This is how it's done

Prowers County commissioner Wendy L. Buxton-Andrad

All is not lost in America. Colorado officials including feminine-looking women and men with, presumably, measurable T levels, show us how to fight for our Constitutional rights:

Ten Colorado counties have declared “Second Amendment Sanctuary” status against a gun confiscation law being pushed by state-level Democrats.

On March 8, 2019, Breitbart News reported that eight counties had made sanctuary declarations. The counties are Custer, Freemont, Kiowa, Moffat, Montezuma, Otero, Rio Blanco, and Weld Counties. The Lamar Ledger reports that Prowers County commissioners declared their county a “Second Amendment Sanctuary” on Monday.

Prowers County commissioner Wendy L. Buxton-Andrade said, “We are elected officials when we raise our hand to take office. We are sworn to protect the United States Constitution. In passing this resolution, we are protecting that right and protecting our constituents from those trying to take away that constitutional right, the Second Amendment.” [...]

The Ledger notes that counties are making these Second Amendment declarations as state-level Democrats push “a bill, known as the ‘red flag’ bill, which would allow a judge to order the confiscation of firearms from someone found to be a danger to themselves or others.”

These "red flag" laws, which 13 states have adopted since the Parkland massacre, are totally unconstitutional:

Colorado Republicans defeated a similar bill last year, insisting it infringed on citizens' Second Amendment rights. But Democrats won both statehouse chambers in November, and Democratic Gov. Jared Polis called for a "red flag" law while campaigning last year.

Let's see what the party of treason is pushing:

This year's bill was being heard Thursday in the House Judiciary Committee. It would allow family or law enforcement to seek a court order to have guns seized if they believe the owner is a threat. If approved, a subsequent court hearing would be held to determine whether to extend the seizure, up to 364 days.

The bill also would leave it up to the person whose guns were seized to prove at any point that he or she no longer poses a risk.

The burden of proof is on citizens to show the state that they are compliant, psychologically normal sheeple who therefore deserve to have their basic rights upheld.

Fight!

The language gap: AOC edition

I don't like to write about AOC. It's an unpleasant subject in more ways than one, and I don't like to give her any more attention than she already gets from a crazed media (especially the conservative media, which is making the same mistake with regard to AOC that the mainstream media made with Trump).

That said, AOC fits so perfectly into a phenomenon I wrote about last September that I couldn't resist. From that post:

One worrying sign of the sharpening polarization in America is the increasing inability of the Blue Church to communicate with the rest of the country. Not only do the bizarre ideological fixations of the Left appear to the majority of Americans to be increasingly unhinged and divorced from reality, but the very vocabulary of the Left -- the actual words Leftist use -- bear an ever-more-tenuous connection to normal English.

I was recently thinking about AOC's "voice"... the distinctive way that she communicates on Twitter. Love it or hate it (personally, I find it about as appealing as a million fingernails scraping a chalkboard in unison), there is no denying its power and appeal to a large swath of the country.

AOC's "voice" is a millennial voice, narcissistic and self-satisfied, aggressively liberal, but reasonable-sounding enough to command wide assent. Something else caught my attention too. AOC may be the first mainstream, national politician to communicate in the strange vernacular of Social Justice - an idiom that includes terms and phrases such as these:

• "calling in"
• "centering their concerns"
• "climate delayers"
• "frontline/impacted communities"
• "intersectionally"
• "Latinx"
• "LGBTQ+ inclusion"
• "tokenism"

It goes without saying that, although her meaning is usually clear in context, many of the terms that she uses are totally incomprehensible to normal Americans. "Latinx"? WTF?

I close with this characteristic AOC tweet:

GOP defensively say, “we’re not scared of dancing women!” yet proceed to use footage of me dancing “with the color drained to make it look more ominous.” ?? Spoiler: The GOP *is* scared of dancing women, because they fear the liberation of all identities taught to feel shame.

The USA is so over.

Drumpf betrays base on immigration?

I never expected to have to say this, but if you're a #MAGA person and you continue to make excuses for this sort of behavior, you're just an idiot:

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, President Trump is abandoning his prior “America First” legal immigration reforms to support increases of legal immigration levels in order to expand profits for businesses and corporations.

