Fox News et al.'s last twenty years of spreading lies and exaggerations to convince people that everyone (particularly, but not exclusively Democrats) in politics are corrupt, selfish, soulless, incompetent, liars set the stage for Trump by basically convincing a large swath of the country that all politicians are as bad as Trump, if maybe not as flagrant. As a result, they excuse Trump by thinking that it's just hypocrisy and partisanship that is driving criticism of his corruption and lying when, in fact, he's several orders of magnitude worse on pretty much any metric than anyone who has come before him.
The prior administration made a conscious decision to ignore immigration law and the will of the voters to usher in millions of illegal immigrants. And now that voters actually have somebody that is acting on the majority's preferences, judges are taking the position that effectively nothing can be done, because while they aren't required to follow any legal process to let millions in, you need individual hearings to deport, which of course we don't have the capabilities and can't reasonably create the capability to have individualized hearings for millions of illegal immigrants in a timely fashion.
No matter what, there were going to be some travesties of justice in trying to reverse all the illegal immigration. That was going to be the case whether there were angels implementing the policy or typical politicians. They created a problem of a scale that it guarantees there will be some travesties, just because a 99.9% error free rate (which they're not going to achieve) is going to create a lot of travesties. All the pearl clutching at this point is about 4 years too late. You had the Biden administration basically take the position that the law and due process don't matter, and unfortunately, they seem to have made a compelling case to a lot of voters.
It's true that Biden wasn't particularly interested in stopping illegal immigration (though a lot of this wasn't exactly letting in illegal immigrants, but rather helping people come in or stay through colorabley legal methods, like requests for asylum and TPS).
However, this is hardly the only area where presidents have chosen not to vigorously enforce the law. Notably, marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, yet no on really complains that Trump isn't demanding the FBI go shut down and arrest everyone involved with "legal weed" dispensaries, and we certainly wouldn't say the next president would be justified in tossing out the constitution to deal with the problem because prior presidents didn't fully enforce the law.
Moreover, the scale of the problem is hardly what people claim it to be. There's a backlog, but immigration cases aren't exactly the OJ trial. They are usually 30 minute affairs. Hire 1,000 IJs and you can clear the backlog in a year or two. Biden even tried to do this, but Trump asked the House GOP to block it because he preferred to have the issue.
And yes, no system is going to be perfect. Occasionally someone will inadvertently have their rights violated or an innocent person will be found guilty or paper work will get messed up. But the problem with Trump isn't that he's making errors (or at least not just that he is making errors), but that he's intentionally violating the Constitution, even after courts tell him to stop, and refusing to fix problems he causes. Maybe Garcia gets inadvertently deported to El Salvador in any administration, but most administrations, realizing they made an error, would have brought him back. Trump steadfastly refuses despite court orders requiring him to do so, or at least make a reasonable effort.
The difference is that lax enforcement on marijuana is that it's generally been consistent with the will of voters. The lax enforcement of overt marijuana dealing has been in jurisdictions that voted to legalize it. In jurisdictions that have not voted to legalize it, the lax enforcement barely looks any different than it did 20 years ago. And it's certainly not like the federal government started facilitating marijuana dealing as a semi-official policy.
And Biden didn't try to hire 1,000 IJs. They offered a carrot of funding IJs with essentially a floor on illegal immigration before they even thought about maybe securing the border. But there was no mechanism to actually require enforcement and presumably democrats wouldn't have agreed to a deal that included those. Even on a non-contentious issue, trying to draft legislation where the executive can't just refuse to do their job would be a heavy lift. The pro-illegal immigration sections of the democrat base would have lost it if they had seen the type of language that would have essentially made immigration law self enforcing.
It isn't like there isn't support for lax immigration enforcement (though it has waned during the Biden admin). Biden got elected in 2020 after the Dems had been largely critical of Trump's immigration enforcement - there were even moves to decriminalize in the primary. You aren't going to see as much local legalization of immigration b/c it's a federal issue, but many states and localities have done things like implement sanctuary laws that seek to limit immigration enforcement within their jurisdictions.
The difference between legal weed and immigration is that you're OK with one but not the other.
Legal weed also isn't an outlier in terms of lax enforcement. Notably, we do not enforce tax law to anywhere close to the level it could be, and the GOP is constantly trying to make enforcement harder with cuts at the IRS. We had something similar with homosexuality, which was illegal in many states until as recently as 2003, but hadn't been enforced since long before then. Other examples include speeding (though this is a local issue) - 90% of drivers at any given time are exceeding the speed limit by a couple MPH, but you only really get a ticket if you are doing so flagrantly or in some other way draw attention to yourself.
Laws are never 100% enforced, and it is a common occurrence for governments to turn a blind eye to minor violations. Conservatives just have a bug up their butts when it comes to immigration and pretend its a special case. It's just a case where they want greater enforcement and Democrats don't, so when Dems are in office, you get less enforcement.
But at the end of the day, you still have to follow the Constitution.
There is pretty strong majority support against open borders, which is what shuttling people into the country looks like to most people. People mostly aren't so worried about illegal immigrant workers in relatively low paying sectors. The sanctuary cities are a pretty good analogy to legal marijuana. There were people outside of those locations that still complain about it, but at the end of the day, the people in those locations generally support it and the federal gov't turning a blind eye to it there doesn't stop it from generally enforcing the law elsewhere in the same way it had for the past couple of decades.
And it's not that you get less enforcement. It's that you get the administration basically working to undermine enforcement. If Biden had kept the same general approach of pre-Trump republicans and pre-2000'
s democrats where you talk like you want to enforce it, enforce the law against people causing problems, and then generally letting employed immigrants and their employers slide except for some occasional random high profile enforcement, I don't think voters care that much. Certainly some would, but it wouldn't rank the #1 issue for many voters outside of maybe people living in areas that are transforming demographically in a way they don't like.
And at the end of the day, you don't have to follow the constitution, you only have to follow it when politics demand it, and that's especially true when it comes to omitting to do your duties as opposed to ceasing some action that is unconstitutional. Biden obviouslyh wasn't following the constitution with respect to immigration and there wsan't really a way to force him to. We aren't really following the Constitution now with respect to marijuana either. We didn't follow it to begin with with Reich, but to the extent you think that was following the constitution, we're not following it now because the administration is not seeing to it that laws be faithfully executed.
No, the comments section to your article refute your assertion very effectively.
I do think the Venezuelans held in El Salvador should be free to repatriate to Venezuela, and not just stuck there, and it is troubling if they aren't. But this fact hasn't been well-established in the shoddy reporting so far.
That aside, it is risible to see all of these concerns about due process after Biden illegally waived 12 million foreign nationals into the country in four years, the overwhelming majority of whom we'll never be rid of, effectively flushing what was left of our entire corpus of immigration law down the toilet.
No one refuted anything on immigrant crime. Even Noah Carl, who opposes immigration but is honest, says that I’m correct in the comments. This issue clouds people’s judgment because you all can’t admit there aren’t good reasons for the position you are so passionate about.
And lol at "shoddy reporting" to refer to the NYT conducting background checks across five foreign countries. Yes, I'm sure that's not up to the standards you're used to on Breitbart and Lindell TV.
The fact that you are trotting out a straw man ("immigrant crime") says everything about the strength of your evidence and argument. The very little data that you have that actually differentiates between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants covers Texas only. We simply have no idea how much more crime is committed on average by migrants in the country illegally.
I've never consumed a morsel of Breitbart and I have no idea what Lindell TV is. If you'd like to show me where the NY Times or the Washington Post addressed my point I'd be happy to see it. It is shoddy insofar as I have never seen anything on his deportations remotely as evenhanded, informative or nuanced as this substack:
When you look at the Times homepage, as I do daily, it is a tidal wave of "orange man bad" resistance reporting.
You are the one with clouded judgment. You have decided a priori that only racists could possibly object to de facto open borders, and you proceed from there.
No, David Frum wants a more restrictive immigration policy and I don’t think he’s racist. I don’t think Noah Carl is racist. I do think you have to be a bad person to support Trump after what we’ve seen though unless you’re terribly uninformed, and racism one of the more common reasons, along with general sadism and stupidity.
There is plenty to criticize about his deportations, but on the whole I'd rather have his policies in place than the reopened floodgates we would have gotten from Harris. And that is the binary choice we were presented with.
Biden was willing to pass an immigration bill that the most conservative Republicans in Congress wrote. They spiked their own bill because Trump told them to. Harris said she would sign it.
And to Hannania's point, where ARE you going to draw the line? When actual citizens start disappearing? Or will you say that's okay too, as long as immigration policy is more restrictive?
Don't say "oh that will never happen," because every time Trump supporters say that, Trump does it and supporters defend him post hoc. There will flimsy justifications then too. Vance will claim with no evidence that they were pedophiles, and you'll have the choice to half-heartedly believe him.
That immigration bill was irrelevant. Much more effective border enforcement never required new legislation. Biden only started using the tools already had at his disposal at the last minute when he was staring into the abyss of his poll numbers in an election year. Harris would have promptly abandoned them again if she'd won.
I do think citizens disappearing would be completely unacceptable.
That was the binary choice on election day. But Trump essentially eliminated further illegal immigration on day 1 with his executive order. That already fulfilled his promise.
It’s what’s the administration has done nearly every day since, that has become indefensible.
