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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on July 3, 2026 at 12:06 am
“Good fences make good neighbors.”
Robert Frost penned those famous words in his 1914 poem, “Mending Wall.”
For millions of Americans, illegal immigration was the issue empowering the candidacy of Donald Trump to regain the Presidency in 2024.
For them, Frost’s opening line has become gospel: “Something there is that truly loves a wall.”
A September 16, 2022 article in The Daily Mail headlined:
“America’s $78B Bill for Teaching Schoolkids With Poor English is Rising by BILLIONS in Biden-era Immigration Surge, Study Says, and 76,000 New Language Instructors Are a Tall Order in a Teacher Shortage.”
Among its findings:
- One million public school students—ranging from kindergarten to high school—need special training in speaking and writing English.
- It costs $78 billion each year to educate them.
- Texas, California, Florida and New York are among the states most burdened with such students.
- Only three percent of these students are proficient in English when they graduate from high school.
- These costs are raised by billions owing to an unceasing tide of illegal alien children at the southern border.
These alarming statistics were produced by a study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
The 5.1 million students lacking English language skills need help in all their classes.
As a result, it costs 15 to 20 percent more to educate them than American-born students who grow up learning English.
Illegal aliens climbing over the border fence
With the United States facing a severe teacher shortage, some states have lowered their hiring rules to recruit teachers with only a high school diploma.
In 2020, the 5.1 million illegal alien students in public schools cost American taxpayers $78 billion—an $18.8 billion jump from the cost in 2016.
Of those students, 1.15 million were in California, costing the state $19.5 billion. One million more lived in Texas, costing that state $11.4 billion. And 278,000 lived in Florida, at a cost of $3.1 billion.
Only 370,000 teachers nationwide are trained to teach them, and 76,000 more will be needed during the next five years.
Immigration remains a highly divisive issue among Americans. “Red” Republican states want to close borders. “Blue” Democratic states are more open to newcomers.
Yet even famously liberal enclaves of support for illegal aliens like New York are beginning to have second thoughts about taking in unlimited numbers of uninvited foreigners.
On October 7, 2022, then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency in response to the city’s migrant crisis, which he said would cost the city $1 billion that fiscal year.
Eric Adams
“We now have a situation where more people are arriving in New York City than we can immediately accommodate, including families with babies and young children,” Adams said.
“Once the asylum seekers from today’s buses are provided shelter, we would surpass the highest number of people in recorded history in our city’s shelter system.”
Behind this unwanted influx lies Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
By May 1, 2025, Texas had spent more than $229 million busing illegal aliens found in Texas to famously liberal supporters of illegal immigration: Washington D.C., New York City and Chicago.
Abbott announced the program on April 13, 2024, as his response to the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
Greg Abbott
In October, 2023, New York City had 90,578 people in its shelter system. Thousands of these are American citizens who are homeless. They are competing for assistance with illegal aliens who were bused to New York City from the southern border since April, 2022.
Three Communist-ruled countries—Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba—are responsible for this huge surge in illegal aliens and their continuing drain on America’s schools, housing and hospitals (among other facilities).
Rising levels of repression, food shortages and economic stability are motivating Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans to enter the United States. And assisting them is the longtime policy of the United States government to automatically accept those leaving Communist countries as refugees.
At some point, the United States must face the economic and social absurdity of allowing some cities and states to provide sanctuary to every illegal alien who appears.
Even Eric Adams, emphasizing that New York City remains a sanctuary city, warned it could not cope with such an overwhelming influx of migrants:
“We are not telling anyone that New York can accommodate every migrant in the city. We’re not encouraging people to send eight, nine buses a day….We’re saying that as a sanctuary city with right to shelter, we’re going to fulfill that obligation. That’s what we’re doing.”
Abbott clearly believes he has the right to inflict thousands of illegal aliens on other states. And illegal aliens clearly believe they have the right to demand unlimited access to the United States.
At some point, America must stop allowing itself to be a dumping-ground for other countries’ unwanteds.
* * * * *
An “open door” policy proved essential 250 years ago, when most of America was unsettled and largely unpopulated.
But the United States is no longer a largely unpopulated, agricultural country. Most of its population lives in coastal cities—which is where most illegal aliens tend to settle as well.
