Above, from video of an arrival at Westchester County Airport, tweeted by a New York Republican with subtitles quoting a U.S. contractor off-camera regarding such “ghost flights” from the southern border.
By James Varney, RealClearInvestigations February 10, 2022
After months of delay, the Department of Homeland Security replied late last month to a Congressional demand for information about the number of illegal migrants the department has flown from border towns to communities around the country. In 2021, it said, 71,617 were dropped off in nearly 20 cities including locales as far from the Mexican border as Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia.
Todd Bensman: “The government knows. But they are being as opaque and ‘darkened-windows’ as they can be about the entire matter.”
Center for Immigration Studies
Immigration experts critical of the Biden administration’s permissive immigration policies believe those numbers are incomplete, especially regarding the most vulnerable migrants, those under 18, whom DHS classifies as “unaccompanied children.” The agency says some 40,000 of the total transported are such minors, but that number is only a fraction of the 147,000 “encounters” the agency reports having with unaccompanied migrant children at the southern border between January and October 2021.
Paramount among the questions raised by the transports is what happens to the unaccompanied children once they leave the airport? The major cities DHS lists, the experts say, are probably simply way stations rather than final destinations.
“Everyone wants to know where they’re going, but nobody knows,” said Todd Bensman, a national security fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank. “Well, somebody knows,” he adds. “The government knows. But they are being as opaque and ‘darkened-windows’ as they can be about the entire matter.”
The lack of information raises a host of questions regarding the health and welfare of the children, and more:
What security checks are being performed — and background checks to ensure these minors are going to safe homes? How can checks be conducted on family members in the U.S. illegally who wind up taking custody of the children (a problem highlighted in a 2019 study)?
What processes are in place to ensure that these children have enough to eat, are receiving any necessary medical care, or are enrolled in school?
What traumas or crimes have they suffered along the way, at the hands of human traffickers, for example, and how are the cases being handled? (Through a public records request, Judicial Watch last year obtained a list of 33 incidents of alleged sexual abuse in a one-month period in 2021.)
What pandemic precautions have been taken, beyond masks seen in some furtively taken images of the transportees, by an administration that professes to be aggressively dedicated to eradicating COVID-19? (Illegal immigrants dispersed on commercial flights in 2021 were not tested for covid, and agencies did not follow preventive procedures, according to preliminary findings of a DHS Inspector General’s report reviewed by RealClearInvestigations.)
Who is responsible for making sure the migrants, children in particular, check in with the government and show up for court immigration hearings?
The difficulty of getting answers from the Biden administration is frustrating many state and local officials who say that tracking the thousands of illegal immigrants apparently melting into their communities is a maddening endeavor.
Larry Keefe, adviser to Florida’s governor: It’s “a clandestine, covert, middle-of-the-night, special ops mission.”
Department of Justice
“The Biden administration is running a clandestine, covert, middle-of-the-night, special ops mission using the same tradecraft the military does in operations against foreign enemies,” said Larry Keefe, a senior policy adviser to Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. “We don’t know what’s going on because the states are not designed to mount intelligence-gathering operations against our own government.”
The situation is complicated by the layers of groups involved. After a gumbo of federal agencies – CBP, DHS, DHHS, ICE, ORR – the government largely relies on nonprofit contractors to handle unaccompanied minors. While those groups present a rosy picture on their websites, it is unclear how they can handle what has proved a massive increase.
In 2021, DHS shelters near the border and further inland took in 122,000 unaccompanied children, according to its figures, which shattered the previous record 69,000 in 2019. The unaccompanied children are but a portion of the illegal immigrants who flooded across the southern border in 2021. For the fiscal year ending last October, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported 1.6 million “encounters” — an all-time record and four times the figure the previous year. Although the number of encounters does not equal the number of people who crossed, given that some are repeat offenders, the actual figures are even higher, because CBP does not release the number of “got-aways” it records.
Single minors: 2021 was a record year and the barely new year already surpasses all of 2020.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection
Neither Homeland Security nor Health and Human Services nor the Office of Refugee Resettlement would answer questions about the resettlement process from RealClearInvestigations.
But the huge increase in numbers means the organizations dealing with them are swamped. In many cases, responsibilities for placing unaccompanied children with families or sponsors are subcontracted through the Office of Refugee Resettlement, or ORR. In 2020, the most recent year for which figures were available, under the far more restrictive immigration policies of the Trump administration, taxpayers spent more than $1.5 billion among 42 various non-profit and religious groups that offer help with housing, educational, medical, legal and other services.
More than $1 billion of that 2020 total was paid to six groups. The major recipient, Southwest Key Programs, received $400 million and a global nonprofit called BCFS received at least $253.1 million, according to tracking of ORR contracts by Maya Pagni Barak, a professor of criminology and criminal studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.
None of the six groups would answer questions from RealClearInvestigations, instead referring them back to federal agencies in the kind of loop that has bedeviled others seeking information.
Rosemary Jenks, NumbersUSA: “This is all being done under the cover of darkness.”