For the fourth time in about a month, Trump suggested increasing legal immigration levels. With Apple CEO Tim Cook sitting next to him at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said he not only wanted more legal immigration but that companies needed an expansion of new arrivals to grow their business.

“We’re going to have a lot of people coming into the country. We want a lot of people coming in. And we need it,” Trump said:

MAGA!

Immigration catastrophe

Trump's inexorable transition into Drumpf

Last post, I told you to spit out that black bill: the Trump administration, through a variety of regulatory changes at US Citizenship and Immigration Services, is building an "invisible wall" of policies and mechanisms that make it harder to immigrate. This is, of course, good news for those of us who seek to curb the million-strong horde of foreign nationals who are permitted to settle in the US every year.

Well, that was the good news. There's bad news too... and it's really bad.

The flood of depressing immigration-related commentary this week is pretty overwhelming, so I will just post a small sample:

"New, awful data shows that the border invasion is worse than ever"

If Trump had not signed the disastrous budget bill several weeks ago and we were still operating on a short-term CR with immigration remaining the top issue, today’s news could have strengthened Trump’s leverage. According to CBP’s preliminary figures obtained by the Washington Post, 76,325 illegal aliens were apprehended at the border in February, more than any other month in over a decade since the decline of migration from Mexico. A record 40,325 family units arrived, blowing out the previous records by almost 10,000. Sadly, Trump already signed away his leverage to force a national dialogue over this issue.

As a nation, we are left debating presidential power from an obscure statute that enables the president to obtain a mere $2.5 billion for partial fencing to deal with a policy-driven invasion. The joke is that even if Trump had full unity behind this approach, it would do little to stop this invasion, which is strategically directed toward soft parts of our border. Unless we force a national discussion over the courts and the illegal immigration magnets that are bringing immigrants in, this entire debate is a non-sequitur. Unfortunately, without a budget deadline for another seven months, no matter how bad things get at our border, there is no mechanism through which to pressure Democrats into submission. [...]

It’s gotten so bad that illegal aliens have successfully taken us past our breaking point, creating a self-fulfilling cycle of catch-and-release. We are so overrun with migrants and detention facilities are so full that now, even those not eligible for catch-and-release are being released. We will never hear from them again, but will have to pay for their public charge and crimes committed.

Money chart:

Judge Sabraw, in case you were wondering, is the US District Judge (a Dubya appointee and son of a Japanese immigrant) who ordered the reunification of children separated from their parents or "parents" at the Mexican border, as a direct result of which, apprehensions of "family units" at the border exploded.

Notice a trend? #MAGA drives illegal immigration down. Judges and the absence of #MAGA drive it back up.

The God-Emperor Trump could put a stop to this treasonous judicial usurpation of power by simply ignoring these totally unconstitutional and ridiculous rulings. But he'd rather whine and bluster, apparently:

"Catch and Release, Birthright Citizenship, Sanctuary Cities Continue Unaltered Despite Trump Opposition"

During his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Trump denounced the Catch and Release program where illegal aliens and border crossers are routinely released into the interior of the U.S. after being apprehended by Border Patrol. [...]

The Catch and Release program, though, was expanded by Trump last month when he signed a spending bill approved by Republicans and Democrats in Congress and strongly supported by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, insiders have told Breitbart News.

The bipartisan spending package Trump signed greatly expands the Catch and Release of border crossers and illegal aliens, codifying into law that border crossers be bused into the interior of the U.S. where they are released with the promise that they are monitored.

DRUMPF denounces his own policies, rages impotently at problems that he refuses to solve! His appointee, DHS head Kirstjen Nielsen, all but rolls out the welcome mat for illegal aliens:

"Beltway Class Praises DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen While She Oversees Illegal Immigration Surge"

The Washington, D.C. political establishment and beltway class are praising their close ally, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, as she oversees a surge in illegal immigration and implements an expansion of the Catch and Release program.

In a glowing piece by Politico, Nielsen received repeated praise for “standing strong” and circumventing President Trump’s criticism of her role as DHS secretary, where she has overseen a continued surge in illegal immigration while focusing her agency’s attention on cybersecurity issues and terrorism prevention. [...]