Space is limited in schools, hospitals and housing, and the more people who cram into limited spaces, the more frictions they inevitably create.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, Entertainment, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on June 15, 2026 at 12:10 am
“America needs the outsider Trump to do what normal politicians would not and could not do.”
That was the assertion made by Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, in Palo Alto, California.
Among his bestsellers on military history:
- The Second World Wars
- Carnage and Culture
- Wars of the Ancient Greeks
- The Western Way of War
- The Soul of Battle: How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyranny
Victor Davis Hanson
In 2019, Hanson turned his attention to politics—specifically, The Case for Trump.
Its dust-jacket provides a useful summary of its contents:
“This New York Times bestselling Trump biography from a major American intellectual explains how a renegade businessman became one of the most successful—and necessary—presidents of all time.
“In The Case for Trump, award-winning historian and political commentator Victor Davis Hanson explains how a celebrity businessman with no political or military experience triumphed over sixteen well-qualified Republican rivals, a Democrat with a quarter-billion-dollar war chest, and a hostile media and Washington establishment to become president of the United States — and an extremely successful president.
“Trump alone saw a political opportunity in defending the working people of America’s interior whom the coastal elite of both parties had come to scorn, Hanson argues. And Trump alone had the instincts and energy to pursue this opening to victory, dismantle a corrupt old order, and bring long-overdue policy changes at home and abroad.”
Hanson’s book appeared before Trump:
- Tried to coerce Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to smear former Vice President Joseph Biden, who was likely to be his Democratic opponent in the 2020 Presidential election.
- Allowed the deadly COVID-19 virus to ravage the country, killing more than 400,000 Americans by the time he left office.
- Attacked medical experts and governors who urged Americans to wear masks and socially distance to protect themselves from COVID-19.
- Ordered his Right-wing followers to defy states’ orders to citizens to stay-at-home and wear masks in public to halt surging COVID-19 rates.
- Became the first President in American history to refuse to accept the results of a Presidential election.
- Tried to overturn the November 3, 2020 election of Joe Biden through 60 lawsuits and the arm-twisting of several state lawmakers.
- Sent a mob of his fanatical followers to attack the United States Capitol Building. Their mission: Stop the counting of Electoral College ballots certain to give Biden the victory.
- Was twice impeached during his four years in office—the only President to be impeached twice (and acquitted by a Republican Senate which ignored his litany of crimes).
But his book appeared after Trump had:
- Fired FBI Director James Comey for pursuing ties between Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign and Russian Intelligence agents.
- Tried to fire Independent Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who was assigned to investigate those ties after Trump fired Comey.
- Attacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions for refusing to fire Mueller.
- Attacked the integrity of Federal judges whose rulings he disagreed with.
- Gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak highly classified CIA Intelligence about an Islamic State plot to turn laptops into concealable bombs.
- Amassed an infamous record as a serial liar, in both personal and Presidential matters.
- Attacked the integrity of the American Intelligence community.
- Sided with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin against the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency which unanimously agreed that Russia had subverted the 2016 Presidential election.
- Repeatedly attacked the nation’s free press for daring to report his growing list of crimes and disasters, calling it “the enemy of the American people.”
- Branded America’s longtime ally, Canada, as “a national security threat.”
- Praised brutal Communist dictators Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
- Shut down the Federal Government for 35 days because Democrats refused to fund his ineffective “border wall” between the United States and Mexico.
- An estimated 380,000 government employees were furloughed and another 420,000 were ordered to work without pay. The shutdown ended due to public outrage—without Trump getting the funding amount he had demanded.
So much for Hanson’s claims that Trump had been “one of the most successful—and necessary—presidents of all time.”
Donald Trump
Then there’s Hanson’s claim that “Trump alone saw a political opportunity in defending the working people of America’s interior whom the coastal elite of both parties had come to scorn.”
In November, 2017, Trump and a Republican-dominated House and Senate rammed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 through Congress. It became law on December 22, 2017.
According to Chye-Ching Huang, Director of Federal Fiscal Policy, the law did nothing to help ordinary Americans.
Testifying before the House Budget Committee on February 27, 2019, Huang stated that the law:
- Ignored the stagnation of working-class wages and worsened inequality;
- Weakened revenues when the nation needed to raise more;
- Encouraged rampant tax avoidance and gaming that will undermine the integrity of the tax code;
- Left behind low- and moderate-income Americans—and in many ways hurt them.