“This is all being done under the cover of darkness and no one really knows what is happening,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations at NumbersUSA, a group that favors immigration limits. “Plus, there’s so much confusion over who has custody over which groups.”
The groups handling unaccompanied children have sites scattered across the U.S., according to their websites. Southwest Key, for example, says it runs such shelters in 18 states, while BCFS lists shelters in a dozen states, from California and New York, to Colorado, Illinois, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee and elsewhere. A fact sheet from ICE notes that altogether there are sites for unaccompanied children in 22 states.
Regarding shelter conditions, the operators’ blanket silence beyond rosy website depictions is not a new development. In 2018, when the Trump administration’s border policies were under scrutiny, Southwest Key barred Democratic Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley from inspecting its Casa Padre facility in a former Walmart in Brownsville, Texas. At that time, Democratic Rep. Nancy Pelosi declared the system “barbaric.”
In an effort to shed some light on the situation in Florida, Gov. DeSantis issued an executive order in September that told state law enforcement and other officials to begin gathering information on the number of illegal immigrants federal agencies were bringing to Florida and where they wind up.
DeSantis took that step after accusing President Biden of abandoning any pretense of protecting the southern border.
Gov. Ron DeSantis: Opposing resettlements in Florida.
Orlando Sentinel via AP
In the face of what Keefe and other Florida officials described as continued intransigence on the part of federal agencies flying and busing illegal immigrants into the Sunshine State, DeSantis has proposed a package of laws now pending before the legislature in Tallahassee that would codify the steps laid out in his executive order. The proposed measures would also “prohibit state and local agencies from doing business with any private entities that facilitate the resettlement of illegal aliens in the state of Florida from the southern border.”
Florida’s Department of Children and Families published an emergency rule in December that directly addresses the various non-profits and religious groups that contract with the federal government. The rule “prohibits the issuance or renewal of any license to provide services to UAC who seek to be resettled in Florida,” unless the state and the federal agencies can craft some “cooperative agreement.”
Keefe said the governor’s moves will also put a crimp in human smuggling. Because the children lack documentation to board international flights from Central American airports and others, someone is paying to have them brought from their country of origin to the U.S. border. These are often criminal organizations that are most likely paid by family members – with whom the children may be eventually reunited – or human trafficking syndicates posing as legitimate sponsors that might exploit them for nefarious purposes.
“We don’t have laws in place to investigate the federal government,” Keefe said. “We’re being kept in the dark by our own country on something that’s definitely contributing to human smuggling because this is about bringing their kids here. Somebody drops the kids off at the border and then HHS is handing off to taxpayers the cost of flying them to illegal immigrant parents.”
Doug Mastriano, Pennsylvania state senator: “There is something fishy going on with all of it.”
Senator Doug Mastriano
Pennsylvania lawmakers are facing a similar situation. Keystone state senators remain dissatisfied with answers they have sought on flights packed with immigrants from the southern border that landed in the middle of the night in Scranton and other Pennsylvania airfields.
In December, there were at least two so-called “ghost” flights into the Lehigh Valley, a tiny fraction of the more than 900 such domestic or “lateral” flights ICE’s air arm flew around the U.S. in 2021.
Republican State Sen. Doug Mastriano and others sought answers from Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and Attorney General Josh Shapiro, both Democrats. While Wolf said Scranton was simply a transit point, he offered no information on passengers that landed in the early morning darkness in Scranton. In a familiar refrain, the state lawmakers were told to direct their questions to the feds.
Record of a Lehigh Valley “ghost flight.”
Lou Barletta
Mastriano has now filed a series of FOIA requests of DHS and ICE, but he remains perplexed and angered at the reluctance of those involved in the system to provide clear answers.
“On two flights from El Paso to Scranton there were 120 passengers, many of which were minors,” Mastriano said. “Imagine that. I don’t know who pays for their schooling or the impact on our community, and there is something fishy going on with all of it.”
The scant information that has been provided is unlikely to offer a complete picture, Mastriano told RCI.
“I think these findings are just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “We need to further examine the total number of illegal immigrants being sent [here] by plane and bus. It’s not just minors they are sending to Pennsylvania, its adults, too.”
Over the weekend, Roger Goodell lamented the lack of black men hired as head coaches in the NFL. It caused him to send out a memo bemoaning the issue. Moreover, Goodell inexplicably stated “that racism and any form of discrimination is contrary to the NFL’s values” — as if this needed to be said, as if such things are not contrary to nearly everyone’s values.
But Goodell can be the change he wants to see in the league. He has the opportunity to make real change if he truly believes all of this social justice ‘equity’ stuff.
“We have made significant efforts to promote diversity and adopted numerous policies and programs which have produced positive change in many areas, however we must acknowledge that particularly with respect to head coach the results have been unacceptable,” Goodell said in the memo. I agree. So let’s start with Goodell.
Currently, 0% of NFL commissioners are black. Goodell can fix this. He should put his money (and all the millions he has made over the years) where his mouth is. He should announce his resignation and appoint a black man as his successor.