By all measures of border crossing data and Catch and Release levels, Nielsen’s record at DHS has been dismal. For example, when January 2018 illegal border crossings are compared to January 2019 numbers, the level of illegal immigration year-to-year has nearly doubled.

Most recently, for February, illegal immigration at the southern border hit the highest level for the month in 12 years, surpassing every month of February under former President Obama. Now, experts predict there to be up to half a million illegal aliens who successfully cross into the country this year, alone.

Likewise, Nielsen has consistently privately advocated for spending bills that have provided little-to-no funds for Trump’s proposed U.S.-Mexico border wall to stop illegal immigration.

Daniel Horowitz of the Conservative Review is nearly apoplectic:



But he has a good idea:

https://twitter.com/RMConservative/status/1103003714581917It's time to use Article II, 212f, and 215A to categorically shut down all cross border migration

Great! Any takers? Anyone?

Drumpf?...

The invisible wall

This is how it's done. Walls are great, yes – and the US needs a wall. Equally important, America needs to make it harder to immigrate across the board. A Politico report from last September details how Lee Francis Cissna, head of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, is tightening up the system:

• Creation of a “denaturalization task force” to strip away fraudulently obtained citizenship
• Allowing visa officers to deny applications without first requesting more info
• Refugee admissions slashed
• Proposed legislation to prevent immigrants from obtaining green cards if they or their family members have used a public benefit
• Suspension of a fast-track processing program for H-1B visas
• Planned rollback of work authorization for spouses of H-1B visa holders

Horrors!

The man overseeing these reforms isn’t Stephen Miller, the White House aide publicly known as the architect of President Donald Trump’s most restrictionist immigration policies. It’s Lee Francis Cissna, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, an agency that not only facilitates legal immigration, but historically celebrates it. Miller is rightly seen as the mastermind of Trump’s far-reaching immigration crackdown, but Cissna is arguably just as important because he makes it happen.

Much less visible than Miller or Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, Cissna has quietly carried out Trump’s policies with a workmanlike dedication. From his perch atop USCIS, he’s issued a steady stream of policy changes and regulations that have transformed his agency into more of an enforcement body and less of a service provider. These changes have generated blowback from immigrant advocates, businesses and even some of his own employees. Leon Rodriguez, who served as USCIS director under President Barack Obama, said the agency is sending a message “that this is a less welcoming environment than it may have been before.” […]

While the travel ban and family separations grabbed headlines, Cissna has waged a quieter war, tightening and reworking regulations and guidance that make it harder to come to the U.S. as an immigrant or temporary worker.

Cissna, one gets the impression, sees himself as a technocratic civil servant who is faithfully upholding the law and the administration's policies, rather than some kind of anti-immigration zealot. It's funny how the people interviewed by Politico seem unable to square Cissna's immigrant parentage with his tough bureaucratic actions, as if they cannot imagine a government official “of color” choosing loyalty to America over his own perceived ethnic self-interest. There's also a weird line about how being Catholic is supposedly incompatible with “splitting up families at the border,” i.e. separating children from illegal alien adults who may or may not be their parents

Cissna gave a good response to a popular, but retarded, immigration canard:

Cissna sees no conflict in shaping policies that could have kept his own family out of the United States if they had been implemented several decades ago. “There’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to advocate for a policy that I think is better for the country, even if it might affect or have affected my own family personally,” he told me.

And a recent update on the Trump administration's tightening of the H-1B visa program:

Immigrants with specialized skills are being denied work visas or seeing applications get caught up in lengthy bureaucratic tangles under federal changes that some consider a contradiction to President Donald Trump’s promise of a continued pathway to the U.S. for the most talented foreigners.

Getting what’s known as an H-1B visa has never been a sure thing — the number issued annually is capped at 85,000 and applicants need to enter a lottery to even be considered. But some immigration attorneys, as well as those who hire such workers, say they’ve seen unprecedented disruptions in the approval process since Trump took office in 2017.

