Last night (Tuesday April 7, 2021), Mark Steyn hosted Fox News Primetime. Fox reports:

“Under the laughably misnamed Department of Homeland Security there’s now an express check-in — Just get a human trafficker to throw you into the country,” [Mark Steyn] said, pointing to video of Mexican traffickers dropping toddlers off of a 14-foot section of border wall constructed under President Donald Trump.

“It’s time for your toddler to start crawling — through the desert,” he said.

Steyn said that for some reason, people on the left see a lax immigration system like the one being instituted as “compassionate”.

“[They] think the government being industrial-scale enablers of some of the most evil people on the planet is progressive and compassionate. It’s not,” he said.

“There is nothing kind about incentivizing human trafficking, which, by the way, is merely a synonym for slavery and the same people who want to tear down the statue if the guy’s family had a plantation 300 years ago are all cool with the global trade in human beings of the 21st century.”

“So, Joe Biden or whoever has got his hand waggling that moth-eaten sock-puppet is consciously enriching these cartels and ensuring that they can expand their operations including more fentanyl to kill Americans and some would-be jihadists now and then.”

Steyn said the U.S. is witnessing what is becoming a “lopsided business partnership between America and coyotes at a time of global pandemic — when almost every national border on the planet, including the northern U.S. Border is closed down”.

Conrad Black, writing at American Greatness, sees much that is wrong and bad with the USA but also much that is right and good.

Not every aspect of the onslaught of self-hate that has broken over America, warped its media, and turned most of the academy—and even apparently, most of its elementary and secondary schools—into centers of reorientation designed to convince Americans their national past is loathsome hypocrisy, is bad.

There were wrongs in America’s past, he says, slavery being the worst of them.

And, he goes on to say, there are wrongs in America’s present that need to be righted – in particular, the justice system:

One of the most nauseatingly persistent American delusions is that the American justice system is one of the best in the world. … It is an appalling, disgraceful, terribly unjust 360-degree cartel for the avaricious legal profession, and on the criminal side, it has been so undermined by the corruption of the plea bargain system that it is essentially the right of prosecutors to suborn false inculpatory testimony with no danger of sanctions for their misconduct.

The result is that the United States has six to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as other comparable large prosperous democracies: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Its conviction rates are much higher than almost all of these countries and so are its crime rates. Millions of innocent people are convicted and millions of innocent people are over-sentenced and millions are ground to powder in the conveyor belt to the bloated and corrupt American prison system. Everyone who is acquainted with the facts is aware of this.

The Bill of Rights guarantees of due process, a grand jury as assurance against capricious prosecution, an impartial jury, no seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel of choice, prompt justice, and reasonable bail have been practically expunged.

That being said, he proceeds to condemn exaggerated criticism and unjustified hatred of America:

But with all that said, the flag-waving, anthem-singing, traditional pride in America was and remains substantially justified. All nations have somewhat delusional self-images and though the American star system elevates many who are not stars, the current eruption of Americophobia is vastly excessive, utterly despicable, cannot remotely be sustained, and is propagated, not just by the faddishly and aggressively ignorant, but also by disturbed and often wicked people.

We agree with him that “Americophobia” is excessive, despicable, ignorant, and propagated by wicked people, but we wonder why he believes that it “cannot remotely be sustained”.

He does not explain how it will fail or be made to fail.

He describes how America remains the mightiest power in the world:

The dictatorships of Latin America, the House of Saud, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Syngman Rhee’s South Korea and many other dubious claimants to the title of champions of freedom … became democracies and the world must never forget nor fail to be grateful for the fact that the United States is chiefly responsible for the spread of democracy and the free market. 

Never forget? What we hear, thanks to the academies and the anti-American media, is that those who remember it see it as a cause, not for gratitude and praise, but for blame and accusation.

Unjustly, of course. And sour hatred and envy of America by outsiders will not reduce America’s might  – or its virtues:

No nation in history has made the effort the United States has to eliminate racial discrimination and to assist minorities bootstrapping themselves up to parity. Whatever liberties may have been taken in national rhetorical puffery, there has never been anything remotely like America’s rise from a few million colonists in two long lifetimes after the Revolutionary War to, as Churchill said in his eulogy of President Roosevelt to a position of “might and glory . . . never attained by any nation in history.” 

But hatred of America by Americans is truly destructive:

The right of educators to teach falsely sourced self-hatred and of the media’s righteous replacement of reporting with subversive and defamatory advocacy is now proclaimed as a long-repressed virtue. It does not fall far short of treason and Joe Biden will pay for his endorsement of the false charge against his country of “systemic racism”. 