Goodell served 16 years in the role. He has made more money than any other NFL commissioner in history. He is the highest-paid commissioner of all the sports leagues in the country. He has helped the league expand. He can now cement his legacy by doing something much more meaningful than having “NO HATE” written on the sidelines. He can sacrifice his job so that a black man can have the highest position in the NFL.
This will not ever happen, of course. Goodell’s words were and are nothing more than virtue-signaling. There are no racist practices when it comes to hiring NFL coaches. No one is denied opportunity because of their skin color. Goodell is cowering to a race-obsessed, agenda-driven mob and implying that several good coaches should be fired just because they are white.
So, he will continue to cave and sacrifice other people’s opportunities — all the while protecting his own.
A5-year-old riding in her mother’s car. A Texas sheriff’s deputy on routine patrol. A Florida father who thought he was foster parenting a minor. A Mississippi woman pistol whipped as she talked on cell phone. Three people found burned to death in a car in Alabama.
All have one thing in common: they were victimized since President Joe Biden took office by immigrants who illegally crossed the border.
The rising tide of high-profile, gruesome crimes far from the U.S.-Mexico border is creating a potent political issue as control of Congress is up for grabs this November while leaving a trail of carnage and drug overdoses in America’s heartland.
“Every state is a border state. And that’s the truth,” said Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who joined Texas in suing to challenge some of Biden’s immigration policies they argue have left the border open to trafficking and criminals.
“It’s terrible for those border towns, because a lot of schools have gone on lockdown, because of the crime and illegal activity that comes across, but the drugs, the fentanyl, the human trafficking ends up in places like Kansas City, or in Wichita, or in Columbus, Ohio, all over the country,” Schmitt told the John Solomon Reports podcast on Monday.Missouri has seen a marked increase in the last year in deadly fentanyl trafficking and deaths, including the tragic deaths of seven residents in St. Louis on Monday from drugs laced with fentanyl typically made in China and trafficked across the border by Mexican cartels.
Fetanyl is more of a silent killer from the border, piling up bodies without blaring headlines. But in recent weeks a constant stream of breaking news reports has awakened the nation to the reality that the permissive border crossings and trafficking to the country’s interior under Biden has had deadly consequences far from the border.
A Florida father who believed he was taking in a 16-year-old migrant minor from Honduras was killed by the immigrant, who turned out to be much older and involved in crime. The case stunned the political world.
That senseless killing even brought grizzled law enforcement officers to tears. “A little 5-year-old beautiful baby was crushed to death,” the local sheriff lamented, noting if the driver had been kept in his “home country last Saturday night like he should have been, our 5-year-old beautiful little girl would have been alive.”
Law enforcement has both experienced the wave of migrant crime and suffered loss from it.
In Harris County, Texas, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador is charged with exiting his vehicle during a routine traffic stop and fatally shooting a sheriff’s deputy in the face last month. The suspect has a long history of crime in the United States despite illegally entering, officials said.
Federal officials also confirm that 14 illegal immigrants with known or suspected terrorist ties have been stopped at the border in Biden’s first year, raising the question of how many have snuck in undetected.
“It took 19 to perpetrate this horrible 9/11 attack, the worst terrorist attack in the history of the country — and they are just pouring across the border, pouring across,” Rep. Brian Babin (R-Texas) told Just the News on Monday, warning Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris bear full responsibility.
“Quite frankly, people are dying on their watch,” he said. “It is a dereliction of duty to do what they are doing. They are violating the Constitution … If this is not an invasion, I don’t know what is.”
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told Just the News on Monday that the border is more than an immigration issue, it is a national security issue that is likely to result in a reckoning for Democrats in the next two elections. He added that America’s porous border is also shaking allies’ confidence in America’s commitment to security.
“If you’re not prepared to protect your own sovereignty, if you’re not prepared to defend your own borders, and make sure you know what’s coming in and out of your country, then I think the world can see that you’re not about to be on the global stage,” he said during an interview on the “Just the News” TV show on Real America’s Voice.
Some Republicans, like Sen. Ted Cruz, believe if their party takes control of Congress next year Biden could face impeachment for refusing to enforce border laws.
“I really believe that impeachment could be on the table,” Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) said. “And I would support that.”
Human trafficking, in particular, is creating victims in multiple spheres, from women and children trafficked into sex work to innocent victims driving the streets.
Last March, 13 migrants were killed when the SUV driven by their smuggler crashed into a tractor trailer in California, in one of the deadliest border crashes in American history. More recently, a 59-year-old mother and her 22-year old daughter were killed in Texas in December when their car was T-boned by a speeding vehicle trying to smuggle illegal aliens into the country. The horrific photos grabbed international headlines.
“What we’re seeing at the border is not just criminal, but it is immoral,” Gooden said. “The fact that our United States government is putting its own citizens behind those of other nations, and also encouraging human trafficking … is really a travesty.”
