I try to imagine the mental gymnastics the libs have to go through to convince themselves that what they are doing is morally in line with the whole of society. All I can think is that they've literally lost their minds.
Let's grant that there's a sincere concern among the vocal critics of ICE for the downtrodden, a concern we surmise is accompanied by the human condition of status seeking and performative moral superiority in supporting those seen as subject to the matrix of oppressions.
That "unbounded kindness toward the marginalized" doesn't have an analog in sympathy toward those rationally concerned about social cohesion, financial resources, public safety, or just the ability to decide who gets to enter the country. Such concerns get labeled and dismissed as white nationalism, as gratuitously cruel.
And there are some on that side that I think are gratuitiously cruel, combined with a misapprehension of brown and black foreigners as being "less than." It's a flawed metric, but with its own internal logic and distorted moral compass. But the progressive empathy doesn't extend to them, who I guess are seen as in league with bigots, xenophobes, the Gestapo. As being willfully immoral.
I think that progressives, in their zeal to signal their piety, their place among the moral elite, and yes, to, with good intentions, defend those they see as oppressed, miss that arriving in a country where one would have *once* been oppressed or would currently be a statistical minority does not wave away the validity of wanting to enforce law relevant to those who enter the country. And it doesn't mean that those who recognize that validity are moral monsters.
Sorry you give them much more credit than they deserve. In their neighborhoods they do have plenty of illegals. who do you think cuts their lawns, cleans their homes, even watches their kids. But every one of them knows that they need to be out of town at the end of the day. Their concern for the marginalized is expressed in ways that maximize their caring and minimize any sacrifice.
Move the next 500 hundred Venezuelan men to Highland Park IL and you will see MAGA signs replacing the "No One is Illegal" the next day.
You cannot begin to understand modern Western liberalism unless you realize that it is rooted in white guilt and white saviorism and that every political idea and policy flows from this. When it comes to immigration (legal or illegal), this is why the Dems more or less opened the border: they have all been socially and culturally conditioned to believe it's gauche and blasphemous for any white person or country to ever say NO to a person or people from poorer brown/black lands, it is simply not done. Or, more exactly: it is simply not done by the Good White People, but only by the Bad White People, and this also goes for "diversity" in employment and college acceptance, in books and movies, and this weird sacralized tokenism that overtakes anxious modern liberals anytime something might involve a "POC". Your orientation toward the marginalized Other is the hinge of modern Western liberal morality, and this usually means that the Good Whites are those who worshipfully defer to those who come coded as Oppressed, whereas the Bad Whites commit the ultimate sin of treating them like any other person, which is a major violation of Social Justice etiquette and dogma (and also why the Bad Whites deserve to be mocked, impoverished and disenfranchised).
But that being said, I still don't think it means that they were hidin' Biden because they wanted him to warm the throne for Kamala. While of course her race and sex got her the job, no one who actually dealt with her seems to have any respect for her or believed she could be anything more than an empty figurehead. Liberals may lose their minds when they deal with POC, but no one is deranged enough to imagine Kamala as competent, maybe not even her friends and family.
You are right of course (and clever) but you would completely shatter that paradigm if you filled the community centers in Newton Mass and Highland Park IL with the the folks sleeping in the police stations and community centers in Roxbury and Garfield Park. The fact that no wealthy neighborhood has been in the least bit burdened by immigration (actually benefited as plenty of illegals work there but they need to be gone by sundown) is the lie and the fact that no one from either side will cop to that tells you everything.
I've always been generally pro-immigration. I think one of the things that made the USA a great place to live is that people came here from all over the world and brought their culture, their music, and their food. I love that I can have Mexican food for breakfast, Ethiopean food for lunch, and Chinese food for dinner -- all without leaving South Austin.
But the US can not absorb all the world's poor. We don't have the resources. It is delusional to try, and the attempt allows third-world fuedalists to export their poverty and crime to us.