For American corporations, however, the law was a godsend:
- Cutting the corporate tax rate from 35 to 21 percent;
- Shifting toward a territorial tax system, where multinational corporations’ foreign profits go largely untaxed;
- Benefitting overwhelmingly wealthy shareholders and highly paid executives.
This was hardly an attempt at “defending the working people of America’s interior.”
Trump never made another attempt to “reform” the tax laws.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, Entertainment, History, Politics, Social commentary on May 27, 2026 at 12:10 am
On July 14, 2025, after returning from a multi-week break, Stephen Colbert, host of CBS’ Late Night With Stephen Colbert, said: “While I was on vacation, my parent corporation, Paramount, paid Donald Trump a $16 million settlement over his ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit.
“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles—it’s big fat bribe.”
Meanwhile, Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS Network, wanted to merge with Skydance Media.
For this, it needed the regulatory permission of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the Trump administration.
On July 17, CBS cancelled the highest-rated late-night show on television with 2.4 million nightly viewers. It had also been nominated for 33 Emmys.
Addressing his in-house and television audience on July 17, Colbert announced: “I want to let you know something that I found out just last night. Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending The Late Show in May.
“It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of The Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”
In a statement, Paramount/CBS called the cancellation a purely financial decision: “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
Colbert did not directly accuse his bosses of bowing to pressure from the FCC. But he did offer this insightful comment: “Less than two years before they called to say it’s over, they were very eager for me to be signed for a long time. So, something changed.”
What “changed” was that after CBS cancelled one of Trump’s biggest critics, the merger between Paramount Global and Skydance Media was quickly approved by the FCC.
David Letterman had hosted The Late Show with David Letterman from August 30, 1993, until his retirement on May 20, 2015. In a May 5, 2025 interview with the New York Times, he didn’t mince words about what he felt was behind the cancellation:
Colbert “was dumped because the people selling the network to Skydance said, ‘Oh no, there’s not going to be any trouble with that guy. We’re going to take care of the show. We’re just going to throw that into the deal. When will the ink on the check dry?'”
CBS is one of the most profitable broadcast networks in the United States, through massive advertising revenue, affiliate fees, and sports broadcast rights.
Yet the owners of its parent company, Paramount Global—whose revenue stood at $29.2 billion in 2024—felt they could enrich themselves even more by acquiring Skydance Media.
And if siding with a dictatorial administration to strike a blow at freedom of speech was necessary to make the deal go forward, so be it.
The Ed Sullivan Theater, where Stephen Colbert reigned for 11 years
Ajay Suresh from New York, NY, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Disney didn’t reinstate Jimmy Kimmel Live! out of a steadfast commitment to the First Amendment. It did so only after a massive public backlash led to a widespread boycott of subscriptions to Disney+ and Hulu—and a steep drop in Disney’s stock value.
Stephen Colbert had no such reprieve. But he never—at least not in public—lost his poise. He often joked about the upcoming end of his show, endured jokes from his guests about it—and never stopped speaking truth to power at the expense of the Trump administration.
“The only choice you have is how to walk through it,” said his friend and mentor, Jon Stewart, as he and Colbert gazed into a fictitious green wormhole. “You can go in kicking and screaming. Or you can do what you’ve done for the past 30 years when faced with something dark: You stare it down and you can laugh.”
On his last night as host of The Late Show Colbert did exactly that, turning what could have been a mournful event into a celebration of joy and defiance.
Stephen Colbert Signs off “Late Show” with Emotional Goodbye https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znec-DIff8o
There had been speculation that Colbert, a devout Catholic, might book Pope Leo XIV for his final show. So Colbert turned it into a gag. He pretended that he was about to bring out the pope for an interview—only to be told the Pontiff was refusing to come out of his dressing room.
“We got him the wrong snacks,” an unidentified voice informed him.
“Who’s going to be my last guest now?” asked Colbert—to be answered by Paul McCartney: “Hey, Stephen, what about me?”
Massive applause resounded as the former Beatle walked onstage.
Stephen Colbert and Paul McCartney
McCartney not only served as Colbert’s last interview guest but as his musical one as well. And McCartney led the band—and the audience—in a rousing number of “Hello, Goodbye,” the Beatles’ 1967 hit:
You say goodbye and I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Hello hello
I don’t know why you say goodbye, I say hello
Members of the audience—probably including relatives of the show’s cast—swarmed onto the stage to join McCartney, Colbert and the band in what was an act of celebration and defiance: “When faced with something dark, you stare it down and you can laugh.”