While impeachment and elections loom on the horizon as a possible solutions, law enforcement officials are focused right now on trying to stem the rise of crime in communities affected by illegal immigrants who have traveled far from the border, sometimes with the help of the Biden administration and their allies in the nonprofit world.
Several Republicans in Congress are sponsoring various pieces of legislation to stop the federal government and nonprofits from assisting aliens seeking to move to the interior of the country. Attorneys general in several states, like Missouri’s Schmitt, are going to the courts to compel the Biden administration to enforce existing immigration laws.
And while the violent, gruesome crimes are capturing headlines, con games and property crimes are also a concern.
In New York City, a 40-year-old illegal immigrant was arrested last month on charges she stole the identities of 100 people in the borough of Queens and filed for $1.9 million in fraudulent jobless benefits.
Advocates of illegal immigrants point to studies like one done recently by the National Academy of Sciences that found that illegal immigrants on average commit fewer crimes in America than legal immigrants or natural born citizens.
But that is little solace to victims who know their loved ones would be alive if an illegal immigrant hadn’t been allowed to cross the border or had been deported back to his or her country.
“By him not being deported, it’s like you telling me my daughter’s life didn’t mean anything,” said Rhonda Exum, a mother whose 19-year-old daughter was killed in Texas by an illegal immigrant in a DUI accident.
Exum told Fox News she regrets voting for Biden in 2020 after his Homeland Security Department refused to deport the man who is accused of killing her daughter.
Advocates for transgenderism make the ideology seem reasonable, but a close look at the ‘logic’ (illogic) of transgender philosophy reveals serious problems.
The so-called ‘wisdom’ of the world is rife with incoherencies. One of the more trendy and pernicious examples of our time is transgenderism. Like relativism, transgender philosophy looks compelling, maybe even commonsense on the surface to ‘some’. But when examined closely one discovers that just like socialism, it devours itself like the Ouroboros, that creepy ancient symbol of a snake devouring its own tail.
Consider that transgenderism, or at least one form of it, claims an individual’s identity is as male or female—that is, his understanding of himself—can be in conflict with the biological sex that he was conceived with. A biological male, so it’s argued, can have a female gender identity, and vice versa.
Here is where the snake begins to devour its tail. Consider a male who thinks his gender identity is female. He identifies with the female form because he thinks his gender identity is female. He may even seek to assimilate such a form via surgery and doctor-prescribed hormones.
But already that’s running into problems. This gent denies the connection between biological sexual forms and gender identity. That is to say, he thinks his biological maleness doesn’t indicate his gender identity. But at the same time, he’s seeking a connection between gender identity and biological sexual forms insofar as he identifies with and seeks to take on the female form to match his female gender identity.
What does this amount to? A contradiction: there’s no connection between biological sex and gender identity, and yet there is a connection at the same time and in the same respect.
Now, an advocate of transgenderism might counter, “Well, for some, it’s not the biological female form that the man might identify with, but rather the female form that’s socially constructed: the wearing of high heels, makeup, long hair, and a curvy figure.”
But the same logical problem arises. If the socially constructed male form (the wearing of flat shoes, short hair, robust figure, etc.) is not indicative of one’s gender identity, then the socially constructed female form would not be indicative of one’s gender identity either. And if that’s the case, then in principle, there is no way for the man to identify with the socially constructed female form because such a form isn’t connected to a female gender identity. So, in this scenario like the above, any connection would have to be denied between gender identity and socially constructed maleness or femaleness and affirm that same connection at the same time and in the same respect. That’s a contradiction, which can not logically be accepted. Period. End of story. Full stop.
There’s another way in which the transgender philosophy is logically incoherent: it ends up defining woman in terms of what it means to be a woman. To the question, “What is a woman?”, a transgenderist only can give one answer: “a person whose gender identity is female.” The answer can’t be a biological female because transgender philosophy separates gender identity from biological sex. Nor can the answer be female social stereotypes since gender identity is supposedly innate, and thus, it’s supposed to precede such stereotypes. Therefore, female gender identity is the only game in town when it comes to defining what a woman is.
Can you see the problem here? Let me help you out: it’s a vicious cycle! This view of woman defines the word in terms of woman, inserting what’s trying to be defined into the definition. It’s a recursive nightmare, again like our friend the Ouroboros.
Another problem emerges: to what does female gender identity refer? If it refers not to biological sex, or to societally enforced norms, or to the inner sense of self (lest we end in a vicious circle), then female gender identity seems to refer to nothing. As philosopher Robert P. George puts it, “there seems to be no ‘something’ for [the inner sense of gender identity] to be the sense of.” If female gender identity refers to nothing, then it’s unintelligible.
The only way out here is to say there’s no difference whatsoever between a male and female gender identity. But that would exclude many people who are accepted as members of the “trans” community, like the gent above. So maybe the transgender philosophy is not so inclusive after all.
It’s important to emphasize that the above critiques are aimed at the ideas or the ways of thinking that transgender philosophy embodies. They are not aimed at the individuals who may have legitimate confusion regarding their sexual identity. Hearts go out to those people and they are loved. And it’s precisely because of that love for them that this here exposes the logical incoherencies of the transgender philosophy.