Spit out that black pill! Drumpf is far from perfect, but whereas his opponents (Republican and Democrat alike) are feckless traitors who piss on everything you care about, the God-Emperor is at least beginning to move things in the right direction. Let's see how he does over the next year, before the 2020 Republican presidential primaries.

Link roundup

Leading today's roundup of news and views, the eminent historian Victor Davis Hanson offers a devastating synopsis of the attempted Deep State coup against the POTUS, which he correctly characterizes as likely "the greatest scandal in American political history."

In the meantime, Trump continues to allow key positions in his administration to be occupied by people who openly loathe him and everything he claims to stand for. Is it possible, as the blogger Vox Day suggests, that Trump's increasing submission to the globalists and neocons is connected to the winding down of the fake Russia collusion investigation? It does seem odd that the God-Emperor's metamorphosis into a swaggering version of Jeb! Bush is accelerating even as the Deep State pressure on him appears to be lessening. But what do I know.

Autopsy of a Dead Coup

The newly promoted McCabe apparently felt that it was his moment to become famous for taking out a now President Trump. Thus, he assembled a FBI and DOJ cadre to open a counterintelligence investigation of the sitting president on no other grounds but the fumes of an evaporating Clinton opposition dossier and perceived anger among the FBI that their director had just been fired. In addition, apparently now posing as Andrew McCabe, MD, he informally head counted how many of Trump’s own cabinet members could be convinced by McCabe’s own apparent medical expertise to help remove the president on grounds of physical and mental incapacity under the 25th Amendment. This was an attempted, albeit pathetic, coup against an elected president and the first really in the history of the United States.

Why Trump is Losing

The success of Trump’s presidency is similarly inseparable from the construction of a wall. In addition to its practical effects, the wall has important symbolic value as a rejection of globalism and an assertion of American sovereignty. Without control of the border and immigration reform broadly, his presidency will be a failure on its own terms. While some held their nose in voting for Trump and others, like me, had a real affection for him and his style, both recognize that Trump’s chief appeal is that he is a fighter. He fought when most Republicans backed down whether against the media, North Korea, or the Deep State. During the campaign, he consistently affirmed the right of ordinary Americans to have a government responsive to them.

It now appears Trump painted himself into a corner and got played by the Machiavellian Nancy Pelosi. He tried a shutdown without much of a plan in December, but eventually relented and allowed a temporary funding measure. During the interregnum, he telegraphed his intention to use emergency powers—deviating from his own wisdom that one needs to keep such plans quiet—and, in the process, the Democrats littered the spending bill with various provisions that will defang what might have been a plausible plan to use emergency powers to fund the wall.

Why Autocrats Are Replacing Democrats

Yet Congress had the latent power, in Article III, Section 2, to restrict the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court and every other federal court. But the big stick the founders left for Congress to corral a runaway Supreme Court was never picked up, never used.

High among the reasons Trump was elected was that, for all his flaws and failings, he was seen as a doer, a man who “gets things done.”

The Naysayers Are Wrong. Bernie Sanders Is A Formidable 2020 Contender

In short, a multitude of factors culminate in the following inescapable conclusion: Bernie Sanders is the strongest 2020 Democratic candidate. Whether you’d call him the “front-runner” is immaterial. That’s kind of trite pundit terminology anyway. The bottom line is that the power and influence he garnered as a result of the previous run, during which he won 46 percent of elected delegates, is sufficient to assume that he is extremely formidable.

Good Riddance to Amazon

Conservatives are right to join with progressive populists in opposing the Amazon deal. And they shouldn’t be either cowed by the hysterics from the business community, or seduced by the chance to score a few political shots against Ocasio-Cortez, into going wobbly now. The rightist opposition to the deal, even if it meant allying with the likes of AOC, was a sign, like the Tucker Carlson monologue and the Trump election, of the growing and important rebellion of rank-and-file Republicans and conservatives against the wealthy “fiscally conservative, socially liberal” corporate and party establishment. This is no time to revert.

(The excellent Selena Zito has a different perspective on the Amazon deal that I think misses the point.)

The View From Olympus: Following the Classic Pattern

Great powers tend to follow a similar pattern of rise, a short time of dominance, overextension, and fall.  It is ever more clear that this country is following the classic pattern.  Our period of dominance ran roughly from 1945 to 1965; its end was marked by our defeat in Vietnam.  We are now in the latter stages of the phase of overextension.  Fall, I suspect, lies around the next corner.