When you “deport” someone, you return them to their home country. That’s it. They’re free thereafter. Deporting is not “send to a third country then lock them up in a prison”. I don’t know what legal or moral justification exists for anything like that, yet here we are.
I'll happily concede we don't have a precise number because that is impossible, even if the Biden administration had any interest in providing one, which it didn't.
A better question is, is there any number that would be too much for you?
I'd happily support a pause on nearly all immigration to the US and essentially all illegal immigrants should be expelled. I think culture is important and that we've likely become much worse at assimilating immigrants in the past 50 years.
But let's be clear what's going on here: you cite a specific number, and then, when asked for a source, say "yeah, someone pulled it out of their ass because the precise number is unknowable."
Like read the NY Post article. It is not attempting to make any kind of reasonable estimate. It is waving at tangentially related numbers and then throwing out large numbers as "possibilities."
(10 million "encounters" could mean that 10 million illegal immigrants came to the US, were encountered by CPB, and ejected from the country. It could mean 10 million illegals came to the US, were encountered by CPB, and released into the US. It could mean that 1 million illegal immigrants crossed the border, were apprehended and ejected, and then tried again 9 more times. There is a huge range of possibilities here, and a reasonable person could look for evidence and make an educated estimate, but that's not what you or the New York Post did.)
No, that really isn't what is going on here. The floor in the article is the 8 million cited in the House Judiciary report. That is not pulled from nowhere. The rest of the conjecture is reasonable.
If the hill you want to die on is that I should have written "many millions and quite possibly as many as 12 million," then fine, I will concede that point. It was a comment on a blog post, not a dissertation, and matters not in the slightest to the point I was making.
> Since President Biden took office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has encountered more than 7.6 million illegal aliens along the southwest border.
It's a game of telephone among people with terrible epistemic standards: The HJC finds "7.6 million *encounters*" and translates this as "Biden has welcomed in 7.6 million illegals." The NYP reads this and notes that "encounters" doesn't include "gotaways" and writes "maybe the true number is 12 million - or 15 million!" Then this number is gospel - at least until JD Vance decides the true number is actually 20 million.
And while yes, this whole thing is a bit of a tangent, I do think it's *interesting* when a response to a post about MAGA's terrible epistemic standards cites an extremely questionable number without qualification.
There is no number that justifies lying about the crime numbers or deporting asylum claimants to prison camps. Your comment implies that, for you, the current number justifies almost any level of lying (as performed by Trump). You should think about how you made this your identity
The puzzling thing about all this lawlessness regarding immigration is it doesn’t seem to even have helped them to increase overall deportation numbers by that much, it seems that cruelty towards the unlucky few (relative to the total number of illegal immigrants) that actually get caught up in this process really is the point.
In light of all this it is also darkly ironic that naturalized immigrants potentially contributed half of the net swing towards Trump in 2024 (David Shor said he thinks this is likely in a discussion with Ezra Klein). MAGA is so dumb that they might end up deporting the people who helped elect them, it’s almost like a self-correcting mechanism.
The bigger issue is that all the lies you listed are a cover up to the actual project that is both extremely nativist and extremely autocratic. They want to chill anyone that is not native born or is not submitting themselves to their asserted power.
The unlucky few as you call them creates deterrence. See monthly numbers from CBP on illegal encounters. The Trump effect is working on future illegals.
They know what they're doing and they've already caused a chilling effect on everyone that lives here or ever intended to immigrate here, legally or illegally. That was always the main goal.
I have a feeling that Trump is not the only one disregarding the truth here. I have noticed a weird thing: despite hundreds of Trump's deportations there's still not a single unequivocal case of them mistakenly deporting an actual US citizen, with no criminal record, etc. The opposite pattern emerges: whenever there's a new outrage, it inevitably turns out that the martyr is a literal rapist with other felony charges that was ordered to be deported a decade ago (for the most recent example: https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1kecev6/us_resident_of_33_years_business_owner_no_gang/mqhtzne/).
Or let's talk about Abrego Garcia. I'm not a gang tattoo expert, but I know that he got his due process and two different judges refused him asylum because of his MS13 membership. One of them then granted this unusual stay on deportation because there was a reasonable danger to his life *from rival gangs*, which is a very hilarious approach to requesting asylum, I'm laughing my ass off here.
Now, you might say that maybe he made mistakes in his youth, and maybe there was an insufficient due process, and we shouldn't trust the courts when they make verdicts we don't like, but my point is, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson for example: people interested in desegregation found a mixed race guy with an impeccable reputation, made sure that there was a police officer instructed to arrest him, that was a planned operation. Same with Rosa Parks by the way, she was not some random woman, she was thoroughly vetted to make sure that all reasonable people would be sympathetic towards her.
And yet in case of Trump's deportees we have an endless procession of rapists, violent felons, gang members, and other scum that he promised to deport and that reasonable people want to see deported. Of course you wouldn't know if you only consume liberal news sources, but that's a factual fact, not a single equivalent of Rosa Parks or Homer Plessy has yet to emerge. The best you can offer is that NYT article, but not a single actual person with a name and a face, all such people turn out to be bad hombres.
Why is that, how do you think? The administration is also aware of this, could it be that they are not simply evil? Do you expect any of your better informed readers to change their minds?
> I know that he got his due process and two different judges refused him asylum because of his MS13
To be clear, this is not true. Kilmar was refused asylum because he did not file his asylum claim in the time frame required for it. The stay for deportation granted requires meeting a stricter legal standard than granting asylum. A judge refused to release him on bond after a detention following an investigation into a murder (or possibly something else, paperwork wasn't filled properly by the police), this determination requires a much lower standard of evidence. Note that he was released with no charges following this, impossible to know why, but a reasonable guess being that the prosecutor did not believe he had good enough evidence to win a trial, so did not even bother attempting it.
This is probably true...but you're still risking the "I didn't speak up when they came for X" problem. Sure, Trump is intentionally targeting 'bad hombres' or whatever now - but were he to come for good old American citizens he could make the Garcia argument just as easily i.e. "Oops, wrong guy but he's in El Salvador now".
Even in this moment, many of the student visas he's haphazardly revoked were not gangsters or even petty criminals.
Shouldn't we wait for something like that to actually happen before we cry wolf?
Like, I would be moderately upset with a deportation program that accidentally deports one innocent per 100 evils, as long as it can be corrected. I get why you're worried that it refuses to correct but in this case it's not an innocent (btw Garcia is a wife beater too, they really select the best people as martyrs) and apparently the order to not deport him was wrong anyways (he should not have been deported to Venezuela, not El Salvador), so idk.
So the thing that happened is Trump violated court orders. We should make people understand that the current law of the United States is that they can be deported and sent to a Gulag without a trial. That is factually the current state of affairs until the court can find an enforcement mechanism to stop Trump.
Great, then you should explain, or just ask yourself seriously, what law atops them from doing this to American citizens. Coming to your house, disappearing you to El Salvador and then saying "Oopsie".
"At this point, you just have to shake your head and say, well, that’s a value system I guess. But if you have any moral system other than Trump is God or all foreigners should be made to suffer, this is not going to strike you as a compelling argument."
I suppose we should all adopt your neolib value system prioritizing cheap uber eats and domestic servants over living in a neighborhood where people actually speak the same language.
I'm curious why your grandstanding about truth doesn't extend to the asylum system. It's obvious that these people are economic migrants exploiting the system to remain in the US, not legitimate asylum seekers or refugees.
You could fix that by budgeting for more immigration judges to process asylum claims. With the backlog cleared, there stops being an incentive to claim asylum so you can be allowed in the country for years. Trump's budget proposal does not do this.
The migrants' dishonesty serves the purpose of decreasing the probability that they or their families will starve or be harmed by violent criminals. Trump's dishonesty serves the purpose of stoking his ego and paying off debts due to other people he scammed or abused. These are not the same.
Deciding an asylum case in 3 days would do nothing about our broken asylum system filled with spurious cases without immediate deportation. Every illegal would just disappear into the U.S. if they lost and we’d have to spent money, time and resources trying to find and deport them. Deportation is key to a fix functioning asylum system. Right how it’s head I win, tails you lose.
There are many people who come back after being deported. Idk about the veracity of this report but from a surface level look it estimates 26% of deportees reenter the country: https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-publications/illegal-reentry-offenses. A border wall might actually help but Trump promised that a decade ago and failed to get any funding even with Republican control of both houses of Congress and his supporters never held him accountable, so we'll probably be stuck like this for the near future https://media1.tenor.com/m/mbniZE9gjV0AAAAd/the-door-barney-gumble.gif
There are plenty who re-enter because our southern border is porous. The illegal migrant who the Wisconsin state judge prevented ICE from capturing was deported in 2013 and re-entered. The illegal migramt activist from Colorado - Jeanette Vizguerra- lost her asylum claims and other claims - self-deported and then re-entered illegally. Then there was the illegal who shot that woman in SF years ago who had been deported 5 times and re-entered. The border is a joke.
Asylum seekers disappearing is a mostly unjustified concern, but if you are concerned, implement e-Verify. If you can't get a job, no point in being here.
Frankly, I think moderately controlled illegal immigration is a good thing, as it gives some leeway on occasionally overly strict labor and employment laws, while making everyone better off, so I'd prefer not to have e-Verify, or really worry that much about this issue. But if it worries you, push to implement e-Verify before tearing up the constitution.