Humans are made for truth. And that’s the only thing that will make us as humans truly happy!
Our rulers stoke a civil conflict because they want to win it.
Over the course of history, societies have chosen different forms of moral currency. In Rome, your virtue was determined by your nobility of ancestry and comportment. In Medieval Europe (and the first two centuries of the American republic, perhaps) piety was the determinant of moral virtue. Today, grievance is America’s moral currency. Understanding this is key to understand exactly what a civil war would be about.
January 6, 2022 brought the first anniversary of the turmoil at the Capitol. In addition toneurotic public remembrances, the date brought with it a wave of hand-wringing furvor over whether we are approachinganother civil war. The prospect of a civil war is more than clickbait. The acrimonious division that was previously contained to the political realm now sets the terms of social interaction everywhere: in schools, restaurants, the workplace, the grocery store, the church. It is the price our establishment pays for its own radicalization. Confronting the civil strife that this rolling revolution creates is a dangerous thing to even talk about—when respected voices broach the subject, this signals to the masses that such a conflict is a possibility, and that increases the possibility of it occurring.
The coverage from outlets such as Politico and The New Yorker displays two types of “civil war” articles. In one, the author pretends he has no idea what such a war would even be about. In the other type, the risk of conflict is attributed wholly to the alleged delusions and purportedly violent tendencies of the political right. The former embodies a lame attempt at obfuscation; the latter suggests that one side of the conflict holds all the culpability for the rising aggression. But in their dissembling, both types inadvertently show that the true cause of the conflict would be a battle over the legitimacy of mass grievances and the deliberate refusal of those in power to address—or even acknowledge—them. Through their incessant denial that the public’s concerns have any merit, the media is fanning the coals that would ignite such a war.
Politico exhibits the idea that there are no grievances: “One side unreasonably believes that President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was stolen, and the other side reasonably fears that former president Donald Trump’s followers are so slavishly under his spell that they are willing to hijack the legal apparatus guaranteeing free and honest elections in order to facilitate his return to power in 2024.” It’s that simple: one side is full of unreasonable, hypnotized conspiracy theorists, and the other side is rational, patriotic defenders of Democracy who would have no problem at all, if not for the threat posed by the yokels who unjustifiably oppose them.
The New Yorker’s reporter believes the civil war might occur because troglodytes and bigots have given up on democracy: put differently, they have grievances, but not ones that deserve any attention. For example, David Remnick claims the current strife exists because people were worried about what Obama’s 2008 victory represented: it “vividly underlined the rise of a multiracial democracy and was taken as a threat by many white Americans who feared losing their majority status.” Remnick goes on to say, without evidence, that the conflict is fueled by “the consuming resentment of many right-wing, rural whites who fear being ‘replaced’ by immigrants and people of color, as well as a Republican Party leadership that bows to its most autocratic demagogue and no longer seems willing to defend democratic values and institutions.” The institutional left is entirely innocent in deepening these divisions: “The battle to preserve American democracy is not symmetrical. One party, the GOP, now poses itself as anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic.”
Moral Currency and Political Power
When “grievance” is mentioned on the right, it is often invoked derisively to refer to today’s fetishization of “systemic injustices.” Throughout the late twentieth century, as the left became increasingly dependent on the votes of racial, linguistic, and ethnic minorities, Democratsencouraged those groups to understand historical hardships and injustices as debts that had to be paid in the present, perpetually. The paying of these debts took the form of many legal, economic, and educational reforms aimed at addressing these grievances, reforms which also served to justify the expansion of the state. Over the decades, many Americans logically came to the realization that leveraging these grievances (a way of calling in a debt) was a way to reap sociopolitical rewards.
Joshua Mitchell’s recent book ably demonstrates how these realities establish a moral economy. Grievance becomes currency—it can buy things. Like a kind of money, people are incentivized to collect and spend their grievances. I do not mean to suggest that certain minority—or majority—groups do not have some legitimate grievances; they do. Minorities and majorities both know well what can be gained from leveraging their grievances. When grievance serves as the moral currency in a society, it is natural that every individual will seek to realize whatever gains can be had from demanding satisfaction. The problem today isn’t the existence of grievances, or even a will to redress them. The problem is the fetishization and commodification of grievance.
Today’s populist discontent is a byproduct of the grievance economy—and a backlash against the unfair rules by which it operates. When moral virtue is determined wholly by the grievances held by a particular individual or class, this encourages an endless deliberation about which grievances are legitimate (and thus, embody real debts), and a toxic calculus to determine who has more grievance (and therefore, a more compelling demand for redress). In short, the people with the most grievances become the good people—people whose concerns are granted a disproportionate weight in public life. The people who purportedly have fewer grievances are implicitly marked as bad people—people whose demands for political satisfaction can be safely ignored.
