:

TUCKER CARLSON: Issues like wearing blackface decades ago are big news, in part because the entire western world has become obsessed with identity politics.

Top Democrats in particular are going on, we could give you a thousand examples. We just picked a couple out of the bin.

During a recent rally in New York City, Senator Elizabeth Warren cast her frontrunner campaign as one that excludes men. Listen to this:

SENATOR ELIZABETH WARREN: I am especially glad to be here in Washington Square Park. I wanted to give this speech right here, and not because of the arch behind me, or the president that this square is named for. Nope. We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men. In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.

CARLSON: Yes, because you don’t have fathers or anything because biology is not real. Georgia conspiracy theorist, meanwhile, and inevitable vice presidential nominee Stacey Abrams is explicit about how much she loves identity politics. Watch this:

FORMER GEORGIA LEGISLATOR STACEY ABRAMS: I lean in to identity politics. In fact, I believe in identity politics. And I believe identity politics are the only politics that win. And I don’t think you should fight me for that because you have an identity too.

CARLSON: So what’s driving this new obsession with identity politics? And is there any way out of it, this vortex? No one has thought more deeply about this than Douglas Murray. He is the author of a book that you have got to read. It’s called, “The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity.” It just came out. I was up late reading it last night and it is absolutely fantastic. Douglas Murray joins us tonight. Douglas, thanks so much for coming on.

AUTHOR DOUGLAS MURRAY: It’s a real pleasure, Tucker.

CARLSON: The identity politics pushes so many emotional buttons in people that it’s very hard to step back far enough as you have in this book, to consider what it means. What’s the point of this? Why are they doing this? Why are they doing it?

MURRAY: Well, there are several reasons. There are different groups of people who are responsible. There is one group who are just pushing this because this is naked politics and this — I take each of these issues in “The Madness of Crowds” one by one.

I do gay, women, race and trans; and in each of these ones, you see the naked root politics at some point. For instance, you get the thing where there are there are gay people who are conservative and therefore denounced by the gay press is no longer gay. I, by the way, had that again this week in America.

Then you get women who have the wrong politics, i.e. conservative and they’ve said to no longer be feminists. You have, you have black Americans who have conservative politics, and they are denounced as no longer black, and this keeps happening.

And at those points you see, that’s just naked politicking. You are using identity groups to batter down a political point, and that’s undoubtedly the case of a lot of people. There are other things going on here, too.

One of them, I show in the book, is just a continuation of an old Marxist idea. You know, there were from the 70s and 80s onwards, a group of people, Marxists and post-Marxists for whom the working class have let them down. You know, the working class never did come up with a revolution in America that they wanted.

CARLSON: No, that’s true.

MURRAY: And they wanted to get these new groups as they saw them, identity groups, ethnic identity groups, racial identity groups, and minority sexual identity groups. They wanted these people to all be brought together to further and actually, this time bring about the revolution that the working class that proved such a loser for them on.

And so several things, but those two, I think are the most pernicious and the problem I have with this, I’ll just say, is that a lot of young people now are growing up in America, are being lied to that this is actually about virtue, that this is actually how they should be their lives, that they should spend their lives pursuing this zero sum game, this appalling zero sum game.

CARLSON: That’s right.

MURRAY: You know, gays against the straights, women against men, all ethnic groups against each other. Trans against absolutely everybody. And this is just a terrible way not just to do politics, but a horrible way to spend your life.

And we have to make sure that the next generation of young Americans that are being wooed into this are wooed out of it.

CARLSON: It does seem like an inexorable recipe for division. I mean, at its core, this politics is telling you to hate people on the basis of qualities they can’t control. I mean, how is that resolved? How can you fix that? I mean, doesn’t that always end up in the worst possible place?

MURRAY: We have to point out that the game they’re inviting us all to play cannot be won.

Nor this cannot be played — it specifically cannot be won. For instance, they do this privilege game, you know, people suffer from privilege, and therefore then — there is an example in Britain earlier this week with The Guardian, the main left wing newspaper, said that David Cameron, the former Prime Minister, may have experienced pain in his life, like the loss of his eldest son, the death of his eldest son, but it was only privileged pain he’d ever felt.