The reason the Border Patrol lets them in is that they claim asylum. If their claims were adjudicated very quickly, it would be financially feasible to hold asylum claimants until their court dates. Failed claimants can be deported at once; those who don't show up for court can be deported on first encounter with any LEO.
We shouldn’t have to pay for their detention. They can apply from overseas. And leftists would never accept detaining families or even single men. It’s “cruel and inhumane.”
I don't think you follow how much the timescale could be reduced. It's a pipeline-type problem. If there's enough capacity in the system to handle the throughput, the wait time goes to zero.
Timescale reduction does not matter without deportation upon the petitioner being denied. Denials can also be appealed, extending the timeframe people would stay in the country or in detention. Detaining asylum seekers is too expensive and not something the U.S. taxpayer should pay for. Full stop.
Years ago a man was deported after living in the U.S. for 17 years while appealing his denied asylum claim. His illegal wife remained here with their U.S. born daughter and 2 illegal alien DACA kids. Our current system is madness and invites abuse, fraud and frivolous claims while simultaneously expanding grounds for asylum to include tragic but not colorable claims like domestic abuse and being a victim of a crime.
You don't have to accept a "neolib value system priorizing cheap Uber eats and domestic servants over living in a neighborhood where people speak the same language" to think it's bad to send innocent people to be tortured in prison for the rest of their lives simply for being born in the wrong country, especially when this is done with no due process and a made-up legal basis, and then gaslighting the country about it with a mountain of lies. If believing that's wrong isn't entailed by basic human decency, I don't know what is.
Enough with the idiotic strawman rhetoric. You know you're wrong and that the administration's actions and claims are indefensible.
I don’t think you need to like immigration in order to admit that the Trump administration is lying. Ideally, for people who do not like the asylum system, they should be mass deporting asylum seekers for abusing the law, but that is a separate issue from if those immigrants are committing crimes.
I do think the above attitude is a substantial part of MAGA. Indeed, over most of history, people who aren't "of the community" aren't considered humans, have no rights, and when anything gets upsetting, they are slaughtered and/or driven out. The Jews keep a long list of such incidents in Eastern Europe, but you can find examples in US history too, including the Trail of Tears (which was outright illegal in its day) and Eisenhower's Operation Wetback (ditto).
So within the context that one of the strongest components of MAGA is "Drive out all the immigrants!" combined with the concept that non-citizens are due *none* of what we call human rights, this part of the Trump administration is sensible and consistent.
Perhaps I sound over the top, but think about it: If you want to have all neighborhoods be "where people actually speak the same language" -- and you don't mean the late-1800s cities of the US, with their large Yiddish-speaking, German-speaking, etc. neighborhoods, you mean all neighborhoods must be English-speaking -- you're going to have to get rid of a *lot* of immigrants, and indeed many of those are in the US quite legally and properly.
Now certainly, the progressives want to classify everybody who wants to get into the US as a refugee, and indeed, the vast majority of immigrants are fundamentally economic migrants. But ... you say that like it's a bad thing. Bulking up the population really does boost the economy. (In particular, each one takes on responsibility for a $100k slice of the federal debt!)
A little more subtly, the burdens of cultural diversity are unevenly spread. The well-educated upper-middle class that dominates the Democratic party has arranged things so that the poor non-English-speaking immigrants don't live in *their* neighborhoods or send their children to *their* schools. (Though they are available to do work for them!) But the fix for that is to attack NIMBY and have considerably better state/federal funding for schools.
I would think living in a neighborhood where people are multi cultural or have the ability to speak different languages would be a positive. I wish I had the capacity to speak different language….
1. Crime statistics were corrupted under the Biden regime by not reporting crime from major cities. I accept the assertion that crime spiked with illegal aliens based on personal observation more readily than accept faulty data.
2. Who to believe? The reliable and unbiased assessments of the CIA or the FBI? Links of organized crime to dictators are not surprising and it is more likely to be true than not true.
3. Minor crime is crime. Do they belong in the super max? No, and it seems like the more redeemable prisoners are not being held there. These gangs are unbelievably vile. Indications of membership are not “body art.” False claims of membership are punished severely so these are either the worst kind of people or the dumbest. But since the dumb ones won't live long, the selection pressure is strong.
4. I agree that Venezuelans should be held somewhere besides the super max in El Salvador. Just don’t send them back to Venezuela. Venezuela would just let them loose again.
5. The vast majority of these active asylum claims ARE illegitimate. Aliens that commit crimes while seeking asylum invalidate their claims. One of the sad results of the perversion of the asylum application process is that the deserving applicants are crowded out of the system.
He’s a typical MAGA semi-literate who has strong opinions and doesn’t read anything. The original article covers decades of crime research and has nothing to do with any reporting issues of the last few years. I haven’t looked at his other points but I’m sure they’re equally dumb and misinformed. I should really ban all these idiots but I’ll keep this one up.
Interesting. You can't ban me until I give up my fee? So, I'm staying. Does that sound like a threat? I'm sure you are not scared. Whatever. I like your thread though I rarely agree with it. If you had bothered to read my post you would have seen that I did agree with you on several points. It would be too much to expect a dialog. TDS much?
Just use grok or ChatGPT to explain to you why you're wrong and all your sources are terrible. It's not fair to demand that real people demonstrate Brandolini's Law.
> Crime statistics were corrupted under the Biden regime by not reporting crime from major cities.
From what I've heard:
- in 2021, the FBI changed the reporting system, and there was a dramatic decrease in the number of Americans covered by local police departments that participated in the reporting system (roughly 65%). This did include some major cities.
- but the number of agencies participating *increased* dramatically as local police departments adjusted. By 2023, 94.3% of Americans lived in agencies that submitted data. Every city agency with a population of over 1M people submitted data for 2023. 84/90 agencies with populations over 250k submitted data.
> Do they belong in the super max? No, and it seems like the more redeemable prisoners are not being held there.
This would be a relief, do you have a source for that?
> False claims of membership are punished severely so these are either the worst kind of people or the dumbest. But since the dumb ones won't live long, the selection pressure is strong.
Fortunately for the "dumb ones," the gangs seem to be slightly less retarded than the Trump administration, and as far as I know haven't started executing people for autism awareness tattoos.
> Links of organized crime to dictators are not surprising and it is more likely to be true than not true.
Not sure this holds at all, would be interested to see evidence - organized crime is an alternative power center and I can imagine this swinging either way.
> 5. The vast majority of these active asylum claims ARE illegitimate. Aliens that commit crimes while seeking asylum invalidate their claims. One of the sad results of the perversion of the asylum application process is that the deserving applicants are crowded out of the system.
Trump's lying about Abrego Garcia has three root causes:
1. The asymmetric illegal immigration game. In practice it is very easy to come into the US on spurious grounds (such as fake asylum claims or fake torture fear claims), but the judges, immigration lawyers, and Congress make it practically impossible to reverse illegal immigration at scale (chronically underfunding detention space and administrative immigration judges). Even the Lankford bill was a farce (its main terms only would have kicked in at an astronomical 4,000 crossings per day). Immigration lawyers make more money the longer the process takes (maximizing due process), so they have a vested incentive in keeping the dysfunctional status quo and in lobbying Congress and activist groups to do the same.
2. Trump's overdeference to the Supreme Court. While the media crows about Trump's dictatorial ambitions, in practice he openly defers to the Supreme Court in rhetoric (even if the meaning of the term "effectuate" is disputed). The idea that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter that determines "what the law is" is a modern innovation. Andrew Jackson openly defied the Supreme Court to push his agenda through, as did Abraham Lincoln. FDR threatened to pack the court to cow the court into submission, and it worked. At the end of the day the courts are a paper tiger. If he wanted to Trump could call the courts' bluff on contempt and expose their lack of real power, but he won't. This empowers the courts to move immigration law in a more juducial supremacist direction.
3. Trump was co-opted by Silicon Valley oligarchs on immigration in order to get their backing and donations. They redirected the immigration debate terrain away from deporting nearly all illegal immigrants (even peaceful ones) because they drive down working-class male wages, drive up rent prices, and sap the social safety net, to deporting just violent criminals, and then narrowing the target group even further to MS-13. This made the public debate harder to win since they now needed to show that each deportee was not just an illegal (or obviously flimsy asylum seeker) but also a criminal and a member of MS-13. Trump could have told the judges to go pound sand if the debate was just about whether Abrego Garcia was an illegal (he clearly is), but by narrowing the target group Trump has to comically lie to make him "fit".
If SCOTUS doesn't have the power to decide whether Constitutional limits on the powers of Congress and POTUS are being violated, those limits are meaningless.
The Framers did not intend the Supreme Court to have that power. It was supposed to be an inferior branch (not a co-equal one) because the Framers feared judicial tyrrany due to their knowledge and horror with English courts (including the dreaded Star Chamber). The Supreme Court then tried to arrogate final judicial review to itself in the Marbury v Madison decision, but this power grab was never complete until recent times. Supreme Court decisions were given heavy weight by the executive, but it could still ignore them if it thought the court was in grievous error (such as after the infamous Dred Scott case).
No, but I also reject the premise that the Supreme Court always get it right either, or that it should be the final, unquestioned arbiter. It should be given deference, but that deference should not be limitless.
This completely leaves aside that Trump used the Alien Enemies Act. Yes, you should have to affirmatively prove that someone is a threat to the US before sending them to a torture prison. There should be no room to accidentally disappear a gay hairdresser who was here legally and had Mom and Dad tattoos.