Well, it is consoling to be assured that Joe Biden will pay for his calumny. But when? And how?

The United States now has an official regime of lies, supported by an almost worthlessly dishonest media, and scores of millions of Americans have been brainwashed into the false view that they live in an evil country.

This lie will not succeed because everyone in America can see that it is not true.

It will not succeed simply because it is not true? The truth will always prevail in the long run? And the truth being that America is good (or at least far more good than bad) is enough to restore it to freedom? To repair its justice system? To punish Joe Biden?

Conrad Black believes it:

Most Americans are reasonable and fair-minded people most of the time, and their numbers, their patience, and the righteousness of their not-uncritical faith in and love for their country will ultimately prevail. There was no excuse for the secretary of state to turn a meeting with the Chinese on American soil into a confessional for a cringe-worthy recitation of America’s faults. Despite everything, America remains a proud country with much to be proud of, and no person nor any nationality can stand unlimited, unjustified, self-loathing. It will end sooner than we dare think, and it will take down its ghastly and contemptible preceptors with it, including the dismal Pharisees of this administration.

Great! But how will it happen? When?

Tell us please, Conrad Black!

To answer letters from readers asking questions about race and racism, we engaged a woke Agony Parent’s Sibling of mixed genders.

Zir pen-name is DEI (derived from the Universal Motto of Virtue, “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion”).

Here are some of zir replies:

Dear Retired Firefighter,

So you believe you are not a racist?

You think that race is one of “the least important or interesting things” about people, and you “know” that the differences between individuals of every race are “far more numerous and significant” than the differences between races.

What you fail to understand is that those very notions make you a racist.

If you want to stop being a racist – and you really should – you must get it firmly into your head that race IS the most important thing about us all.

But first you must sincerely want to be cured of your wrong-think. If you do not, then you want to be a racist. In which case my message to you is – that’s what you ARE.

So you do not deserve to live.

Parent’s Sibling DEI

*

Dear Black Supremacist,

Of course the more melanin you have in your cells the more physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, socially, politically, and mystically superior you are. I can confirm that without even having to appeal to the Washington Post’s fact-checker.

If anybody says you’re wrong, they do not deserve to live.

Hail, hero!

Parent’s Sibling DEI

*

Dear History Corrector,

No, Africans never sold fellow Africans to white slavers.

No, there have never been white slaves of black or brown slave owners. There have never been any black or brown slave owners.

No, it was not a minority of southern white Americans who owned slaves. All white Americans owned slaves.

No, aid does not flow from white countries to black and brown countries. It only goes the other way.

If any white person or Uncle Tom argues with you about any of these facts, they do not deserve to live.

Parent’s Sibling DEI

*

Dear Peaceful iPhoner,

Yes, it is shocking the way whites have culturally appropriated whatever they have culturally appropriated.

Yes, owning a gun is your unalienable right.

Enjoy your riot in Portland next Saturday night.

Parent’s Sibling DEI

*

Dear White Penitent,

Apologies, though necessary, are not sufficient.

Whiteness is an unforgivable sin against humanity, democracy, Joe Biden and Harvard University.

Continue to live on your knees.

Parent’s Sibling DEI

The jihad goes on. (Read more about its recent atrocities here.)

More evidence emerges of bribery as part of the Democrats’ conspiracy to cheat in the November 2020 election.

J. Christian Adams writes at PJ Media:

A new report documents that private foundations spent more than $36 million to pay local election offices in Texas to alter policies and practices in the 2020 election. The money was overwhelmingly spent in solid Democratic strongholds and designed to maximize turnout in these Biden-leaning jurisdictions. The money was concentrated in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and the Rio Grande Valley, according to a new report.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, with which I am associated, reviewed the grant letters and other government documents executed between Texas county election officials and the Center for Technology for Civic Life, a nonprofit that poured over $350 million nationwide into government election offices in order to have those offices adopt policies the nonprofit supported.

The nonprofit was funded by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg after a dinner meeting where controversial Biden Justice Department nominee Vanita Gupta advocated for the strategy in 2019.

Other organizations donated another $100 million nationwide to local election offices in addition to the Zuckerberg-related nonprofit, raising the total to influence government election policy to almost half a billion dollars. …

Documents from Texas county election officials obtained for the Public Interest Legal Foundation report show that the private dollars were focused on adopting procedures not always consistent with Texas law and practices, such as drive-through voting and voting by mail for any reason, contrary to Texas law.