If they were cold blooded and strategic they would get behind deporting violent assholes and gang members while giving sob stories about how everyone else are wonderful people and these "law abiding" "undocumented" immigrants were also victimized by "a few" violent criminals. The left could have stymied further deportation efforts. Instead because they are addicted to the performance, their sob stories are directed at the violent assholes. I've heard better plans.
I agree - imagine if a Romney was doing this, that would be the strategy. Its why Trump is the guy we did not want but may need because he gets them to react in such an unhinged way they make Trump seem reasonable.
I enjoyed your dissection of progressive narcissism. Watching Just Stop Oil dipshits in Britain; super-rich trust-fund brats telling everyone how to live without understanding the massive expenses involved in a net-zero world. The expense is nothing when Mom and Dad are paying your way, but fuck everybody else who couldn't afford this ridiculous endeavor. I really enjoy this Substack.
Brad, this is a brilliant, spot on piece. Your comments on the narcissistic nature of the progressive worldview enable me to see how their emphasis on “lived experience “ cuts two ways. They perceive their personal experience as the one and only measure of what is true; what is included in it is What Exists in the absolute sense, and what is not included in their lived experience can’t exist anywhere else.
Prior to the last 10-15 years, especially pre 2000, unions and many leftists in Canada were against mass migration and illegal immigration as they knew it weakened workers’ rights and was a slap in the face to legal immigrants.
Now, I cannot fathom why people are defending illegals who are convicted criminals. Mind boggling.
Meanwhile, knife attacks increase in Europe, bombings in Sweden are unprecedented and attacks on women increase in North America.
if they are cowards who are afraid to be identified with their beliefs. i think if they are wearing masks because of their cowardice, just like the KKK. To equate that with the reasons for ICE agents ti remain anonymous is a false equivalence due to either stupidity or a deliberate attempt to obfuscate.
The strategy is to fight tooth and nail on every deportation to make sure that no one is deported. generating any sympathy for these thugs means that there will no way to enact any legislation that deports any significant amount of people. wait 20 years and see what happens. California being prime example. also this stifles any legislative action so when they get back into control we go right back to where they left off.
I agree with everything you say ... but there's also a conflation of "deportation" with throwing human beings in brutal confinement centers like CECOT and Guantanamo.
It's possible to support deporting illegals and imprisoning criminals, but oppose throwing people in worse-than-prisons without judicial review. That's not only wrong, but a power we wouldn't want to give, say, President Pritzker ...
Understand it's not possible to give every illegal migrant a long, expensive hearing before sending them back to their home countries - and I agree open borders are a disaster, with support built on manipulating emotions and calling everything racist but the most extreme "everyone is welcome, forever, with free stuff, no matter who or how many".
But ... not giving people a trial before sending them into what's basically hell ... that's giving some legitimacy to the hatred / fear of ICE. And giving some legitimacy to what the media warned and people became insane believing ...
Some of the people thrown in CECOT came legally. Even if it may(?) be fair to say "you may have thought you were coming legally, but we never should have done the CPB One app, and you have to go home now", that's not the same planet as putting them in concentration camps. (Not meaning that in an exaggerated, media-TDS-fearmongering way, but technically the difference between a concentration camp and a prison is that people in prisons were found guilty of crimes).
No problem with actual violent criminals being locked up, but there should be some fair process that determines that.
https://anotherbetrayedliberal.substack.com/p/context-catastrophes-and-selective - It's fair to note that the people showing (or performing) empathy for migrants and immigrants had no empathy for the vaccine injured, the J6ers denied due process, or victims of migrant crime. But that doesn't make it right to throw people in hell based on tattoos, without disclosing other evidence ...
I try to imagine the mental gymnastics the libs have to go through to convince themselves that what they are doing is morally in line with the whole of society. All I can think is that they've literally lost their minds.
Let's grant that there's a sincere concern among the vocal critics of ICE for the downtrodden, a concern we surmise is accompanied by the human condition of status seeking and performative moral superiority in supporting those seen as subject to the matrix of oppressions.