I really wonder if people understand just how despotic this prison is. Prisoners have NO contact with the outside world. No visitors, no phone calls, no letters, no lawyers. You literally do not see the sun: you are not allowed outside, and the prison has no windows. There 100+ prisoners to one cell. The lights are kept on 24/7 to disrupt sleep. You have no clothes, just underwear. **And you will probably never leave.**
**We sent innocent men there to die**. It is unconscionable. It is evil.
I agree that sending the non-MS 13 members to CECOT was a major moral and public relations blunder just to save some money on detention cost. One of the worst moves in the Trump presidency so far. The Trump administration should have just focused on deporting all illegals (irrespective of gang membership) and forcing through asylum case adjuducation rapidly (telling slothful judges to either rule quickly or get pushed out of the way, and Congress to pass more border and immigration judge funding or face an indefinite government shutdown). CECOT has been an immoral and politically unhelpful sideshow.
I'm glad we agree that condemning an innocent man to fifty years of no contact with his family or the sun (assuming he's not already dead), is a public relations blunder.
Lower wages mean lower prices; to say that we should support wages by limiting immigration is the broken window fallacy. The cause of rising rents is NIMBYs; we are physically capable of building far more housing than we do. The last one is a valid point, but why doesn't Trump aim policy at that (for example, allowing Medicaid-funded hospitals to refuse lifesaving treatment to illegal aliens)?
NIMBYism is a big problem but it is not the only factor behind rising rent prices. The supply of usable land is inflexible, so a rising population should always increase rent prices all else being equal. Building is also constrained by other fixed constraints (such as limited drinkable water in the western states and limited arable land to grow crops to feed a growing population). The key driver of food prices is not labor availability but land availability, transportation cost, fertilizer price, and population.
As to lower wages leading to lower prices, this is true, but the price drop will always be smaller than the wage drop, leading impacted workers to ALWAYS be worse off (this is because labor is only one factor in production). The more capital-intensive the industry the worse the workers will be.
Land is limited, but vertical space is not. Until San Francisco consists entirely of 50-story apartment buildings, there is room to build.
The vast majority of fresh water in the West is used for agriculture; household use is a rounding error.
If you want to redistribute wealth, tax the rich/big corporations and give government checks to citizens with the revenue. Doing this indirectly through immigration policy increases deadweight loss.
I agree that taxing the rich would be the best solution, but given the intractable corruption in Congress (and the near hopelessness in fixing it) immigration restrictions serve as a second-best policy for preserving working class wealth.
True, you can build upwards, but at exponentionally increasing cost and diminished quality of life and safety (good luck surviving a skysraper fire or structural collapse). Almost nobody prefers to live in a 49th floor pod without access to green grass or a view of the sunshine.
"2. Trump's overdeference to the Supreme Court. While the media crows about Trump's dictatorial ambitions, in practice he openly defers to the Supreme Court in rhetoric (even if the meaning of the term "effectuate" is disputed). The idea that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter that determines "what the law is" is a modern innovation. Andrew Jackson openly defied the Supreme Court to push his agenda through, as did Abraham Lincoln. FDR threatened to pack the court to cow the court into submission, and it worked. At the end of the day the courts are a paper tiger. If he wanted to Trump could call the courts' bluff on contempt and expose their lack of real power, but he won't. This empowers the courts to move immigration law in a more juducial supremacist direction."
The Supreme Court would just rule that Trump's actions are illegal and that federal law enforcement officers don't have to follow illegal orders.
Because his budget proposal was written by some of his more libertarian, Silicon Valley-type advisors rather than the Stephen Miller-like group. The Elon Musk cult "slash and burn crew" doesn't see the vision on immigration. Trump lacks enough knowledge on policy detail to reconcile the two groups.
You admitted you were wrong multiple times now, and you live in LA, so your vote for Trump was moot. And I honestly don't know if your endorsement moved a single swing voter.
But I still can't believe you fell for it. Every single thing you say about Trump has been abundantly obvious for the past decade. That's ten years. You wrote a vigorous defense of abortion rights, and then said you could still vote for Trump because only destitute women in the Deep South would be forced to die giving birth.
I think the real reason the blinders fell off is because tariffs hit your retirement savings. Of course, the tariffs are incredibly destructive nonsense. But bottom line, the leopards finally ate your face.
While I don't agree with all your points and it seems to me that name calling does nothing to change people's thinking, just what is the alternative to MAGNA? It looks like we have a corrupt Government top to bottom no matter who is in charge. I am 82 and have never had such a pessimistic view of Government!
Nicely said, but is there anything more to be said after Sharpiegate? After it becomes clear that nobody can get a high-level job in this administration unless they say that Trump won the 2020 election?
Something I'm not clear on in your argument: grant that it's true that illegal aliens commit crime at a lower rate. Don't they increase both the numerator and denominator in terms of crime rate, so the per capita goes down but the actual amount of crime (including that with citizen victims) goes up?
It's predictably farcical. 4 points for having tattoos, and 4 points for 'displaying logos'. Boom gang member.
Or, 6 points for texting a claimed gang member, 3 more for venmo/paypaling one, 9 points off you go to gulag for life. Gin up a bogus claim about one person then snag their family, friends, old room mates then snag all of their associates and never stop!
It's predictably farcical. 4 points for having tattoos, and 4 points for 'displaying logos'. Boom gang member.
Or, 6 points for texting a claimed gang member, 3 more for venmo/paypaling one, 9 points off you go to gulag for life. Gin up a bogus claim about one person then snag their family, friends, old room mates then snag all of their associates and never stop!
I'm sure border enforcement's job would be made somewhat easier if on days where too many people make asylum claims, they can just start ignoring them. That theory is supported by, you know, the border patrol union supporting the bill.
You rightly noted that there are incentives to preserve "wedge issues", but you fail to notice that that explains Trump's opposition more than it explains, for example, Senator Lankford sticking his neck out and trying to move bipartisan legislation. WTF does Sen. Lankford need with wedge issues? To win reelection in Oklahoma by 40 points instead of 30?
“…If you’re already at the point that you will repeat an entire constellation of lies about a fake war for no other reason than you need to justify Trump sending innocent men to rot in a brutal prison camp, are you going to have a crisis of conscience when he disobeys a court order, starts closing newspapers, or calls on his followers to murder his enemies while promising pardons? It’s hard to predict where this is all going….”
I have long thought that trump’s greatest appeal is that he supplies a “reality” that justifies the anger and deep seated desire to punish people that they blame for thier shortcomings in life. That the “reality” is based on lies is not missed by most of his followers. (even if they believe them on a certain level) They gladly repeat the lies as long as they serve their need to punish the “right” people. They get to this place because they don’t believe in truth, they believe everyone has lied to them for thier entier lives and see our society as a war of lies. To them trump is the greatest general they have ever had in this war of lies. In that regard they are not wrong, and the deep cult like loyalty Maga has for him is understandable and deserved.
It’s not hard to predict where this is “heading” the direction is clear. What is hard to predict is if there will be enough reality based opposition and courage to stop it.
To expand on when I said.."even if they believe them on a certain level." I think Orwell said it best when he defined "doublethink" in his book "1984".
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed."
I have posted this quote from time to time for decades when criticizing the right. When I first started posting it, it applied to a fringe of the right or a few aspects of the mainstream right. Over the years it applied to more and more of the right, until today it describes the vast majority of the right, especially those with the most sophisticated views.
Fox News et al.'s last twenty years of spreading lies and exaggerations to convince people that everyone (particularly, but not exclusively Democrats) in politics are corrupt, selfish, soulless, incompetent, liars set the stage for Trump by basically convincing a large swath of the country that all politicians are as bad as Trump, if maybe not as flagrant. As a result, they excuse Trump by thinking that it's just hypocrisy and partisanship that is driving criticism of his corruption and lying when, in fact, he's several orders of magnitude worse on pretty much any metric than anyone who has come before him.
Exactly.
Didn’t Jon Stewart say something about this to Tucker Carlson on Crossfire?
The prior administration made a conscious decision to ignore immigration law and the will of the voters to usher in millions of illegal immigrants. And now that voters actually have somebody that is acting on the majority's preferences, judges are taking the position that effectively nothing can be done, because while they aren't required to follow any legal process to let millions in, you need individual hearings to deport, which of course we don't have the capabilities and can't reasonably create the capability to have individualized hearings for millions of illegal immigrants in a timely fashion.
No matter what, there were going to be some travesties of justice in trying to reverse all the illegal immigration. That was going to be the case whether there were angels implementing the policy or typical politicians. They created a problem of a scale that it guarantees there will be some travesties, just because a 99.9% error free rate (which they're not going to achieve) is going to create a lot of travesties. All the pearl clutching at this point is about 4 years too late. You had the Biden administration basically take the position that the law and due process don't matter, and unfortunately, they seem to have made a compelling case to a lot of voters.
It's true that Biden wasn't particularly interested in stopping illegal immigration (though a lot of this wasn't exactly letting in illegal immigrants, but rather helping people come in or stay through colorabley legal methods, like requests for asylum and TPS).
However, this is hardly the only area where presidents have chosen not to vigorously enforce the law. Notably, marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, yet no on really complains that Trump isn't demanding the FBI go shut down and arrest everyone involved with "legal weed" dispensaries, and we certainly wouldn't say the next president would be justified in tossing out the constitution to deal with the problem because prior presidents didn't fully enforce the law.
