Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Moral Superiority Won't Fix the Border Crisis or Anything Else
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Moral Superiority Won't Fix the Border Crisis or Anything Else

Is that really the plan?
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“An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonized hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be.” John Galsworthy, The Forsyte Saga

Joe Biden told a bedtime story about the border. It was secure, he said. But more importantly, those in charge were now humane, not like the previous administration’s barbaric practices. It was a good story. His supporters believed it. Then he closed the storybook, turned off the lights, and they all went to sleep.

When they awoke, Governor Ron DeSantis had sent 50 migrants from Venezuela to Martha’s Vinyard, the home of his former boss, Barack Obama. They were refugees fleeing socialism for a paradise only Capitalism could have built.

Martha’s Vinyard has around 17,000 residents with an average income of $132,000. How better to arrive on American soil and into the open arms of people with signs in their windows that declare their support for migrants? Farmer’s Markets overflowing with the abundance of organic produce.

It’s the best of everything - seafood, frozen yogurt and green juice, pilates studios, and meditation centers. And everywhere you look an electric car - they care about climate change here. Fine wines, expensive cheese, bed, and breakfasts - and did you know they filmed Jaws here in 1975?

But just as quickly as the migrants had arrived, they were whisked off the island by the National Guard.

Though they wouldn’t activate them on January 6th, even knowing the crowd might become violent, they didn’t blink ordering them to Martha’s Vinyard. It makes you wonder whom they most fear - Trump supporters or migrants from Venezuela.

If they could not find homes or jobs for just 50 migrants, imagine what it’s like in a border town where they’re taking in 5,000 a day? Does that make what Ron DeSantis did right? I guess the better question might be, what else should he have done? Only an event the press could not ignore - that blue-check Twitter would use to showcase their own moral virtue — would pierce the bubble of the Left and send the message that the situation was getting dire.

How can people who ignored drowning toddlers, hundreds of bodies piling up, terrifying border crossings, not to mention the fentanyl streams now pretend like they ever gave a single thought to the border since Biden took power? They never did. It was — always dodge the catastrophe, pivot to Trump.

During the Trump years, the migrants were constantly being dragged in front of cameras to help the Democrats with their pitch to oust Trump. They used “children in cages,” families, and the worst optics they could find to rally sympathy and condemn the Right.

AOC who declared the detainment centers to be “concentration camps,” famously visited and said, "Anyone who's using the word 'surge' around you, consciously, is trying to invoke a militaristic frame. And that's a problem. Because this is not a surge, these are children. And they are not insurgents. And we are not being invaded."

But when Biden finally took power the story went dark. No one was talking about the migrant families anymore on social media. That meant the Biden administration could safely ignore the problem, knowing they would never be called out by the media, even as the bodies piled up. Under Biden, in 2021, they had the deadliest migrant crossings since The Missing Migrants project began tracking them.

More crossings, more deaths. You’d think that alone might have waken up the Biden Democrats to try to do something, especially since most of them believed that it was Biden who invited them to come, his humanitarian approach meant if they showed up they would be welcomed in.

After so many tragedies of toddlers drowning in the river, sexual assaults, and those with more nefarious goals like selling fentanyl, it was clear to anyone paying attention that the border was turning into a crisis that could not be controlled. The Biden Democrats, however, took the See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil approach.

This is one big reason why the DeSantis’ stunt sparked so much outrage on Twitter. Most of them, including the residents of Martha’s Vinyard, just have no idea what’s really happening outside of their bubble. Maybe they see a report here or there, but it never becomes a real crisis because it never shows up on Twitter.

The last time the border became a news story it was when there was outrage over border agents who were supposedly caught “whipping” migrants. That turned out to be untrue, yet in Biden World they felt no need to apologize for smearing the reps of the agents.

Says Jonathan Turley in a blistering op-ed:

After almost a year of investigation, the Biden administration announced the agents would be punished even though investigators found no evidence that they whipped migrants, as Biden and many other politicians and pundits insisted. Since the president declared — before an investigation had begun — that the agents would have to be punished, the agents had to be found guilty of something. So, they were reprimanded for “unprofessional conduct,” “working in an unsafe manner” and “derogatory language.” 

Make no mistake: This is not about protecting migrants. It is about protecting a president.

No outrage, though, for a President and a media who got it THAT wrong?