CARLSON: Oh my gosh. I can’t imagine that. That’s disgusting.

MURRAY: You’re trying to make a political point about privilege in order to bring some people down. And you decide, yes, well, he was one of the lucky ones, he lost his eldest son, because he is rich.

You know, I mean, this is the disgusting anti-human position that people get to if they go down this route. You know, they end up being profoundly anti-human. And, you know, I just think that again, we have to show people that these are not games that can be played or won.

You can never work out where exactly somebody’s privilege is. You know, Justin Trudeau is an incredibly privileged person in all sorts of ways.

CARLSON: I’ve noticed that.

MURRAY: You know, all of these people are playing this in American politics.

Now, Elizabeth Warren is by any stretch of imagination, unbelievably privileged person.

CARLSON: I know, but she is lecturing you on your privilege. Douglas Murray, come back. I hope you will join us once more. The Madness of Crowds — I recommend this book personally. It’s fantastic. Congratulations on that. Thank you for coming.

Dr. Drew is very concerned about the dire public health [...]]]> There have been several news reports in the last couple days about the disease danger caused by Los Angeles’ extreme homelessness. They may have been prompted in part by a truly alarming report from Dr. Drew Pinksky on the Laura Ingraham show last week.

Dr. Drew is very concerned about the dire public health situation in LA. Years of liberal governance, increased drugs, worsening homelessness and general permissiveness have created a dangerous stew of communicable diseases from measles to bubonic plague. A Los Angeles Police officer has contracted typhoid and the LAPD station located in Skid Row suffers from a vermin infestation.

It can’t help that the current border anarchy has welcomed many thousands of poor Latin American peasants who have received no health screening. The public health threat of open borders has been too little discussed.

(Spare video)

LAURA INGRAHAM: Two hot topics and just a short time to get to them. So let’s bring in Drew Pinsky, board-certified internist. OK, Dr. Drew, great to see you. I have to begin with the shocking case out of L.A., and two friends of mine have told me about this. A police officer now has contracted that really rare and life-threatening illness, disease, typhoid fever. Fewer than 350 Americans contract this every year, so what is going on here?

DR. DREW PINSKY: We have a complete breakdown of the basic needs of civilization in Los Angeles right now. We have the three prongs of airborne disease. Tuberculosis is exploding. Rodent-born, we’re one of the only major cities in the country that does not have a rodent control program. And sanitation has broken down. We had a typhus outbreak last summer. We will have a typhus as outbreak this summer. I’m hearing from experts that bubonic plague is likely. It’s already here. It will get onto the rat fleas. And then now finally we have this oral-fecal route contamination, which is typhoid fever — three cases, one confirmed, probably three.

This is unbelievable. I can’t believe I live in a city where this is not third world, Laura: this is medieval. Third world countries are insulted if they are accused of being like this. No city on earth tolerates this. The entire population is at risk. And God forbid if measles — this is a population that is sub-optimally immunized — if measles gets in, I just have an image of myself on knees in the gutter tending to people, because this summer is likely to be a very profound problem.

INGRAHAM: Meanwhile, we are welcoming in tens of thousands into California in the next few months of illegal immigrants, and I’ve had a chance to talk to a lot of these migrants after they crossed the border. They have no papers, they have no identification, but they have a friend or a relative that they are going to go visit. A couple people had nowhere to go. So I don’t know how you check health records, and they are flooding into many cities in California, San Jose, L.A., San Diego.

PINSKY: And we can’t handle our situations such as it is. And there is a very bizarre thing going on where the government is somehow insisting that housing is the problem, when in fact we have chronic mental illness, we have addiction, we have people who don’t want to leave the streets. They literally won’t take the housing if we give it to them. And that is the population that is vulnerable. And it’s going to get so ill this summer, it scares me for their well-being.

Laura, I need your help. I want to pierce their shield of qualified immunity so we can go after them for reckless negligence. This is disgusting. It is reckless negligence. And we have to have a solution to this.

INGRAHAM: I know the businesses are upset, just like they are in San Francisco.