Moreover, the scale of the problem is hardly what people claim it to be. There's a backlog, but immigration cases aren't exactly the OJ trial. They are usually 30 minute affairs. Hire 1,000 IJs and you can clear the backlog in a year or two. Biden even tried to do this, but Trump asked the House GOP to block it because he preferred to have the issue.
And yes, no system is going to be perfect. Occasionally someone will inadvertently have their rights violated or an innocent person will be found guilty or paper work will get messed up. But the problem with Trump isn't that he's making errors (or at least not just that he is making errors), but that he's intentionally violating the Constitution, even after courts tell him to stop, and refusing to fix problems he causes. Maybe Garcia gets inadvertently deported to El Salvador in any administration, but most administrations, realizing they made an error, would have brought him back. Trump steadfastly refuses despite court orders requiring him to do so, or at least make a reasonable effort.
The difference is that lax enforcement on marijuana is that it's generally been consistent with the will of voters. The lax enforcement of overt marijuana dealing has been in jurisdictions that voted to legalize it. In jurisdictions that have not voted to legalize it, the lax enforcement barely looks any different than it did 20 years ago. And it's certainly not like the federal government started facilitating marijuana dealing as a semi-official policy.
And Biden didn't try to hire 1,000 IJs. They offered a carrot of funding IJs with essentially a floor on illegal immigration before they even thought about maybe securing the border. But there was no mechanism to actually require enforcement and presumably democrats wouldn't have agreed to a deal that included those. Even on a non-contentious issue, trying to draft legislation where the executive can't just refuse to do their job would be a heavy lift. The pro-illegal immigration sections of the democrat base would have lost it if they had seen the type of language that would have essentially made immigration law self enforcing.
It isn't like there isn't support for lax immigration enforcement (though it has waned during the Biden admin). Biden got elected in 2020 after the Dems had been largely critical of Trump's immigration enforcement - there were even moves to decriminalize in the primary. You aren't going to see as much local legalization of immigration b/c it's a federal issue, but many states and localities have done things like implement sanctuary laws that seek to limit immigration enforcement within their jurisdictions.
The difference between legal weed and immigration is that you're OK with one but not the other.
Legal weed also isn't an outlier in terms of lax enforcement. Notably, we do not enforce tax law to anywhere close to the level it could be, and the GOP is constantly trying to make enforcement harder with cuts at the IRS. We had something similar with homosexuality, which was illegal in many states until as recently as 2003, but hadn't been enforced since long before then. Other examples include speeding (though this is a local issue) - 90% of drivers at any given time are exceeding the speed limit by a couple MPH, but you only really get a ticket if you are doing so flagrantly or in some other way draw attention to yourself.
Laws are never 100% enforced, and it is a common occurrence for governments to turn a blind eye to minor violations. Conservatives just have a bug up their butts when it comes to immigration and pretend its a special case. It's just a case where they want greater enforcement and Democrats don't, so when Dems are in office, you get less enforcement.
But at the end of the day, you still have to follow the Constitution.
There is pretty strong majority support against open borders, which is what shuttling people into the country looks like to most people. People mostly aren't so worried about illegal immigrant workers in relatively low paying sectors. The sanctuary cities are a pretty good analogy to legal marijuana. There were people outside of those locations that still complain about it, but at the end of the day, the people in those locations generally support it and the federal gov't turning a blind eye to it there doesn't stop it from generally enforcing the law elsewhere in the same way it had for the past couple of decades.
And it's not that you get less enforcement. It's that you get the administration basically working to undermine enforcement. If Biden had kept the same general approach of pre-Trump republicans and pre-2000'
s democrats where you talk like you want to enforce it, enforce the law against people causing problems, and then generally letting employed immigrants and their employers slide except for some occasional random high profile enforcement, I don't think voters care that much. Certainly some would, but it wouldn't rank the #1 issue for many voters outside of maybe people living in areas that are transforming demographically in a way they don't like.
And at the end of the day, you don't have to follow the constitution, you only have to follow it when politics demand it, and that's especially true when it comes to omitting to do your duties as opposed to ceasing some action that is unconstitutional. Biden obviouslyh wasn't following the constitution with respect to immigration and there wsan't really a way to force him to. We aren't really following the Constitution now with respect to marijuana either. We didn't follow it to begin with with Reich, but to the extent you think that was following the constitution, we're not following it now because the administration is not seeing to it that laws be faithfully executed.
1) They Lied about Immigrant Crime
No, the comments section to your article refute your assertion very effectively.
I do think the Venezuelans held in El Salvador should be free to repatriate to Venezuela, and not just stuck there, and it is troubling if they aren't. But this fact hasn't been well-established in the shoddy reporting so far.
That aside, it is risible to see all of these concerns about due process after Biden illegally waived 12 million foreign nationals into the country in four years, the overwhelming majority of whom we'll never be rid of, effectively flushing what was left of our entire corpus of immigration law down the toilet.
No one refuted anything on immigrant crime. Even Noah Carl, who opposes immigration but is honest, says that I’m correct in the comments. This issue clouds people’s judgment because you all can’t admit there aren’t good reasons for the position you are so passionate about.
And lol at "shoddy reporting" to refer to the NYT conducting background checks across five foreign countries. Yes, I'm sure that's not up to the standards you're used to on Breitbart and Lindell TV.
The fact that you are trotting out a straw man ("immigrant crime") says everything about the strength of your evidence and argument. The very little data that you have that actually differentiates between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants covers Texas only. We simply have no idea how much more crime is committed on average by migrants in the country illegally.
I've never consumed a morsel of Breitbart and I have no idea what Lindell TV is. If you'd like to show me where the NY Times or the Washington Post addressed my point I'd be happy to see it. It is shoddy insofar as I have never seen anything on his deportations remotely as evenhanded, informative or nuanced as this substack:
https://www.wakeuptopolitics.com/p/what-due-process-was-owed-to-kilmar.
When you look at the Times homepage, as I do daily, it is a tidal wave of "orange man bad" resistance reporting.
You are the one with clouded judgment. You have decided a priori that only racists could possibly object to de facto open borders, and you proceed from there.
No, David Frum wants a more restrictive immigration policy and I don’t think he’s racist. I don’t think Noah Carl is racist. I do think you have to be a bad person to support Trump after what we’ve seen though unless you’re terribly uninformed, and racism one of the more common reasons, along with general sadism and stupidity.
There is plenty to criticize about his deportations, but on the whole I'd rather have his policies in place than the reopened floodgates we would have gotten from Harris. And that is the binary choice we were presented with.
Biden was willing to pass an immigration bill that the most conservative Republicans in Congress wrote. They spiked their own bill because Trump told them to. Harris said she would sign it.
And to Hannania's point, where ARE you going to draw the line? When actual citizens start disappearing? Or will you say that's okay too, as long as immigration policy is more restrictive?
Don't say "oh that will never happen," because every time Trump supporters say that, Trump does it and supporters defend him post hoc. There will flimsy justifications then too. Vance will claim with no evidence that they were pedophiles, and you'll have the choice to half-heartedly believe him.
That immigration bill was irrelevant. Much more effective border enforcement never required new legislation. Biden only started using the tools already had at his disposal at the last minute when he was staring into the abyss of his poll numbers in an election year. Harris would have promptly abandoned them again if she'd won.
I do think citizens disappearing would be completely unacceptable.
That was the binary choice on election day. But Trump essentially eliminated further illegal immigration on day 1 with his executive order. That already fulfilled his promise.
It’s what’s the administration has done nearly every day since, that has become indefensible.
When you “deport” someone, you return them to their home country. That’s it. They’re free thereafter. Deporting is not “send to a third country then lock them up in a prison”. I don’t know what legal or moral justification exists for anything like that, yet here we are.
Do you have a source for the "12 million" number? As far as I can tell it's another shining example of MAGA's epistemic standards.
Here is a source: https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/opinion/question-for-trump-to-solve-just-how-many-million-migrants-did-joe-let-in-8-million-12-15/
I'll happily concede we don't have a precise number because that is impossible, even if the Biden administration had any interest in providing one, which it didn't.
A better question is, is there any number that would be too much for you?
I'd happily support a pause on nearly all immigration to the US and essentially all illegal immigrants should be expelled. I think culture is important and that we've likely become much worse at assimilating immigrants in the past 50 years.
But let's be clear what's going on here: you cite a specific number, and then, when asked for a source, say "yeah, someone pulled it out of their ass because the precise number is unknowable."
Like read the NY Post article. It is not attempting to make any kind of reasonable estimate. It is waving at tangentially related numbers and then throwing out large numbers as "possibilities."
(10 million "encounters" could mean that 10 million illegal immigrants came to the US, were encountered by CPB, and ejected from the country. It could mean 10 million illegals came to the US, were encountered by CPB, and released into the US. It could mean that 1 million illegal immigrants crossed the border, were apprehended and ejected, and then tried again 9 more times. There is a huge range of possibilities here, and a reasonable person could look for evidence and make an educated estimate, but that's not what you or the New York Post did.)
No, that really isn't what is going on here. The floor in the article is the 8 million cited in the House Judiciary report. That is not pulled from nowhere. The rest of the conjecture is reasonable.