Thus Stephen Colbert went gentle—and triumphant—into that good night.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, Entertainment, History, Politics, Social commentary on May 26, 2026 at 12:05 am
…A truly great man is ever the same under all circumstances. And if his fortune varies, exalting him at one moment and oppressing him at another, he himself never varies, but always preserves a firm courage, which is so closely interwoven with his character that everyone can readily see that the fickleness of fortune has no power over him. —Niccolo Machiavelli, The Discourses
Watching the last episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert was like watching a slow-motion execution—where the victim turns his demise into a rousing revival meeting.
That episode, shown on Thursday, May 21, capped a hugely successful run of 10 years and eight months (September 8, 2015 to May 21, 2026). Broadcast on CBS against ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Late Night ranked as the highest-rated American late-night talk show.
And it held that ranking for nine consecutive seasons, marking the longest such streak in franchise history.
Stephen Colbert
But for all the adoring fans Colbert attracted during those years, he acquired one enemy who never forgot or forgave the slightest insult. And from 2015 onward, Colbert showered him with humorous, deadly accurate insults calculated to get under his paper-thin skin and stay there.
That enemy was Donald J. Trump.
Colbert started throwing thousands of barbs at Trump immediately after the real estate mogul launched his first campaign for President on June 16, 2015. These focused on Trump’s appearance, intelligence, family, policy shifts, criminality, legal troubles and commercial ventures.
Among the barbs:
- “It’s true, this [Iran] war reached all of its objectives. It’s been weeks since anyone mentioned the Epstein files.”
- After Trump threatened to destroy Iran but then agreed to a brief pause, Colbert paraphrased John Lennon’s famous peace anthem, singing: “All we are saying, is peace for two weeks.”
- “For my MAGA viewers. The Trump golden cell phone has FINALLY arrived after a nine month delay. And it SUCKS. The only Trump item more disappointing after a nine-month wait was Eric!”
- Colbert often joked about Trump’s short attention span, comparing his mind to “nature’s most cunning opponent, the goldfish.”
- Following Trump’s 34 felony convictions on May 30, 2024, for falsifying business records, Colbert joked that Trump had “more felonies than Baskin-Robbins has flavors.”
Donald Trump
Colbert had a biting wit that never flinched at speaking truth to—and about—power. But Trump had a weapon that Colbert couldn’t match: Command of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
And in its chair, Brendan Carr, he had a crony willing to destroy any network that dared to offend his thin-skinned boss, Donald Trump.
Knowing Trump’s animosity toward nonwhites, Carr has brutally attacked any network-related company promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). He ordered investigations into Comcast and the Walt Disney Company and threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcast license over the practices.
On September 10, 2025, Right-wing propagandist Charlie Kirk was shot at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.
In September 2025, Carr pressured Disney, which owns ABC, to suspend comedian Jimmy Kimmel over comments he had made about the assassination. On September 17, Disney caved and suspended Kimmel.
Brendan Carr
Kimmel had actually called the murder “senseless.” What enraged Right-wing Americans was Kimmel’s noting that “the MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
This was actually true—and all the more embarrassing to Republicans because of it. The Trump administration and its MAGA cult have tried to portray Tyler Robinson, the man accused of shooting Kirk, as a radical liberal.
He is not.
Debbie Robinson, his grandmother, said most of the family are Republicans—and that Tyler’s father, Matt, is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump.
Disney/ABC reinstated The Jimmy Kimmel Show on September 23 after a massive public backlash, a steep drop in Disney’s stock value, and a widespread Hollywood boycott.
Unable to remove Kimmel, Carr moved on against Colbert in a more subtle manner.
He knew that Paramount Global wanted to merge with Skydance Media. And Paramount is the parent company of CBS Network, which hosted The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
Jimmy Kimmel
Paramount had recently paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit he had brought against the CBS news show, 60 Minutes. He claimed that it had misleadingly edited a pre-election interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris to boost her election chances in 2024. CBS’ attorneys and a number of legal experts had said that the lawsuit was “completely without merit.”