That "unbounded kindness toward the marginalized" doesn't have an analog in sympathy toward those rationally concerned about social cohesion, financial resources, public safety, or just the ability to decide who gets to enter the country. Such concerns get labeled and dismissed as white nationalism, as gratuitously cruel.
And there are some on that side that I think are gratuitiously cruel, combined with a misapprehension of brown and black foreigners as being "less than." It's a flawed metric, but with its own internal logic and distorted moral compass. But the progressive empathy doesn't extend to them, who I guess are seen as in league with bigots, xenophobes, the Gestapo. As being willfully immoral.
I think that progressives, in their zeal to signal their piety, their place among the moral elite, and yes, to, with good intentions, defend those they see as oppressed, miss that arriving in a country where one would have *once* been oppressed or would currently be a statistical minority does not wave away the validity of wanting to enforce law relevant to those who enter the country. And it doesn't mean that those who recognize that validity are moral monsters.
Sorry you give them much more credit than they deserve. In their neighborhoods they do have plenty of illegals. who do you think cuts their lawns, cleans their homes, even watches their kids. But every one of them knows that they need to be out of town at the end of the day. Their concern for the marginalized is expressed in ways that maximize their caring and minimize any sacrifice.
Move the next 500 hundred Venezuelan men to Highland Park IL and you will see MAGA signs replacing the "No One is Illegal" the next day.
👏👏👏The leftists Dems are so committed to their delusional beliefs that they are incapable of understanding how counterproductive their conduct is.
You cannot begin to understand modern Western liberalism unless you realize that it is rooted in white guilt and white saviorism and that every political idea and policy flows from this. When it comes to immigration (legal or illegal), this is why the Dems more or less opened the border: they have all been socially and culturally conditioned to believe it's gauche and blasphemous for any white person or country to ever say NO to a person or people from poorer brown/black lands, it is simply not done. Or, more exactly: it is simply not done by the Good White People, but only by the Bad White People, and this also goes for "diversity" in employment and college acceptance, in books and movies, and this weird sacralized tokenism that overtakes anxious modern liberals anytime something might involve a "POC". Your orientation toward the marginalized Other is the hinge of modern Western liberal morality, and this usually means that the Good Whites are those who worshipfully defer to those who come coded as Oppressed, whereas the Bad Whites commit the ultimate sin of treating them like any other person, which is a major violation of Social Justice etiquette and dogma (and also why the Bad Whites deserve to be mocked, impoverished and disenfranchised).
But that being said, I still don't think it means that they were hidin' Biden because they wanted him to warm the throne for Kamala. While of course her race and sex got her the job, no one who actually dealt with her seems to have any respect for her or believed she could be anything more than an empty figurehead. Liberals may lose their minds when they deal with POC, but no one is deranged enough to imagine Kamala as competent, maybe not even her friends and family.
You are right of course (and clever) but you would completely shatter that paradigm if you filled the community centers in Newton Mass and Highland Park IL with the the folks sleeping in the police stations and community centers in Roxbury and Garfield Park. The fact that no wealthy neighborhood has been in the least bit burdened by immigration (actually benefited as plenty of illegals work there but they need to be gone by sundown) is the lie and the fact that no one from either side will cop to that tells you everything.
I've always been generally pro-immigration. I think one of the things that made the USA a great place to live is that people came here from all over the world and brought their culture, their music, and their food. I love that I can have Mexican food for breakfast, Ethiopean food for lunch, and Chinese food for dinner -- all without leaving South Austin.
But the US can not absorb all the world's poor. We don't have the resources. It is delusional to try, and the attempt allows third-world fuedalists to export their poverty and crime to us.
How fortuitous. I just wrote a Substack showing examples of some of ICE’s criminal arrests. Their crimes are horrific. https://open.substack.com/pub/foxyheterodoxy/p/illegal-immigrant-crimes-and-arrests?r=1qba3o&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
If they were cold blooded and strategic they would get behind deporting violent assholes and gang members while giving sob stories about how everyone else are wonderful people and these "law abiding" "undocumented" immigrants were also victimized by "a few" violent criminals. The left could have stymied further deportation efforts. Instead because they are addicted to the performance, their sob stories are directed at the violent assholes. I've heard better plans.