PINSKY: I don’t think you get how dire this is.

INGRAHAM: I do.

PINSKY: I’m telling you as a physician, like I’m standing on a railroad track, saying the bridge is out. This could be a very serious summer.

INGRAHAM: But where are the politicians? The liberal politicians in California care about people.

PINSKY: They are negligent, disgustingly negligent. It’s almost like — I was driving over and I thought, do they want the people on the streets to die? Is that it really, they don’t care if they all die? Is that really where we are now?

INGRAHAM: Dr. Drew, we didn’t have time to get into the six-figure rehab. We’ll have to have you back for that. That’s a shocker.

PINSKY: I’ll do it. You got it.

INGRAHAM: It’s a teaser for your next appearance. But thank you for sounding the alarm. This is not political. This is a health crisis now.

PINSKY: No, no. This is a health crisis that I have not seen in this country for 100 years.

INGRAHAM: Dr. Drew, thank you so much.

The New York Times featured [...]]]> Is the immigration sob story genre making a comeback? As I pointed out in my 2002 article, The Style Guide To Writing A Sensitive Immigrant Story, emotions are foremost, showing the humanity of foreigners who are illegally present in this country, because liberal ideology is not interested in such details.

The New York Times featured a front-page illegal alien tear-jerker on Memorial Day that was filled with migrant family travails as they rode the Greyhound to their new home in stupid-generous America.

On Tuesday, the Washington Post responded with another kind of family story, where Mexican grandparents visited offspring stuck in America by their unlawful immigration status. (Wait, isn’t Mexico prosperous these days with its #15 GDP ranking?)

The State Department set up the travel deal, revealing itself as one of the many anti-Trump, anti-sovereignty centers in Washington.

The Post’s front-page story featured a colorful photo of a Mexican granny, emphasizing diverse family values:

The Post story was reprinted in Stripes.com (a US military website, hmm) so click freely if you are not a paid-up Post subscriber:

Elderly Mexicans visiting their undocumented children in US with State Department approval, Washington Post, May 25, 2019

CHERAN, Mexico — María Dominga Romero León bent over a small black suitcase and packed her things, one by one: a folder of photographs, a half-finished blouse, a bag of wooden toys for the grandchildren she’d never met.

She sighed.

“They’re probably used to America by now,” she said.

Romero León, 68, hadn’t seen her daughter Guillermina in so long that she was starting to lose track of the years. Had it been 15 or 20? She wasn’t sure. What she knew was that Guillermina was an undocumented immigrant in a place called Germantown in Illinois with three children of her own. Two were U.S. citizens; one was a beneficiary of the federal program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

Romero León knew that U.S. immigration laws made it impossible for her daughter to come back to Cheran without jeopardizing the life she had built in the United States, because she didn’t have papers to move back and forth across the border.

That’s why Romero León was packing her bags. She had never been on an airplane, or been to an airport, or seen an escalator – she’d never left her home state of Michoacan. But now she was getting ready to fly to America.

The U.S. government – the same government from which Romero León’s daughter was hiding – had surprised her with a tourist visa.

Officials in Michoacan call them Palomas Mensajeras (Messenger Pigeons.) They are parents and grandparents in Mexico who have not seen their undocumented children in the United States for years, even decades.

Since 2017, officials here have been working with the U.S. State Department to reunite those families for three-week visits in cities and towns across the United States.

For many here, it is an unlikely American olive branch amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration. But it has been welcomed by immigrant families grappling with a crisis that has rippled across both countries: The elderly parents of the estimated 5 million undocumented Mexicans in the United States are dying alone in Mexico while their children remain stuck on the other side of the border.

Romero León’s husband died of complications from diabetes a year ago. During his final days, she held a phone to his ear so their children could speak to him from the United States. Three of the couple’s six children were undocumented immigrants living across the border.

“It was hard for him,” Romero León said, “to be sick, to be dying so far away from them.

“I thought, ‘Will it be the same for me?’ ”

Still, when she learned that she would be joining 21 other elderly residents from around Cheran on a flight to Chicago, she found it hard to understand. Why had the United States granted her a visa? Was it a trick to apprehend her daughter?