A Trail of Catastrophic Failures

It isn’t that people on the Left, or the legacy media, don’t care. They do care. They just don’t care enough to do the rough business of properly running a country or a border. They can’t get their hands dirty. They can’t be like Trump, even if they’ve quietly been implementing Trump’s Remain in Mexico policy. They have to be seen as the more humane side, even if it means one tragedy after another unfolding across the Rio Grande.

Holding onto their moral superiority is so important, they can’t even admit that Biden has been doing the same thing with migrants, sending them into various states throughout the country. They will say that they were prepared for them and the residents of Martha’s Vinyard were not. But no self-respecting journalist should let them get away with that.

The media has utterly failed in holding Biden to account for his border policies. Only Peter Doocy, a one-man Woodward and Bernstein, is brave enough to do the dirty job of asking hard questions.

Doocy, like everyone on the Right, is cast as a “conspiracy theorist,” relentlessly mocked on Twitter but Doocy understands his job as a journalist is to make the powerful uncomfortable. If you aren’t doing that, you have no business sitting in White House press briefings.

These are tough times. These are hard times. The last thing Americans need are the most privileged among us bloviating about a migrant crisis they only just noticed two seconds ago. Look at what it took just to get them to care. And even then, they only barely cared. Gavin Newsom used the moment to peacock as the Left’s only “tough guy” who isn’t tough at all.

The moral outrage was enough to power a whole city. Maybe that’s the solution to climate change. Just make the Left angry enough that they take to Twitter all day long. But it isn’t fair that those who have the most have to care the least.

Where Biden Goes, a Crisis Soon Follows

Twitter has become not a hub for news but the reflecting pool of Narcissus, to tell the alpha voices of the Left how virtuous they are. Narcissus fell in love with his own image and stared at it for the rest of his life. So too have the Biden Democrats fallen for their own publicity.

This is why Hollywood has reached a bottleneck. They can’t tell the stories of everyday Americans now that those same Americans have been discarded as “domestic extremists” and “racists.” If they’re the morally superior side then the morally inferior side must be the silent majority.

They try to tell those stories but they always have to infuse them with their newfound religion to try to “normalize” it for the majority. They don’t realize people are onto the game and have long since stopped tuning in.

The Left I once knew used to care about the working class. But now, they only really care if they are also ideologically compliant. That’s what Orwell’s 1984 is about - they pretend to stand for equity and tolerance but they really don’t. Not anymore.

A walled-off aristocracy that cares only about their own image can’t survive with a majority of forgotten people banging on the castle walls. They do themselves no favors in caring more about the image of Joe Biden where the migrants are concerned, than either the migrant themselves or the working class forced to accommodate them.

The Biden Democrats seem to need a reason to care beyond just the struggles of everyday life in a country with rising inflation, costs at the grocery stores, and spiking murder rates, violent assaults in the wake of their “defund the police” campaign. They’ve divided people up into categories to decide who matters and who doesn’t. They care mostly about those whom they consider “marginalized,” but care the least about those who make up the majority in this country.

This story from the Summer of 2020 has stayed with me, even if it only has around 3K views on Youtube. It never became that big on any social media. On the left, it was verboten to talk about any the violent crimes, especially any victims who were white. You could almost get away with it if you talked about the many minority-owned businesses that had been destroyed, but there was no sympathy to be had for Sue’s 100-year-old mattress store.

Nothing in this country has been the same since that Summer. It was a real revolution that impacted nearly every major institution in this country. There was an America before 2020 and an America after 2020. Most of this just isn’t discussed, at least not on the Left.

Had things gone well when Biden took power perhaps we would not be where we are now? But that isn’t how it’s gone, as Victor Davis Hanson lays out

Even if the media won’t cover the dystopian nightmare this country is becoming at the hands of disconnected leaders, the people are noticing. Even Frank Luntz had to issue a dire warning. We are reaching a breaking point:

America is in a very dark place right now, a dangerous place. It’s hard to watch the people on the upper decks of the Titanic demand only favorable coverage of the messes they make that they expect others to clean up.

The Biden Democrats and the blue-checks on Twitter should not be surprised if Americans turn out in record numbers to send them packing before they turn this country into the kind of country those who migrate here are so desperate to escape.

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Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Free Thinking Through the Fourth Turning with Sasha Stone
Essays on politics and culture from Sasha Stone's Substack. A former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left. Sashastone.substack.com