Trump administration launches global effort to end criminalization of homosexuality

The Trump administration is launching a global campaign to end the criminalization of homosexuality in dozens of nations where it's still illegal to be gay, U.S. officials tell NBC News, a bid aimed in part at denouncing Iran over its human rights record.

U.S. Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest-profile openly gay person in the Trump administration, is leading the effort, which kicks off Tuesday evening in Berlin. The U.S. embassy is flying in LGBT activists from across Europe for a strategy dinner to plan to push for decriminalization in places that still outlaw homosexuality — mostly concentrated in the Middle East, Africa and the Caribbean.

Triumph

It's over.

They threw everything they had at him. They mobilized the entire vast apparatus of the evil establishment for their shameful, lying campaign to take down a good man, a mild-mannered Catholic of impeccable reputation, and they failed. The effort backfired on the Democrats, hideously and spectacularly.

The disgusting and cynical attack on Kavanaugh will not be forgotten. If you come at the king, you best not miss. The Democrats missed, and they will pay the price in the midterms. And they will continue to pay the price in the form of awakened Republican anger, and a newly radicalized Kavanaugh who will, we can hope, exact his revenge from the bench of the highest court in the land.

 

Conservatives are beginning to discover what it means to win. It is an unfamiliar feeling for people on the political Right. We are so used to noble defeat and Pyrrhic victories, to endless, shameless betrayal by the Republican establishment. Fine rhetoric about muh Constitution and muh principles, and perhaps the occasional tax cut and pointless foreign war, while the greatest nation in the history of the world morphs into a continent-sized freak show. "Winning" meant George W Bush in the Oval Office. Now, for the first time in 30 years, under the magnificent God-Emperor, we are starting to win by ACTUALLY FUCKING WINNING.

Make no mistake, this is a landmark victory. We now have possibly the most conservative Supreme Court since 1934; this is real power. The Left is in disarray, but it is also dangerous, like a wounded animal that is still far from dead. Having failed to defeat Kavanaugh through the normal political process, and having failed to ruin his life through their despicable lies and machinations, the Left will now extend and widen the battle to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court itself. They are already laying the groundwork for this next phase of the conflict. "Kavanaugh’s confirmation will have poisoned the foundation of the judiciary’s authority." If they cannot keep the court, they will burn it down.

There is literally no institution, no custom, no tradition, no bedrock American value the Left will not eagerly demolish in its insane, totalizing quest for utopia. Do I exaggerate? Forget limited government, forget guns and border enforcement...  now they're attacking the freakin' presumption of innocence!!!

Mike Cernovich made the astute point that the establishment media has lost any remaining credibility through this fiasco. Even the formerly admired Ronan Farrow has completely jumped the shark, penning not one, but two ludicrous hit pieces against Kavanaugh in The New Yorker. Why would anyone even bother to refute a hit piece anymore? The media is totally, utterly fake and everyone knows it. If you're ever accused of something by the media, all you have to do is say "fake news" and you've won the argument.

But the damage runs deeper than that. As @Instapundit noted, "Trump's greatest gift is getting various institutions to make clear in obvious ways that they're as corrupt as he says they are." This was in reference to the story that hundreds -- ultimately more than 2,400 -- law professors had signed a letter arguing that Kavanaugh should not be confirmed based on his judicial temperament. As if the righteous fury of a good man falsely accused, when defending himself before the Senate and the nation in the capacity of a witness, has any bearing whatsoever on his temperament as a judge! And then there is the contemptible bias displayed by the ACLU and the American Bar Association.

The Democratic party. The media. The legal profession. All severely damaged, if not comprehensively discredited, in a matter of weeks.

The Right has won a huge victory, but there are many more battles to come. The Left will grow crazier, more desperate and more violent as their world continues to fall apart. Our political system will devolve into chaos and our institutions will continue to bleed legitimacy. There is little doubt that the United States is on a greased slope to collapse, but we need to keep winning or what replaces the US will be worse than we can imagine.