“That’s what I’m worried about,” she said. “Are they going to use this to arrest them?”

___

The U.S. government hasn’t specifically endorsed the program, a State Department spokesman said in a statement. But officials last year began designating special interview days at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City for elderly visa applicants who “frequently travel in groups to the United States for a variety of reasons including tourism, cultural programs, and to visit friends and family such as U.S. citizen grandchildren.”

The spokesman made no mention of the generation between the Mexican grandparents and the American grandchildren. But in practice, the Palomas Mensajeras program is exclusively for elderly Michoacanos who live in Mexico and have undocumented children in the United States.

Trump – of the border wall proposal, family separations and the national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border – has taken a different approach toward the undocumented. “Please do not make yourselves too comfortable,” he tweeted this month, “you will be leaving soon!”

The State Department spokesman declined to answer questions about why the United States is facilitating reunions between Mexicans and their undocumented children. (Continues)

Whatever happened to liberals with sensible ideas about the limits to growth on our little planet? They [...]]]> The new issue of The Social Contract is online and has an interesting topic: “When Liberals Were For Sensible Policies – on the Environment, Immigration, and the National Interest.” Be sure to check out the many excellent articles.

Whatever happened to liberals with sensible ideas about the limits to growth on our little planet? They certainly are an endangered species today when the far left Democrats demand open borders to America even as the world edges toward eight billion residents — it’s crazy.

Can you recognize the liberal luminaries of the past and present pictured on the cover? From the top going clockwise they are: Edward O. Wilson, David Brower, Garrett Hardin, Gov. Richard Lamm, George F. Kennan, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, Sen. Gaylord Nelson, and Rep. Barbara Jordan.

My article begins with a somewhat nostalgic reminiscence of Latin American revolutionaries of earlier decades who chose to fight for their own countries rather than illegally immigrate to the US to steal jobs and benefits. Even commie dictators are worth our attention, since bad examples definitely have a place in today’s environment where college students are trained to believe in the socialist model — hey kids, how about an educational semester in Venezuela? Be sure to pack a lunch.

Liberal Policy Switches – From Latin American governance to environmental protection, the reversals are dizzying, By Brenda Walker, The Social Contract, Winter 2019

Is consistency a desirable trait in deeply felt values that form policy positions? You would think so, but the leftward political contingent appears to be unburdened by such moral steadiness, preferring instead the pursuit of power by any means necessary. A major example of inconstancy has been the immigration issue, where lefties once supported nation states around the world, but now side with the hated globalist corporations in pursuing a borderless planet. Go figure.

Confession: I’m beginning to miss Fidel Castro. He may have been a mass-murdering commie dictator, but he at least chose to fight for his own country rather than immigrating for the easy freebies in America. He had a reputation of being a decent baseball player with a wicked curveball, so he had a shot at an illustrious career among the evil capitalists. Harper’s magazine reported in 1989 that he had turned down an offer to play for the Giants. That claim has doubters in some quarters, but the Internet certainly has plenty of photos showing Fidel playing ball.

In contrast, the choice to stay and fight for one’s homeland is rarely made today. The earlier Latin American tradition of revolution against tyranny is just plain gone, with the modern ease of transportation and iPhones to make travel easier for illegal aliens. Are you a Latin American wishing for “a better life” immediately? Just hop a north-bound train or join a well-funded caravan to invade the United States to steal jobs, education, and welfare. Illegal immigration is the acceptable ticket to personal betterment in the modern twenty-first century — according to the left-bent mind at least.

It’s obvious that liberals are fine with that change. The idea of Hispanic national self-determination through political and revolutionary struggle has disappeared from public consciousness. And while liberals love to fling the “racism” charge against Americans who reject open borders, it is genuinely racist to believe brown people must be rescued from their own nations via immigration to the United States. The rescue fantasy is usually a flashing neon light of liberal virtue signaling. (Plus, the fact that most amnestied Hispanic illegals eventually vote Democrat may be a reason the D-party panders to them.)

It is not cruel to limit immigration to America. In fact, ending it entirely would have a positive effect on the Third World. If there were no comfy welfare state to which to immigrate, local people across the planet would get serious about building reform at home.