The effect of this grievance economy is that you have an entire nation of people who have been trained to be aggrieved, but the regime rules by ensuring that certain grievances will be routinely dismissed. These are deemed to have arisen from historical “privilege”—privilege that must be surrendered so as to pay the debt to the aggrieved. Many people who seem to have little privilege are nevertheless deemed as beneficiaries of it. These are the rural, white members of the working class who have been abandoning the Democratic party at a rate identical to the one at which the left has fetishized minority grievance. When a society implicitly states “grievance is what matters,” but tells certain aggrieved groups that their gripes are illegitimate, it is no surprise that this creates alienation. Because a large government like ours is justified precisely on the grounds of its responsiveness to all the needs of its citizens, this alienation is understandably directed at the regime and its clients. As a result, our leaders’ dismissal of public grievances leads to one more grievance.
The irrepressible question is whether the citizens the media blames for our nation’s intensifying conflict have legitimate grievances, and, if so, why?
A Long Train of Grievances
Over the last 50 years, our leaders progressively outsourced our manufacturing, which had served as the backbone of middle-class economic stability. Not only did the government not incentivize companies to stay in America—the state actively accelerated the departure. This loss of millions of middle-class jobs finally produced a generation with significantly less wealth than their forebears—something that hasn’t happened since before World War II.
For a half century, the state refused to secure the border. Amnesty was periodically provided to those who had entered illegally, which incentivized others to come. Non-enforcement of labor laws that would bar illegal immigrants from working put low-skilled American workers in direct competition with foreigners, who would accept lower pay, making low-wage jobs harder to get. By the arrival of the Obama era, our elites were moving from a mere tolerance of illegal immigration to an endorsement of it: after all, many of the new arrivals were ethnic minorities—an aggrieved class in need of deference.
The influx of illegal immigrants has flooded the nation with drugs: notably, the often-fatal opioid fentanyl, almost all of which comes from our geo-political rival China. This results in an epidemic of addiction and drug death among the very groups most impacted by the betrayals referenced above.
To make matters worse, the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve and the flood of government spending have further undermined the purchasing power of what little money the working class is able to earn. The endless printing of money only increases a stupefying national debt. Of course, Americans’ diminished purchasing power is increasingly irrelevant, as a supply chain crisis (an effect of our dependence on foreign manufacturing) ensures that many needed goods are not available.
Moreover, a complete lack of accountability among our leaders fuels the alienation of typical American citizens. Obama’s IRS worked to combat conservative fundraising to minimize its influence in the 2012 election. No one was held accountable. States like California and Colorado are allowed to enact policies that directly subvert existing federal law——and it is tolerated. Obama admitted he had no legal authority to act unilaterally to address immigration——then he ordered DACA anyway, an effective amnesty for millions of people who entered the country illegally. The courts affirmed it.
Hillary Clinton illegally used a private server to conduct her business as Secretary of State and deleted over 30,000 emails from those servers, in direct violation of a subpoena. Not only was no one held accountable for the violation of data security protocols, but no one was held accountable for the destruction of evidence.
All of this is to say nothing about the misery inflicted on the middle class by authoritarian lockdowns and the medical establishment’s unconstitutional political power during the Covid-19 pandemic.
These examples point to two compounding injuries. Affected citizens suffer the indignity of a government that routinely denies their grievances a place in the political process by ruling through policies it sets against them. It was this hostile disregard that led to the rise of a figure like Trump, an outsider who promised to address their concerns. The second injury did even more to amplify the current opposition to the regime: when the people elected Trump, the elite powers ensured that he would not be able to govern, and then ensured that he would not be reelected. Essentially, the state told Americans: “Not only will we not address your grievances, we will also enact safeguards so that you may not elect someone who will.” Thus, the people who claim to be defending American democracy have negated what little democratic power many citizens actually held.
As a coda to this litany of abuses, the elite institutions tell these citizens not only that their grievances are illegitimate, but that those grievances are imagined.
Then they pretend they have no idea why Americans are angry.
Sovereignty on Its Head
Today, the United States government has inverted the idea of sovereignty: it carefully takes account of the external demands made upon our nation by foreign powers and peoples, while it sees itself as internally sovereign in relation to the people it rules. The state does not recognize its obligation to respond to certain classes of citizens—and when the people use their vote to register their discontent with this abdication of duty, the state ensures that this discontent will be contained and neutralized.
In a democracy, the regime itself is not meant to be sovereign in relation to the citizens it governs: that’s authoritarian autocracy. Democratic government is not independent from the will of the people—on the contrary, if it won’t address their grievances, then it must yield to a majority of citizens’ decision to install officials who will. Ultimately, grievance is also the political capital of our society—the state holds sole power to decide whose grievances are legitimate and whose are not. The resolute rejection of the grievances claimed by half the country has understandably provoked an enormous anger. The continued refusal of elites to acknowledge these grievances only accelerates our cultural fragmentation—and thus increases the chances of what would surely be a catastrophic “civil war”—one that they claim they do not want.
A House Aggrieved Cannot Stand
Our rulers stoke a civil conflict because they want to win it.