In other words, the private dollars were used in a way to pressure officials to alter existing Texas election procedures adopted by the Texas legislature.

Texas Rep. Phil King has introduced HB 2283 to solve the problem and prohibit private dollars from flowing into government election offices. The bill has sat in committee since March 15.

The private dollars appear to have made a difference. Tarrant County received $1.6 million in Zuckerberg cash. Biden’s performance improved 43% in raw votes over Hillary Clinton’s compared to Trump’s increase of 18% in raw votes. The same dynamic played out in urban areas across Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

Democratic urban cores opened the floodgates to Biden votes – all through the creation of structural bias.

Austin area counties also received Zuckerberg dollars, and raw Democrat vote totals there jumped 70 and 80 percent over 2016 in counties like Hays and Williamson, according to the PILF report.

So how does this happen? The Zuckerberg dollars turned urban offices into massive turnout machines.

What these grants did was build structural bias into the 2020 election where structural bias matters most – in densely populated urban cores. It converted election offices in key jurisdictions with deep reservoirs of Biden votes into Formula One turnout machines.

The hundreds of millions of dollars built systems, hired employees from activist groups, bought equipment and radio advertisements. It did everything that street activists could ever dream up to turn out Biden votes if only they had unlimited funding. It is true that red counties in Texas also received grants, but those were fig leaf grants designed to insulate the Center For Technology and Civic life from accusations of bias.

More importantly, those grants were smaller, sometimes only $5,000, and barely enough to make any dent in behaviors, unlike the large blue-county grants in Texas. If the Texas election were confined only to those counties that received Zuckerberg dollars, the report notes, Biden would have won Texas by 270,000 votes. That’s the point. The private dollars created efficiencies and capacities.

When a given county is majority blue to begin with, such as Harris or Travis, and you create efficiencies and capacities in the election process in those counties, you are manufacturing votes for Democrats that did not exist before the efficiencies and capacities were put in place with Zuckerberg dollars.

Some might wonder why Zuckerberg money was wasted on Texas, a state Trump was sure to win.

Two answers. First, Texas was not always a certain Trump win. The October spin in the Democrat-friendly media was that Texas was in play. Second, and more importantly, the play in Texas wasn’t about 2020. It was about flipping Texas blue in the future. And if and when that happens, it will be done by building out efficiencies and capacities in the counties in 2020 that were part of the trial run.

Now you understand why banning private money that builds in bias in Texas is so important.

Not only is China already at war with us, it is scoring victories.

And while we have a senile president, a foolish and incompetent vice president, a gang of America-haters controlling the legislative branch of our government and a bunch of cowards dominating the judicial branch, China can win the war.

Conrad Black writes at American Greatness:

The coronavirus pandemic has delivered Beijing the most decisive strategic victory in great power affairs since the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The World Health Organization report on the origins of the pandemic is clearly a Chinese whitewash—as even vehemently anti-Trump CBS News acknowledged over the weekend—and the eager Inauguration Day return of the Biden Administration to the WHO now appears particularly destructive of any claim the administration might make to cloak itself in moral resolution on the issue. On the basis of what has been revealed, it appears that though the Chinese may not have deliberately invented and propagated the virus, they dissembled and lied about it as well as facilitated its transmission out of China to the world while aggressively suppressing it within its own borders. This verged on, if it did not in fact constitute, an act of germ warfare.

China is not predestined to win this contest, unless the United States continues to misplay its hand.

If the United States cannot lure Russia back from its cooperation with China, eventually surplus Chinese manpower will be successfully exploiting the vast unpopulated treasure house of Siberia, and the United States will find itself for the first time in its history in a severe competition with a deadly rival of approximately equivalent geopolitical strength to itself.

What will be at stake is not just a matter of the prestige that accrues to the world’s most powerful and successful country; it is the question which vastly transcends mere interstate rivalry of whether the world’s foremost nation recognizes the value of human life and the entitlement of all people to certain rights, or is governed by a totalitarian government’s imposition of collective values by surveillance and repression that are not subject to any canvass of the approval of the governed. 

Do a majority of Americans now want totalitarian government?

If the Democrats’ claim that they won the 2020 election honestly, by the clearly demonstrated will of the electorate, is true, then the answer to that question is an ominous yes.

Joy Pullmann, writing at The Federalist, rightly accuses the FBI of spending hundreds of millions of dollars and years going after Democrats’ political enemies, while letting known Islamic and other domestic terrorist threats slip through their fingers.