On July 14, 2025, after returning from a multi-week break, Colbert said: “While I was on vacation, my parent corporation, Paramount, paid Donald Trump a $16 million settlement over his ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit.
“As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended. And I don’t know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company, but just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.
“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles—it’s big fat bribe.”
Colbert didn’t know it, but the axe was about to fall.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Military, Politics, Social commentary on May 22, 2026 at 12:05 am
Ask the average person, “What do you think of Niccolo Machiavelli?” and he’s likely to say: “The devil.”
In fact, “The Old Nick” became an English term used to describe Satan and slander Machiavelli at the same time.
Niccolo Machiavelli
The truth, however, is more complex. Machiavelli was a passionate Republican, who spent most of his adult life in the service of his beloved city-state, Florence.
The years he spent as a diplomat were tumultuous ones for Italy—with men like Pope Julius II and Caesare Borgia vying for power and plunging Italy into one bloodbath after another.
Florence, for all its wealth, lacked a strong army, and thus lay at the mercy of powerful enemies, such as Borgia. Machiavelli often had to use his wits to keep them at bay.
Machiavelli is best-known for his writing of The Prince, a pamphlet on the arts of gaining and holding power. Its admirers have included Benito Mussolini and Joseph Stalin.
But his longer and more thoughtful work is The Discourses, in which he offers advice on how to maintain liberty within a republic. Among its admirers were many of the men who framed the Constitution of the United States.
Most people believe that Machiavelli advocated evil for its own sake.
Not so. Rather, he recognized that sometimes there is no perfect—or perfectly good—solution to a problem.
Sometimes it’s necessary to take stern—even brutal—action to stop an evil (such as a riot) before it becomes widespread:
“A man who wishes to make a profession of goodness in everything must inevitably come to grief among so many who are not good. And therefore it is necessary for a prince, who wishes to maintain himself, to learn how not to be good, and to use this knowledge and not use it, according to the necessity of the case.”
His counsel remains as relevant today as it did during his lifetime (1469 – 1527). This is especially true for politicians—and students of political science.
But plenty of ordinary citizens can also benefit from the advice he has to offer—such as those in business who are asked to give advice to more powerful superiors.
Machiavelli warns there is danger in urging rulers to take a particular course of action: “For men only judge of matters by the result, all the blame of failure is charged upon him who first advised it, while in case of success he receives commendations. But the reward never equals the punishment.”
This puts would-be counselors in a difficult position: “If they do not advise what seems to them for the good of the republic or the prince, regardless of the consequences to themselves, then they fail to do their duty.
“And if they do advise it, then it is at the risk of their position and their lives, for all men are blind in thus, that they judge of good or evil counsels only by the results.”
Thus, Machiavelli warns that an adviser should “take things moderately, and not to undertake to advocate any enterprise with too much zeal, but to give one’s advice calmly and modestly.”
The person who asked for the advice may follow it, or not, as of his own choice, and not because he was led or forced into it by the adviser.
Above all, the adviser must avoid the danger of urging a course of action that runs “contrary to the wishes of the many.
“For the danger arises when your advice has caused the many to be contravened. In that case, when the result is unfortunate, they all concur in your destruction.”
Or, as President John F. Kennedy famously said after the disastrous invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in April, 1961: “Victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.”
John F. Kennedy
By “not advocating any enterprise with too much zeal,” the adviser gains two advantages:
“The first is, you avoid all danger.
“And the second consists in the great credit which you will have if, after having modestly advised a certain course, your counsel is rejected, and the adoption of a different course results unfortunately.”
Finally, the time to give advice is before a catastrophe occurs, not after. Machiavelli gives a vivid example of what can happen if this rule is ignored.
King Perseus of Macedon had gone to war with Paulus Aemilius—and suffered a humiliating defeat. Fleeing the battlefield with a handful of his men, he later bewailed the disaster that had overtaken him.
Suddenly, one of his lieutenants began to lecture Perseus on the many errors he had committed, which had led to his ruin.
“Traitor,” raged the king, turning upon him, “you have waited until now to tell me all this, when there is no longer any time to remedy it—” And Perseus slew him with his own hands.
Niccolo Machiavelli sums up the lesson as this:
“Thus was this man punished for having been silent when he should have spoken, and for having spoken when he should have been silent.”