Over the course of history, societies have chosen different forms of moral currency. In Rome, your virtue was determined by your nobility of ancestry and comportment. In Medieval Europe (and the first two centuries of the American republic, perhaps) piety was the determinant of moral virtue. Today, grievance is America’s moral currency. Understanding this is key to understand exactly what a civil war would be about.
January 6, 2022 brought the first anniversary of the turmoil at the Capitol. In addition toneurotic public remembrances, the date brought with it a wave of hand-wringing furvor over whether we are approachinganother civil war. The prospect of a civil war is more than clickbait. The acrimonious division that was previously contained to the political realm now sets the terms of social interaction everywhere: in schools, restaurants, the workplace, the grocery store, the church. It is the price our establishment pays for its own radicalization. Confronting the civil strife that this rolling revolution creates is a dangerous thing to even talk about—when respected voices broach the subject, this signals to the masses that such a conflict is a possibility, and that increases the possibility of it occurring.
The coverage from outlets such as Politico and The New Yorker displays two types of “civil war” articles. In one, the author pretends he has no idea what such a war would even be about. In the other type, the risk of conflict is attributed wholly to the alleged delusions and purportedly violent tendencies of the political right. The former embodies a lame attempt at obfuscation; the latter suggests that one side of the conflict holds all the culpability for the rising aggression. But in their dissembling, both types inadvertently show that the true cause of the conflict would be a battle over the legitimacy of mass grievances and the deliberate refusal of those in power to address—or even acknowledge—them. Through their incessant denial that the public’s concerns have any merit, the media is fanning the coals that would ignite such a war.
Politico exhibits the idea that there are no grievances: “One side unreasonably believes that President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory was stolen, and the other side reasonably fears that former president Donald Trump’s followers are so slavishly under his spell that they are willing to hijack the legal apparatus guaranteeing free and honest elections in order to facilitate his return to power in 2024.” It’s that simple: one side is full of unreasonable, hypnotized conspiracy theorists, and the other side is rational, patriotic defenders of Democracy who would have no problem at all, if not for the threat posed by the yokels who unjustifiably oppose them.
The New Yorker’s reporter believes the civil war might occur because troglodytes and bigots have given up on democracy: put differently, they have grievances, but not ones that deserve any attention. For example, David Remnick claims the current strife exists because people were worried about what Obama’s 2008 victory represented: it “vividly underlined the rise of a multiracial democracy and was taken as a threat by many white Americans who feared losing their majority status.” Remnick goes on to say, without evidence, that the conflict is fueled by “the consuming resentment of many right-wing, rural whites who fear being ‘replaced’ by immigrants and people of color, as well as a Republican Party leadership that bows to its most autocratic demagogue and no longer seems willing to defend democratic values and institutions.” The institutional left is entirely innocent in deepening these divisions: “The battle to preserve American democracy is not symmetrical. One party, the GOP, now poses itself as anti-majoritarian and anti-democratic.”
Moral Currency and Political Power
When “grievance” is mentioned on the right, it is often invoked derisively to refer to today’s fetishization of “systemic injustices.” Throughout the late twentieth century, as the left became increasingly dependent on the votes of racial, linguistic, and ethnic minorities, Democratsencouraged those groups to understand historical hardships and injustices as debts that had to be paid in the present, perpetually. The paying of these debts took the form of many legal, economic, and educational reforms aimed at addressing these grievances, reforms which also served to justify the expansion of the state. Over the decades, many Americans logically came to the realization that leveraging these grievances (a way of calling in a debt) was a way to reap sociopolitical rewards.
Joshua Mitchell’s recent book ably demonstrates how these realities establish a moral economy. Grievance becomes currency—it can buy things. Like a kind of money, people are incentivized to collect and spend their grievances. I do not mean to suggest that certain minority—or majority—groups do not have some legitimate grievances; they do. Minorities and majorities both know well what can be gained from leveraging their grievances. When grievance serves as the moral currency in a society, it is natural that every individual will seek to realize whatever gains can be had from demanding satisfaction. The problem today isn’t the existence of grievances, or even a will to redress them. The problem is the fetishization and commodification of grievance.
Today’s populist discontent is a byproduct of the grievance economy—and a backlash against the unfair rules by which it operates. When moral virtue is determined wholly by the grievances held by a particular individual or class, this encourages an endless deliberation about which grievances are legitimate (and thus, embody real debts), and a toxic calculus to determine who has more grievance (and therefore, a more compelling demand for redress). In short, the people with the most grievances become the good people—people whose concerns are granted a disproportionate weight in public life. The people who purportedly have fewer grievances are implicitly marked as bad people—people whose demands for political satisfaction can be safely ignored.