Instead they focus on helping a Democrat coup – called Crossfire Hurricane – against President Trump; on tracking down, and holding without trial, right-wing “extremists” who were mere onlookers at the unarmed raid on the Capitol; and persecuting NRA members.

It is past time to shut down the FBI and start over from scratch. We cannot continue to have an FBI more interested in pulling off Crossfire Hurricane than stopping mass shooters.

Read it all here.

Yet more evidence of fraud in the 2020 election – again contributing to a Biden “win” – turns up in Montana: twenty-eight signatures on twenty-eight ballots, different names, all the same handwriting.

John R Lott Jr. writes at The Daily Signal:

During the pandemic summer of 2020, the governor of Montana, Democrat Steve Bullock, issued a directive permitting counties to conduct the general election fully by mail.

Also a court struck down Montana’s law aimed at preventing ballot harvesting.

Missoula, Montana’s second-most populous county and one of its most heavily Democratic, opted in to the universal vote-by-mail regime.

In response, in October 2020, several county residents with experience targeting election integrity issues formed a group to ensure the legitimacy of the 2020 vote.

In November, the group approached state Rep. Brad Tschida, a Republican, to formally take up the issue. Tschida hired a lawyer involved in the group, Quentin Rhoades, to represent him in corresponding with Missoula County Elections Administrator Bradley Seaman, a Democratic appointee and a longtime supporter of progressive causes.

Seaman’s office complied with Tschida’s request for access to all of the county’s ballot envelopes, and on Jan. 4 a team of volunteers, overseen by Rhoades, conducted an audit with the assistance of the Missoula County Elections Office.

The audit consisted of both a count and review of all ballot envelopes and comparing that to the number of officially recorded votes during the Nov. 3, 2020, general election. 4,592 out of the 72,491 mail-in ballots lacked envelopes—6.33% of all votes. Without an officially printed envelope with registration information, a voter’s signature, and a postmark indicating whether it was cast on time, election officials cannot verify that a ballot is legitimate. It is against the law to count such votes.

Dozens of ballot envelopes bore strikingly similar, distinctive handwriting styles in the signatures, suggesting that one or several persons may have filled out and submitted multiple ballots, an act of fraud. 28 envelopes reviewed from the same address, a nursing home, all 28 signatures looked “exactly the same” stylistically.

An auditor reported that among the envelopes she reviewed, two [unusual and easily recognized] signatures appeared dozens of times.

When Rhoades asked Seaman about more ballots recorded than the envelope count, Seaman appeared extremely nervous and had no explanation.

The magnitude of defective—and potentially fraudulently cast—ballots identified during the Missoula County ballot audit is particularly troubling given the small margins by which local 2020 elections were decided. The 2020 local House District 94 race was determined by 435 votes; that of local House District 96, a mere 190.

If Missoula County generated problem ballots on the level of those cast during 2020, it may well have swung these statewide elections.

The Democrat-controlled U.S. House has passed HR 1, a bill that would result in universal mail-in voting across America. 

China is preparing for war, so America needs to do the same.

Dan Gelernter warns at American Greatness:

We should prepare for war. Churchill called preparation for war “the sole guarantee of peace”. Instead, Biden touts maternity flight suits. We indulge in ludicrous fantasies of a “fair” military based on the premise that real wars don’t happen anymore. What message does that send enemies who plan to use their armies for actual fighting?

We are headed to war again. We are pointed at war right now. America’s weakness will bring us there. The hour is already late—we have allowed the Chinese navy to grow larger than our own.

But there is still time. We can strengthen ourselves. We can confront Russian and Chinese encroachments on international rights and territories now. Or we can immolate and destroy another generation, as a sacrifice to our own self-serving short-sightedness.

Or we can put President Trump back in the White House.

Christopher Roach warns even more strongly – also at American Greatness:

China is not our friend. Since the Clinton Administration, and through the Bush and Obama years, American policy proceeded as if trade and cultural ties would work automatically to liberalize the Chinese. Instead, these ties have enriched and strengthened China, allowing it to build first-class infrastructure, a robust economy, and a substantially more capable military in a mere 30 years’ time.

Simultaneously, these policies have hollowed out our own industrial base, rendering most of our industries, including the tech sector, dependent on Chinese inputs. In the name of efficiency, we have lost resilience, jobs, and independence.

The prospect of a military confrontation with China is now closer than it was at the beginning of this process. Along with its rising confidence and capability, China has advanced a self-serving and novel view of its authority, asserting sovereignty and rights of exclusion deep into the South China Sea.