Looking at the recent past, it’s curious how strongly felt beliefs of left-wingers are so apt to change over time, sometimes doing a 180 to fit the political winds (or the preferences of funders).

A few decades back, leftist revolutionaries were the totally cool icons among Democrat elites in America, to whom Fidel Castro and other Latin insurgents were great heroes. The late Tom Wolfe described “Radical Chic” where wealthy New York liberals celebrated revolutionaries like the Black Panthers and Castro.

Radical chic has more recently expanded into “terrorist chic” among the open-borders left, because murderous jihadists might want to immigrate here and vote Democrat. Muslims with vague unscreenable backgrounds were certainly no problem for the Obama administration. In 2016, his administration announced it would admit 30 percent more refugees in the next year, with the target total being 110,000. The Obama White House brought in 10,000 Syrians in 2016 despite the obvious danger of admitting persons with no background files.

Times have definitely changed. Liberals once espoused the idea of homegrown reform where brown people took their destinies into their own hands through armed revolution and political activity.

And the struggle was real. In 1987, Foreign Affairs began an article titled “Revolution in Central America?” by noting: “On President Reagan’s first inauguration day [1980], revolution appeared to be spreading across Central America. The Sandinistas were consolidating their hold over Nicaragua and guerrillas in El Salvador and Guatemala were on the move.” (Continues)

Tucker Carlson presented brief remarks on the subject last week and turned up [...]]]> Diversity is big business these days, perhaps nowhere so much as in the universities. Apparently the liberal college presidents need numerous underlings to promote the ideology of diversity rather than excellence, a value that has been lost in the leftists’ pet project.

Tucker Carlson presented brief remarks on the subject last week and turned up some facts about the dollar cost of diversity to students in Michigan.

TUCKER CARLSON: Well, diversity is our strength, nobody ever explains exactly what that means, but it’s basically our new national motto. Turns out diversity is also lucrative on college campuses — who knew? Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute tallied the total payroll of diversity-related positions at the University of Michigan — that’s just one public university among hundreds in this country. Overall, Michigan employs an army of 88 people as diversity and inclusion bureaucrats of various kinds. Twenty-four of them make more than a hundred grand a year. Collectively these 88 make about $11 million a year in salary and benefits — that’s enough to fund in-state tuition for 742 students per year at a single school. So it turns out that principle is making a lot of money for a small group of people.

Even the Simpsons show has noticed the University of Michigan’s campus diversity.

Unfortunately, big spending on campus for diversity is widespread.

In 2012, I reported about the office of equity and inclusion at UC Berkeley, which has a staff of approximately 150 and a $17-million budget.

But that budget is tiny compared with USC’s stunning $100 million dedicated to diversity: in 2016, the University of Southern California pledged “to dish out millions of dollars in scholarship funds for Syrian and Mexican immigrants as part of a campus wide diversity initiative.”

Meanwhile, today’s college graduates have accrued an average debt load of $37,172, due in part to the criminal waste in spending on liberal projects in the university.

Toddler Alfie Evans was struggling against a brain disease, but the British hospital authorities and courts prevented the parents from seeking other care abroad even though it was made available to the family at no cost to [...]]]> It’s stunning to see the demise of a most basic freedom — that of parenting — in Britain.

Toddler Alfie Evans was struggling against a brain disease, but the British hospital authorities and courts prevented the parents from seeking other care abroad even though it was made available to the family at no cost to the government. The little boy died after a few days off the respirator without a chance at alternative treatment. What would have been the harm?

Nigel Farage nailed the issue when he said, “The wishes of parents in a free society should be paramount. The State should not own our kids.”

The wishes of parents should be paramount in a free society. The state should not own our kids. pic.twitter.com/onrtFtJBQj

— Nigel Farage (@Nigel_Farage) April 27, 2018

Britain is no longer a free society, that’s certain. Socialism plus open borders have been suicidal. Just a few decades ago the Brits were fighting heroically against the Nazis. Now the oppressive state will not permit parents to take care of their own children.

But as Ronald Reagan said, “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.”