The effect of this grievance economy is that you have an entire nation of people who have been trained to be aggrieved, but the regime rules by ensuring that certain grievances will be routinely dismissed. These are deemed to have arisen from historical “privilege”—privilege that must be surrendered so as to pay the debt to the aggrieved. Many people who seem to have little privilege are nevertheless deemed as beneficiaries of it. These are the rural, white members of the working class who have been abandoning the Democratic party at a rate identical to the one at which the left has fetishized minority grievance. When a society implicitly states “grievance is what matters,” but tells certain aggrieved groups that their gripes are illegitimate, it is no surprise that this creates alienation. Because a large government like ours is justified precisely on the grounds of its responsiveness to all the needs of its citizens, this alienation is understandably directed at the regime and its clients. As a result, our leaders’ dismissal of public grievances leads to one more grievance.
The irrepressible question is whether the citizens the media blames for our nation’s intensifying conflict have legitimate grievances, and, if so, why?
A Long Train of Grievances
Over the last 50 years, our leaders progressively outsourced our manufacturing, which had served as the backbone of middle-class economic stability. Not only did the government not incentivize companies to stay in America—the state actively accelerated the departure. This loss of millions of middle-class jobs finally produced a generation with significantly less wealth than their forebears—something that hasn’t happened since before World War II.
For a half century, the state refused to secure the border. Amnesty was periodically provided to those who had entered illegally, which incentivized others to come. Non-enforcement of labor laws that would bar illegal immigrants from working put low-skilled American workers in direct competition with foreigners, who would accept lower pay, making low-wage jobs harder to get. By the arrival of the Obama era, our elites were moving from a mere tolerance of illegal immigration to an endorsement of it: after all, many of the new arrivals were ethnic minorities—an aggrieved class in need of deference.
The influx of illegal immigrants has flooded the nation with drugs: notably, the often-fatal opioid fentanyl, almost all of which comes from our geo-political rival China. This results in an epidemic of addiction and drug death among the very groups most impacted by the betrayals referenced above.
To make matters worse, the monetary policies of the Federal Reserve and the flood of government spending have further undermined the purchasing power of what little money the working class is able to earn. The endless printing of money only increases a stupefying national debt. Of course, Americans’ diminished purchasing power is increasingly irrelevant, as a supply chain crisis (an effect of our dependence on foreign manufacturing) ensures that many needed goods are not available.
Moreover, a complete lack of accountability among our leaders fuels the alienation of typical American citizens. Obama’s IRS worked to combat conservative fundraising to minimize its influence in the 2012 election. No one was held accountable. States like California and Colorado are allowed to enact policies that directly subvert existing federal law——and it is tolerated. Obama admitted he had no legal authority to act unilaterally to address immigration——then he ordered DACA anyway, an effective amnesty for millions of people who entered the country illegally. The courts affirmed it.
Hillary Clinton illegally used a private server to conduct her business as Secretary of State and deleted over 30,000 emails from those servers, in direct violation of a subpoena. Not only was no one held accountable for the violation of data security protocols, but no one was held accountable for the destruction of evidence.
All of this is to say nothing about the misery inflicted on the middle class by authoritarian lockdowns and the medical establishment’s unconstitutional political power during the Covid-19 pandemic.
These examples point to two compounding injuries. Affected citizens suffer the indignity of a government that routinely denies their grievances a place in the political process by ruling through policies it sets against them. It was this hostile disregard that led to the rise of a figure like Trump, an outsider who promised to address their concerns. The second injury did even more to amplify the current opposition to the regime: when the people elected Trump, the elite powers ensured that he would not be able to govern, and then ensured that he would not be reelected. Essentially, the state told Americans: “Not only will we not address your grievances, we will also enact safeguards so that you may not elect someone who will.” Thus, the people who claim to be defending American democracy have negated what little democratic power many citizens actually held.
As a coda to this litany of abuses, the elite institutions tell these citizens not only that their grievances are illegitimate, but that those grievances are imagined.
Then they pretend they have no idea why Americans are angry.
Sovereignty on Its Head
Today, the United States government has inverted the idea of sovereignty: it carefully takes account of the external demands made upon our nation by foreign powers and peoples, while it sees itself as internally sovereign in relation to the people it rules. The state does not recognize its obligation to respond to certain classes of citizens—and when the people use their vote to register their discontent with this abdication of duty, the state ensures that this discontent will be contained and neutralized.
In a democracy, the regime itself is not meant to be sovereign in relation to the citizens it governs: that’s authoritarian autocracy. Democratic government is not independent from the will of the people—on the contrary, if it won’t address their grievances, then it must yield to a majority of citizens’ decision to install officials who will. Ultimately, grievance is also the political capital of our society—the state holds sole power to decide whose grievances are legitimate and whose are not. The resolute rejection of the grievances claimed by half the country has understandably provoked an enormous anger. The continued refusal of elites to acknowledge these grievances only accelerates our cultural fragmentation—and thus increases the chances of what would surely be a catastrophic “civil war”—one that they claim they do not want.
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What you need to tell the doctors you will go to that are not part of this current medical killing system is that you want this cocktail of pharmaceuticals if you are infected with this weaponized virus, whether or not you’ve been vaccinated, boosted or not vaccinated. THIS WILL KEEP YOU ALIVE. THE HOSPITALS WILL KILL YOU!
fox files 
Written
on 2.February.2022.