The United States, for over 100 years, has viewed itself as a maritime power, enforcing freedom of navigation so that the world may benefit from trade and secure sea lanes. China’s expansive view of its rights threatens these expectations and sows the seeds of a potential military conflict.

Just as trade wars can become real ones, conventional military victories threaten to escalate into nuclear wars, not out of ruthlessness, but out of fear and confusion about an adversary’s intent.

In dealing with China, America would do well to ensure no conflict with China goes nuclear. There seems no reliable way to guarantee this under the conditions of conventional war. Under these circumstances, the United States should reconceive its regional objectives to avoid such conflict altogether.

One way of avoiding such conflict is to continue the focus on economic matters. Ideally, this would mean continuing the Trump-era policy of disconnecting our fortunes from China as much as possible.

Unfortunately, the Biden Administration’s watchword appears to be reversing every Trump policy reflexively.

There are no asylums for the insane. Because the deeply immoral Michel Foucault (and others of his 1960s New Left revolutionary sort) said they are not nice.

How did it come about that European leftists could so easily change America?

Christopher F. Rufo writes at Jewish World Review:

In 1961, French theorist Michel Foucault re-envisioned the history of mental illness in his book Madness and Civilization, which documented the role of confinement, morality, and medicine from the Middle Ages to modernity. Foucault yielded some profound insights, but, like his radical-progressive American counterparts, he savaged the practice of confinement without proposing a substantive alternative.

What “profound insights”? We found none in his oeuvre.

Nearly 60 years later, it has become clear that the liberationists of the 1960s did not usher in a new era of freedom but something far darker. By reducing the entire cultural history of madness to one long progression of brutality, imprisonment, and false care, they laid the political groundwork for deinstitutionalization. At the same time, their insistence that mental illness was a “myth”,  and that [although only a myth] it could be cured by new psychiatric drugs or would be transformed through political consciousness, turned out to be wrong.

Most needed is a renewed theoretical defense of the principles of the asylum — safety, rest, morality, and health — that Foucault and his compatriots demolished. This does not mean a return to the historical practices of the asylum but a revival of the spirit that animated the care and moral reasoning of the old retreats.

It is a moral scandal that our society, which has surpassed the material wealth of the nineteenth century 16-fold, cannot provide an adequate sanctuary for the mad and the unmoored. It’s easy to condemn the horrors of the old state hospitals, but the horrors of the invisible asylum may exceed them.

Do exceed them, as he has said above.

He describes some of the horrors of the “invisible asylum”, including an abandoned homeless mad woman devouring a dead rat.

And he relates this anecdote:

Patrol Sergeant Amy King and Officer Patrick Hutnik, who oversee the downtown area for the Olympia Police Department, take me on a tour. The officers are working their morning rounds, rousting awake people sleeping in doorways and asking them to move on. We see a slumped-over man who has soiled himself overnight, a man wrapped in cardboard complaining that his tent got stolen, and three women behind a barricade of shopping carts and filthy blankets. One of the women is tying off her arm with a blue rubber strap but loosens her grip when she sees us; the other two are barely cognizant, blinking at the officers and lifelessly nodding their heads.

The cast of characters in Sergeant King’s world is a difficult one. Hai air-fights through the streets because he believes monsters in the ground want to enter his body. Michael, an old man, calls 911 many times per day but doesn’t qualify as “gravely disabled”. Suburban Gary lives in a broken-down Chevy Suburban full of trash but refuses all offers of housing or services. And John, wheelchair-bound and covered in sores, huffs paint in front of officers because he knows he’s “untouchable” — the hospital will not take him, the prosecutor will not move on his criminal cases, and the psychiatrists cannot send him for involuntary treatment.

As they finish their morning rounds and head back to the station, Sergeant King and Officer Hutnik find a disheveled, shirtless man, passed out with his body extending into the street. Officer Hutnik politely wakes him, and the man, known as Angry Marty, begins screaming about zombies and food lines down at the mission. He manically gathers metal piping tubes from the ground and bangs them into a shopping cart. “There is going to be a mob that finally takes over this city!” he screams. “They’re going to kill you! They’re going to kill you!”

Under the current policy regime, this madness has become an eternal recurrence: the officers will see Marty again tomorrow morning, as he suffers through another drug-terror, and they must leave him to fend for himself.

As we head back to the station, we can still hear Marty’s cries in the distance.

“Is that compassion?” Sergeant King asks, disappearing into the doorway.

Compassion can be very cruel.