If the hill you want to die on is that I should have written "many millions and quite possibly as many as 12 million," then fine, I will concede that point. It was a comment on a blog post, not a dissertation, and matters not in the slightest to the point I was making.
I believe the House Judiciary report is here: https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2024-04-16-How-the-Biden-Administration%27s-Lax-Immigration-Enforcement-Allows-Dangerous-Criminal-Aliens-to-Run-Free-in-American-C.pdf
Quoting:
> Since President Biden took office, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has encountered more than 7.6 million illegal aliens along the southwest border.
It's a game of telephone among people with terrible epistemic standards: The HJC finds "7.6 million *encounters*" and translates this as "Biden has welcomed in 7.6 million illegals." The NYP reads this and notes that "encounters" doesn't include "gotaways" and writes "maybe the true number is 12 million - or 15 million!" Then this number is gospel - at least until JD Vance decides the true number is actually 20 million.
And while yes, this whole thing is a bit of a tangent, I do think it's *interesting* when a response to a post about MAGA's terrible epistemic standards cites an extremely questionable number without qualification.
There is no number that justifies lying about the crime numbers or deporting asylum claimants to prison camps. Your comment implies that, for you, the current number justifies almost any level of lying (as performed by Trump). You should think about how you made this your identity
The puzzling thing about all this lawlessness regarding immigration is it doesn’t seem to even have helped them to increase overall deportation numbers by that much, it seems that cruelty towards the unlucky few (relative to the total number of illegal immigrants) that actually get caught up in this process really is the point.
In light of all this it is also darkly ironic that naturalized immigrants potentially contributed half of the net swing towards Trump in 2024 (David Shor said he thinks this is likely in a discussion with Ezra Klein). MAGA is so dumb that they might end up deporting the people who helped elect them, it’s almost like a self-correcting mechanism.
I think there's a logic in that stuff like this is flashy and creates a deterrent effect, probably more than just increasing deportations.
The bigger issue is that all the lies you listed are a cover up to the actual project that is both extremely nativist and extremely autocratic. They want to chill anyone that is not native born or is not submitting themselves to their asserted power.
The unlucky few as you call them creates deterrence. See monthly numbers from CBP on illegal encounters. The Trump effect is working on future illegals.
They know what they're doing and they've already caused a chilling effect on everyone that lives here or ever intended to immigrate here, legally or illegally. That was always the main goal.
I have a feeling that Trump is not the only one disregarding the truth here. I have noticed a weird thing: despite hundreds of Trump's deportations there's still not a single unequivocal case of them mistakenly deporting an actual US citizen, with no criminal record, etc. The opposite pattern emerges: whenever there's a new outrage, it inevitably turns out that the martyr is a literal rapist with other felony charges that was ordered to be deported a decade ago (for the most recent example: https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1kecev6/us_resident_of_33_years_business_owner_no_gang/mqhtzne/).
Or let's talk about Abrego Garcia. I'm not a gang tattoo expert, but I know that he got his due process and two different judges refused him asylum because of his MS13 membership. One of them then granted this unusual stay on deportation because there was a reasonable danger to his life *from rival gangs*, which is a very hilarious approach to requesting asylum, I'm laughing my ass off here.
Now, you might say that maybe he made mistakes in his youth, and maybe there was an insufficient due process, and we shouldn't trust the courts when they make verdicts we don't like, but my point is, consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_v._Ferguson for example: people interested in desegregation found a mixed race guy with an impeccable reputation, made sure that there was a police officer instructed to arrest him, that was a planned operation. Same with Rosa Parks by the way, she was not some random woman, she was thoroughly vetted to make sure that all reasonable people would be sympathetic towards her.
And yet in case of Trump's deportees we have an endless procession of rapists, violent felons, gang members, and other scum that he promised to deport and that reasonable people want to see deported. Of course you wouldn't know if you only consume liberal news sources, but that's a factual fact, not a single equivalent of Rosa Parks or Homer Plessy has yet to emerge. The best you can offer is that NYT article, but not a single actual person with a name and a face, all such people turn out to be bad hombres.
Why is that, how do you think? The administration is also aware of this, could it be that they are not simply evil? Do you expect any of your better informed readers to change their minds?
> I know that he got his due process and two different judges refused him asylum because of his MS13
To be clear, this is not true. Kilmar was refused asylum because he did not file his asylum claim in the time frame required for it. The stay for deportation granted requires meeting a stricter legal standard than granting asylum. A judge refused to release him on bond after a detention following an investigation into a murder (or possibly something else, paperwork wasn't filled properly by the police), this determination requires a much lower standard of evidence. Note that he was released with no charges following this, impossible to know why, but a reasonable guess being that the prosecutor did not believe he had good enough evidence to win a trial, so did not even bother attempting it.
This is probably true...but you're still risking the "I didn't speak up when they came for X" problem. Sure, Trump is intentionally targeting 'bad hombres' or whatever now - but were he to come for good old American citizens he could make the Garcia argument just as easily i.e. "Oops, wrong guy but he's in El Salvador now".
Even in this moment, many of the student visas he's haphazardly revoked were not gangsters or even petty criminals.
Shouldn't we wait for something like that to actually happen before we cry wolf?
Like, I would be moderately upset with a deportation program that accidentally deports one innocent per 100 evils, as long as it can be corrected. I get why you're worried that it refuses to correct but in this case it's not an innocent (btw Garcia is a wife beater too, they really select the best people as martyrs) and apparently the order to not deport him was wrong anyways (he should not have been deported to Venezuela, not El Salvador), so idk.
So the thing that happened is Trump violated court orders. We should make people understand that the current law of the United States is that they can be deported and sent to a Gulag without a trial. That is factually the current state of affairs until the court can find an enforcement mechanism to stop Trump.
* we should make illegals understand <...>
Great, then you should explain, or just ask yourself seriously, what law atops them from doing this to American citizens. Coming to your house, disappearing you to El Salvador and then saying "Oopsie".
"At this point, you just have to shake your head and say, well, that’s a value system I guess. But if you have any moral system other than Trump is God or all foreigners should be made to suffer, this is not going to strike you as a compelling argument."
I suppose we should all adopt your neolib value system prioritizing cheap uber eats and domestic servants over living in a neighborhood where people actually speak the same language.
I'm curious why your grandstanding about truth doesn't extend to the asylum system. It's obvious that these people are economic migrants exploiting the system to remain in the US, not legitimate asylum seekers or refugees.
You could fix that by budgeting for more immigration judges to process asylum claims. With the backlog cleared, there stops being an incentive to claim asylum so you can be allowed in the country for years. Trump's budget proposal does not do this.
The migrants' dishonesty serves the purpose of decreasing the probability that they or their families will starve or be harmed by violent criminals. Trump's dishonesty serves the purpose of stoking his ego and paying off debts due to other people he scammed or abused. These are not the same.
Deciding an asylum case in 3 days would do nothing about our broken asylum system filled with spurious cases without immediate deportation. Every illegal would just disappear into the U.S. if they lost and we’d have to spent money, time and resources trying to find and deport them. Deportation is key to a fix functioning asylum system. Right how it’s head I win, tails you lose.
There are many people who come back after being deported. Idk about the veracity of this report but from a surface level look it estimates 26% of deportees reenter the country: https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-publications/illegal-reentry-offenses. A border wall might actually help but Trump promised that a decade ago and failed to get any funding even with Republican control of both houses of Congress and his supporters never held him accountable, so we'll probably be stuck like this for the near future https://media1.tenor.com/m/mbniZE9gjV0AAAAd/the-door-barney-gumble.gif
There are plenty who re-enter because our southern border is porous. The illegal migrant who the Wisconsin state judge prevented ICE from capturing was deported in 2013 and re-entered. The illegal migramt activist from Colorado - Jeanette Vizguerra- lost her asylum claims and other claims - self-deported and then re-entered illegally. Then there was the illegal who shot that woman in SF years ago who had been deported 5 times and re-entered. The border is a joke.
Asylum seekers disappearing is a mostly unjustified concern, but if you are concerned, implement e-Verify. If you can't get a job, no point in being here.
Frankly, I think moderately controlled illegal immigration is a good thing, as it gives some leeway on occasionally overly strict labor and employment laws, while making everyone better off, so I'd prefer not to have e-Verify, or really worry that much about this issue. But if it worries you, push to implement e-Verify before tearing up the constitution.
If you want more lax labor and employment laws then pass laws to weaken them. Don’t advocate for breaking them.
Asylum seeking is not a constitutional right.
Asylum seekers who lose almost never leave if they ever file cases in the first place.
You want migrants to have all of the rights with none of the obligations, while Americans get all of the obligations but none of the rights.
The reason the Border Patrol lets them in is that they claim asylum. If their claims were adjudicated very quickly, it would be financially feasible to hold asylum claimants until their court dates. Failed claimants can be deported at once; those who don't show up for court can be deported on first encounter with any LEO.
We shouldn’t have to pay for their detention. They can apply from overseas. And leftists would never accept detaining families or even single men. It’s “cruel and inhumane.”
I don't think you follow how much the timescale could be reduced. It's a pipeline-type problem. If there's enough capacity in the system to handle the throughput, the wait time goes to zero.
Timescale reduction does not matter without deportation upon the petitioner being denied. Denials can also be appealed, extending the timeframe people would stay in the country or in detention. Detaining asylum seekers is too expensive and not something the U.S. taxpayer should pay for. Full stop.