I agree - imagine if a Romney was doing this, that would be the strategy. Its why Trump is the guy we did not want but may need because he gets them to react in such an unhinged way they make Trump seem reasonable.
I enjoyed your dissection of progressive narcissism. Watching Just Stop Oil dipshits in Britain; super-rich trust-fund brats telling everyone how to live without understanding the massive expenses involved in a net-zero world. The expense is nothing when Mom and Dad are paying your way, but fuck everybody else who couldn't afford this ridiculous endeavor. I really enjoy this Substack.
Ditto all of that!
I'm all for allowing immigration, as long as every Democrat houshold sponsors and hosts a family of 8, for a minimum of five years.
Brad, this is a brilliant, spot on piece. Your comments on the narcissistic nature of the progressive worldview enable me to see how their emphasis on “lived experience “ cuts two ways. They perceive their personal experience as the one and only measure of what is true; what is included in it is What Exists in the absolute sense, and what is not included in their lived experience can’t exist anywhere else.
Prior to the last 10-15 years, especially pre 2000, unions and many leftists in Canada were against mass migration and illegal immigration as they knew it weakened workers’ rights and was a slap in the face to legal immigrants.
Now, I cannot fathom why people are defending illegals who are convicted criminals. Mind boggling.
Meanwhile, knife attacks increase in Europe, bombings in Sweden are unprecedented and attacks on women increase in North America.
If ICE wears masks for the same reason the KKK does, how about pro-Palestine and pro-trans protesters?
?? What is your point?
Is it okay when the pro-Palestinian protestors ask?
if they are cowards who are afraid to be identified with their beliefs. i think if they are wearing masks because of their cowardice, just like the KKK. To equate that with the reasons for ICE agents ti remain anonymous is a false equivalence due to either stupidity or a deliberate attempt to obfuscate.
The strategy is to fight tooth and nail on every deportation to make sure that no one is deported. generating any sympathy for these thugs means that there will no way to enact any legislation that deports any significant amount of people. wait 20 years and see what happens. California being prime example. also this stifles any legislative action so when they get back into control we go right back to where they left off.
People who virtue signal instead of being virtuous.
This is why rule #1 is “those who don’t do don’t get a say”
California governor asks court to block Trump administration from using troops in immigration raids
https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-protests-ice-national-guard-9dfd2d025070bb6060d908dd3cf9b1f0
This will definitely help the Democrats at midterms.
I agree with everything you say ... but there's also a conflation of "deportation" with throwing human beings in brutal confinement centers like CECOT and Guantanamo.
It's possible to support deporting illegals and imprisoning criminals, but oppose throwing people in worse-than-prisons without judicial review. That's not only wrong, but a power we wouldn't want to give, say, President Pritzker ...
Understand it's not possible to give every illegal migrant a long, expensive hearing before sending them back to their home countries - and I agree open borders are a disaster, with support built on manipulating emotions and calling everything racist but the most extreme "everyone is welcome, forever, with free stuff, no matter who or how many".
But ... not giving people a trial before sending them into what's basically hell ... that's giving some legitimacy to the hatred / fear of ICE. And giving some legitimacy to what the media warned and people became insane believing ...
Some of the people thrown in CECOT came legally. Even if it may(?) be fair to say "you may have thought you were coming legally, but we never should have done the CPB One app, and you have to go home now", that's not the same planet as putting them in concentration camps. (Not meaning that in an exaggerated, media-TDS-fearmongering way, but technically the difference between a concentration camp and a prison is that people in prisons were found guilty of crimes).
No problem with actual violent criminals being locked up, but there should be some fair process that determines that.
https://anotherbetrayedliberal.substack.com/p/context-catastrophes-and-selective - It's fair to note that the people showing (or performing) empathy for migrants and immigrants had no empathy for the vaccine injured, the J6ers denied due process, or victims of migrant crime. But that doesn't make it right to throw people in hell based on tattoos, without disclosing other evidence ...