Years ago a man was deported after living in the U.S. for 17 years while appealing his denied asylum claim. His illegal wife remained here with their U.S. born daughter and 2 illegal alien DACA kids. Our current system is madness and invites abuse, fraud and frivolous claims while simultaneously expanding grounds for asylum to include tragic but not colorable claims like domestic abuse and being a victim of a crime.
Richard has said before that he's a neoliberal. I am too. We exist. Maybe you should read someone else.
Do you live in a neighborhood where people speak a different language? I don't now but I have in the past. I had great neighbors, then and now.
You don't have to accept a "neolib value system priorizing cheap Uber eats and domestic servants over living in a neighborhood where people speak the same language" to think it's bad to send innocent people to be tortured in prison for the rest of their lives simply for being born in the wrong country, especially when this is done with no due process and a made-up legal basis, and then gaslighting the country about it with a mountain of lies. If believing that's wrong isn't entailed by basic human decency, I don't know what is.
Enough with the idiotic strawman rhetoric. You know you're wrong and that the administration's actions and claims are indefensible.
I don’t think you need to like immigration in order to admit that the Trump administration is lying. Ideally, for people who do not like the asylum system, they should be mass deporting asylum seekers for abusing the law, but that is a separate issue from if those immigrants are committing crimes.
"neolib value system prioritizing cheap uber eats and domestic servants"
Having money's good. Get some.
"living in a neighborhood where people actually speak the same language."
You can accomplish this by repealing anti-discrimination law.
I do think the above attitude is a substantial part of MAGA. Indeed, over most of history, people who aren't "of the community" aren't considered humans, have no rights, and when anything gets upsetting, they are slaughtered and/or driven out. The Jews keep a long list of such incidents in Eastern Europe, but you can find examples in US history too, including the Trail of Tears (which was outright illegal in its day) and Eisenhower's Operation Wetback (ditto).
So within the context that one of the strongest components of MAGA is "Drive out all the immigrants!" combined with the concept that non-citizens are due *none* of what we call human rights, this part of the Trump administration is sensible and consistent.
Perhaps I sound over the top, but think about it: If you want to have all neighborhoods be "where people actually speak the same language" -- and you don't mean the late-1800s cities of the US, with their large Yiddish-speaking, German-speaking, etc. neighborhoods, you mean all neighborhoods must be English-speaking -- you're going to have to get rid of a *lot* of immigrants, and indeed many of those are in the US quite legally and properly.
Now certainly, the progressives want to classify everybody who wants to get into the US as a refugee, and indeed, the vast majority of immigrants are fundamentally economic migrants. But ... you say that like it's a bad thing. Bulking up the population really does boost the economy. (In particular, each one takes on responsibility for a $100k slice of the federal debt!)
A little more subtly, the burdens of cultural diversity are unevenly spread. The well-educated upper-middle class that dominates the Democratic party has arranged things so that the poor non-English-speaking immigrants don't live in *their* neighborhoods or send their children to *their* schools. (Though they are available to do work for them!) But the fix for that is to attack NIMBY and have considerably better state/federal funding for schools.
I would think living in a neighborhood where people are multi cultural or have the ability to speak different languages would be a positive. I wish I had the capacity to speak different language….
This is why I say comparisons to Hitler are not unfair. I’m sorry but sending people to labor camps under false pretenses is very Hitler-like
I wouldn't say Hitler -- prisoners aren't worked to death, or summarily shot upon entry. But utterly depraved and evil, yes.
How sure are we that people aren't worked to death in CECOT?
The thing is that there are less inflammatory and more accurate comparisons one could make.
And none of them will penetrate Main Street’s consciousness
1. Crime statistics were corrupted under the Biden regime by not reporting crime from major cities. I accept the assertion that crime spiked with illegal aliens based on personal observation more readily than accept faulty data.
2. Who to believe? The reliable and unbiased assessments of the CIA or the FBI? Links of organized crime to dictators are not surprising and it is more likely to be true than not true.
3. Minor crime is crime. Do they belong in the super max? No, and it seems like the more redeemable prisoners are not being held there. These gangs are unbelievably vile. Indications of membership are not “body art.” False claims of membership are punished severely so these are either the worst kind of people or the dumbest. But since the dumb ones won't live long, the selection pressure is strong.
4. I agree that Venezuelans should be held somewhere besides the super max in El Salvador. Just don’t send them back to Venezuela. Venezuela would just let them loose again.
5. The vast majority of these active asylum claims ARE illegitimate. Aliens that commit crimes while seeking asylum invalidate their claims. One of the sad results of the perversion of the asylum application process is that the deserving applicants are crowded out of the system.
Do you have a source establishing your first point? My recollection is that the claim was debunked.
He’s a typical MAGA semi-literate who has strong opinions and doesn’t read anything. The original article covers decades of crime research and has nothing to do with any reporting issues of the last few years. I haven’t looked at his other points but I’m sure they’re equally dumb and misinformed. I should really ban all these idiots but I’ll keep this one up.
Please do and refund my fees
Figure out how to cancel and I will gladly ban you. I can’t do it while you’re a paid subscriber.
Interesting. You can't ban me until I give up my fee? So, I'm staying. Does that sound like a threat? I'm sure you are not scared. Whatever. I like your thread though I rarely agree with it. If you had bothered to read my post you would have seen that I did agree with you on several points. It would be too much to expect a dialog. TDS much?
No you can’t be banned while a paid subscriber and I don’t know which email you are to cancel. But either way, you can stick around.
Just use grok or ChatGPT to explain to you why you're wrong and all your sources are terrible. It's not fair to demand that real people demonstrate Brandolini's Law.
In 2023, major city reporting was improved, as you note. However, there are issues
https://whitecollarfraud.com/2024/09/23/fbi-crime-data-discrepancies-an-updated-analysis-of-new-york-citys-2023-statistics/ and it seems odd that we see with our own eyes crime that we didn't see often. Reporting crime is often a problem and illegals, the main victims of crime by illegals, are understandably reluctant to report crime.
> Crime statistics were corrupted under the Biden regime by not reporting crime from major cities.
From what I've heard:
- in 2021, the FBI changed the reporting system, and there was a dramatic decrease in the number of Americans covered by local police departments that participated in the reporting system (roughly 65%). This did include some major cities.
- but the number of agencies participating *increased* dramatically as local police departments adjusted. By 2023, 94.3% of Americans lived in agencies that submitted data. Every city agency with a population of over 1M people submitted data for 2023. 84/90 agencies with populations over 250k submitted data.
> Do they belong in the super max? No, and it seems like the more redeemable prisoners are not being held there.
This would be a relief, do you have a source for that?
> False claims of membership are punished severely so these are either the worst kind of people or the dumbest. But since the dumb ones won't live long, the selection pressure is strong.
Fortunately for the "dumb ones," the gangs seem to be slightly less retarded than the Trump administration, and as far as I know haven't started executing people for autism awareness tattoos.
> Links of organized crime to dictators are not surprising and it is more likely to be true than not true.
Not sure this holds at all, would be interested to see evidence - organized crime is an alternative power center and I can imagine this swinging either way.
> 5. The vast majority of these active asylum claims ARE illegitimate. Aliens that commit crimes while seeking asylum invalidate their claims. One of the sad results of the perversion of the asylum application process is that the deserving applicants are crowded out of the system.
Fully agree here.
Trump's lying about Abrego Garcia has three root causes:
1. The asymmetric illegal immigration game. In practice it is very easy to come into the US on spurious grounds (such as fake asylum claims or fake torture fear claims), but the judges, immigration lawyers, and Congress make it practically impossible to reverse illegal immigration at scale (chronically underfunding detention space and administrative immigration judges). Even the Lankford bill was a farce (its main terms only would have kicked in at an astronomical 4,000 crossings per day). Immigration lawyers make more money the longer the process takes (maximizing due process), so they have a vested incentive in keeping the dysfunctional status quo and in lobbying Congress and activist groups to do the same.
2. Trump's overdeference to the Supreme Court. While the media crows about Trump's dictatorial ambitions, in practice he openly defers to the Supreme Court in rhetoric (even if the meaning of the term "effectuate" is disputed). The idea that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter that determines "what the law is" is a modern innovation. Andrew Jackson openly defied the Supreme Court to push his agenda through, as did Abraham Lincoln. FDR threatened to pack the court to cow the court into submission, and it worked. At the end of the day the courts are a paper tiger. If he wanted to Trump could call the courts' bluff on contempt and expose their lack of real power, but he won't. This empowers the courts to move immigration law in a more juducial supremacist direction.
3. Trump was co-opted by Silicon Valley oligarchs on immigration in order to get their backing and donations. They redirected the immigration debate terrain away from deporting nearly all illegal immigrants (even peaceful ones) because they drive down working-class male wages, drive up rent prices, and sap the social safety net, to deporting just violent criminals, and then narrowing the target group even further to MS-13. This made the public debate harder to win since they now needed to show that each deportee was not just an illegal (or obviously flimsy asylum seeker) but also a criminal and a member of MS-13. Trump could have told the judges to go pound sand if the debate was just about whether Abrego Garcia was an illegal (he clearly is), but by narrowing the target group Trump has to comically lie to make him "fit".
If SCOTUS doesn't have the power to decide whether Constitutional limits on the powers of Congress and POTUS are being violated, those limits are meaningless.
The Framers did not intend the Supreme Court to have that power. It was supposed to be an inferior branch (not a co-equal one) because the Framers feared judicial tyrrany due to their knowledge and horror with English courts (including the dreaded Star Chamber). The Supreme Court then tried to arrogate final judicial review to itself in the Marbury v Madison decision, but this power grab was never complete until recent times. Supreme Court decisions were given heavy weight by the executive, but it could still ignore them if it thought the court was in grievous error (such as after the infamous Dred Scott case).
do you trust that, if the trump administration felt they could freely defy the supreme court, they would only do so in good and virtuous ways?
No, but I also reject the premise that the Supreme Court always get it right either, or that it should be the final, unquestioned arbiter. It should be given deference, but that deference should not be limitless.
If the rule is "the President can defy the Supreme Court if he has a really good reason", the President will always say he has a really good reason.
Not necessarily. Abraham Lincoln defied the Supreme Court on the Dred Scott case but not on most other matters. Same with Andrew Jackson.
This completely leaves aside that Trump used the Alien Enemies Act. Yes, you should have to affirmatively prove that someone is a threat to the US before sending them to a torture prison. There should be no room to accidentally disappear a gay hairdresser who was here legally and had Mom and Dad tattoos.
I really wonder if people understand just how despotic this prison is. Prisoners have NO contact with the outside world. No visitors, no phone calls, no letters, no lawyers. You literally do not see the sun: you are not allowed outside, and the prison has no windows. There 100+ prisoners to one cell. The lights are kept on 24/7 to disrupt sleep. You have no clothes, just underwear. **And you will probably never leave.**
**We sent innocent men there to die**. It is unconscionable. It is evil.
I agree that sending the non-MS 13 members to CECOT was a major moral and public relations blunder just to save some money on detention cost. One of the worst moves in the Trump presidency so far. The Trump administration should have just focused on deporting all illegals (irrespective of gang membership) and forcing through asylum case adjuducation rapidly (telling slothful judges to either rule quickly or get pushed out of the way, and Congress to pass more border and immigration judge funding or face an indefinite government shutdown). CECOT has been an immoral and politically unhelpful sideshow.
I'm glad we agree that condemning an innocent man to fifty years of no contact with his family or the sun (assuming he's not already dead), is a public relations blunder.
A public relations blunder and a moral blunder. It is the wrong thing to do both politically and from a basic human decency perspective.
Lower wages mean lower prices; to say that we should support wages by limiting immigration is the broken window fallacy. The cause of rising rents is NIMBYs; we are physically capable of building far more housing than we do. The last one is a valid point, but why doesn't Trump aim policy at that (for example, allowing Medicaid-funded hospitals to refuse lifesaving treatment to illegal aliens)?
NIMBYism is a big problem but it is not the only factor behind rising rent prices. The supply of usable land is inflexible, so a rising population should always increase rent prices all else being equal. Building is also constrained by other fixed constraints (such as limited drinkable water in the western states and limited arable land to grow crops to feed a growing population). The key driver of food prices is not labor availability but land availability, transportation cost, fertilizer price, and population.
As to lower wages leading to lower prices, this is true, but the price drop will always be smaller than the wage drop, leading impacted workers to ALWAYS be worse off (this is because labor is only one factor in production). The more capital-intensive the industry the worse the workers will be.
Land is limited, but vertical space is not. Until San Francisco consists entirely of 50-story apartment buildings, there is room to build.
The vast majority of fresh water in the West is used for agriculture; household use is a rounding error.
If you want to redistribute wealth, tax the rich/big corporations and give government checks to citizens with the revenue. Doing this indirectly through immigration policy increases deadweight loss.
I agree that taxing the rich would be the best solution, but given the intractable corruption in Congress (and the near hopelessness in fixing it) immigration restrictions serve as a second-best policy for preserving working class wealth.
True, you can build upwards, but at exponentionally increasing cost and diminished quality of life and safety (good luck surviving a skysraper fire or structural collapse). Almost nobody prefers to live in a 49th floor pod without access to green grass or a view of the sunshine.
If there is demand for it, it will be built. If not, not.
Exactly.
"2. Trump's overdeference to the Supreme Court. While the media crows about Trump's dictatorial ambitions, in practice he openly defers to the Supreme Court in rhetoric (even if the meaning of the term "effectuate" is disputed). The idea that the Supreme Court is the final arbiter that determines "what the law is" is a modern innovation. Andrew Jackson openly defied the Supreme Court to push his agenda through, as did Abraham Lincoln. FDR threatened to pack the court to cow the court into submission, and it worked. At the end of the day the courts are a paper tiger. If he wanted to Trump could call the courts' bluff on contempt and expose their lack of real power, but he won't. This empowers the courts to move immigration law in a more juducial supremacist direction."
The Supreme Court would just rule that Trump's actions are illegal and that federal law enforcement officers don't have to follow illegal orders.
If Trump wants to deport at scale, why does his budget proposal not call for funding of more immigration judges to expedite the process?
Because his budget proposal was written by some of his more libertarian, Silicon Valley-type advisors rather than the Stephen Miller-like group. The Elon Musk cult "slash and burn crew" doesn't see the vision on immigration. Trump lacks enough knowledge on policy detail to reconcile the two groups.
So you admit that Trump has no idea what he's doing.
Yes, he often has decent ideas in the abstract, but he is absolutely horrible in personnel selection and policy implementation.
You admitted you were wrong multiple times now, and you live in LA, so your vote for Trump was moot. And I honestly don't know if your endorsement moved a single swing voter.
But I still can't believe you fell for it. Every single thing you say about Trump has been abundantly obvious for the past decade. That's ten years. You wrote a vigorous defense of abortion rights, and then said you could still vote for Trump because only destitute women in the Deep South would be forced to die giving birth.
I think the real reason the blinders fell off is because tariffs hit your retirement savings. Of course, the tariffs are incredibly destructive nonsense. But bottom line, the leopards finally ate your face.
While I don't agree with all your points and it seems to me that name calling does nothing to change people's thinking, just what is the alternative to MAGNA? It looks like we have a corrupt Government top to bottom no matter who is in charge. I am 82 and have never had such a pessimistic view of Government!
Make government smaller and there's less incentive for it to be corrupt and its corruption matters less. That's the alternative: us Libertarians.
Nicely said, but is there anything more to be said after Sharpiegate? After it becomes clear that nobody can get a high-level job in this administration unless they say that Trump won the 2020 election?
Something I'm not clear on in your argument: grant that it's true that illegal aliens commit crime at a lower rate. Don't they increase both the numerator and denominator in terms of crime rate, so the per capita goes down but the actual amount of crime (including that with citizen victims) goes up?
So the determination guide for who to claim was a gang member was published:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.67.21.pdf
It's predictably farcical. 4 points for having tattoos, and 4 points for 'displaying logos'. Boom gang member.
Or, 6 points for texting a claimed gang member, 3 more for venmo/paypaling one, 9 points off you go to gulag for life. Gin up a bogus claim about one person then snag their family, friends, old room mates then snag all of their associates and never stop!
So the determination guide for who to claim was a gang member was published:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436/gov.uscourts.dcd.278436.67.21.pdf
It's predictably farcical. 4 points for having tattoos, and 4 points for 'displaying logos'. Boom gang member.
Or, 6 points for texting a claimed gang member, 3 more for venmo/paypaling one, 9 points off you go to gulag for life. Gin up a bogus claim about one person then snag their family, friends, old room mates then snag all of their associates and never stop!
I'm sure border enforcement's job would be made somewhat easier if on days where too many people make asylum claims, they can just start ignoring them. That theory is supported by, you know, the border patrol union supporting the bill.
You rightly noted that there are incentives to preserve "wedge issues", but you fail to notice that that explains Trump's opposition more than it explains, for example, Senator Lankford sticking his neck out and trying to move bipartisan legislation. WTF does Sen. Lankford need with wedge issues? To win reelection in Oklahoma by 40 points instead of 30?
Is it hard to predict where this is going?
“…If you’re already at the point that you will repeat an entire constellation of lies about a fake war for no other reason than you need to justify Trump sending innocent men to rot in a brutal prison camp, are you going to have a crisis of conscience when he disobeys a court order, starts closing newspapers, or calls on his followers to murder his enemies while promising pardons? It’s hard to predict where this is all going….”
I have long thought that trump’s greatest appeal is that he supplies a “reality” that justifies the anger and deep seated desire to punish people that they blame for thier shortcomings in life. That the “reality” is based on lies is not missed by most of his followers. (even if they believe them on a certain level) They gladly repeat the lies as long as they serve their need to punish the “right” people. They get to this place because they don’t believe in truth, they believe everyone has lied to them for thier entier lives and see our society as a war of lies. To them trump is the greatest general they have ever had in this war of lies. In that regard they are not wrong, and the deep cult like loyalty Maga has for him is understandable and deserved.
It’s not hard to predict where this is “heading” the direction is clear. What is hard to predict is if there will be enough reality based opposition and courage to stop it.
To expand on when I said.."even if they believe them on a certain level." I think Orwell said it best when he defined "doublethink" in his book "1984".
"To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself—that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed."
I have posted this quote from time to time for decades when criticizing the right. When I first started posting it, it applied to a fringe of the right or a few aspects of the mainstream right. Over the years it applied to more and more of the right, until today it describes the vast majority of the right, especially those with the most sophisticated views.