Be careful that you don’t make the same mistake.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Politics, Social commentary on May 21, 2026 at 12:48 am
May 21 marks the last broadcast of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert—yet another casualty of President Donald Trump’s war on those who criticize him.
According to the 2016 book, One Day We Will Live Without Fear: Everyday Lives Under the Soviet Police State, by Mark Harrison, the secret police (known as the Cheka, the NKVD, the MGB, the KGB, and now the FSB) operates on seven working principles:
- Stop the laughing
- Your enemy is hiding.
- Start from the usual suspects.
- Study the young
- Rebellion spreads like wildfire.
- Stamp out every spark.
- Order is created by appearance.
It’s no accident that the first commandment of dictatorships is “Stop the laughing.” If you’re laughing at a dictator, you’re not afraid of him. And dictators thrive on fear. No less than Trump has said: “Real power is—I don’t even want to use the word—fear.”
Trump routinely hands out insults and threats as though they are birthday gifts. But he’s notoriously thin-skinned about the least sign of criticism—let alone ridicule.
For example: At Christmastime, 2018, “Saturday Night Live” aired a parody of the classic movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Its title: “It’s a Wonderful Trump.”
In it, Trump (portrayed by actor Alec Baldwin) discovers what the United States would be like if he had never become President: A great deal better-off.
As usual, Trump expressed his resentment through Twitter: The Justice Department should stop investigating his administration (for his collusion with Russia during the 2016 Presidential election) and go after the real enemy: “SNL.”
And since being re-elected President in 2024, he has ordered Brendan Carr, his chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), to declare war on “woke” (i.e., liberal-leaning) corporations.
Knowing Trump’s animosity toward nonwhites, Carr has brutally attacked any network-related company promoting Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI). He ordered investigations into Comcast and the Walt Disney Company and threatened to revoke ABC’s broadcast license over the practices.
Brendan Carr
In September 2025, Carr pressured Disney, which owns ABC, to suspend comedian Jimmy Kimmel over comments he had made about the assassination of Rightwing propagandist Charlie Kirk.
Kimmel had actually called the murder “senseless” and noted how “the MAGA gang [was] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
Disney/ABC reinstated The Jimmy Kimmel Show after a massive public backlash, a steep drop in Disney’s stock value, and a widespread Hollywood boycott.
Unable to remove Kimmel, Carr moved on against another anti-Trump humorist.
Paramount Global was worth $9.25 billion. Nevertheless, it wanted to merge with Skydance Media, whose worth was valued at $4.75 billion.
Paramount is the parent company of CBS Network, which hosted The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
Colbert, who had hosted the show since 2015, had been a fierce Donald Trump critic since the former real estate developer announced his first run for President.
Stephen Colbert
Paramount had recently paid Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit he had brought against the CBS news show, 60 Minutes. He claimed that it had misleadingly edited a pre-election interview with then Vice President Kamala Harris to boost her election chances in 2024.
CBS’ attorneys and a number of legal experts had said that the lawsuit was “completely without merit.”
On July 14, 2025, after returning from a multi-week break, Colbert said: “While I was on vacation, my parent corporation, Paramount, paid Donald Trump a $16 million settlement over his ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit.
“As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended. And I don’t know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company, but just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.
“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles—it’s big fat bribe.”
Meanwhile, Paramount was in the midst of an $8 billion sale to the Hollywood studio Skydance Media. For this, it needed the regulatory permission of the FCC of the Trump administration.
So it’s easy to draw a straight line from the FCC to Paramount to CBS to The Late Show With Stephen Colbert to see how easy it was for Paramount/CBS to cancel—on July 17—the highest-rated late-night show on television with 2.4 million nightly viewers. It has also been nominated for 33 Emmys.
In a statement, Paramount/CBS called the cancellation a purely financial decision: “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
Which of course it was, since the merger was quickly approved by the FCC.
Addressing his in-house and television audience on July 17, Colbert announced: “I want to let you know something that I found out just last night. Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending The Late Show in May.
“It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”
A frequent theme of the classic CBS show, The Twilight Zone, was: Deal with the Devil—and you’ll get burned.
Paramount may learn the truth of this in its future dealings with the Trump administration.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Military, Politics, Social commentary on May 19, 2026 at 12:10 am
On April 29, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth appeared before Congress for the first time since President Donald Trump-–in concert with Israel—launched a series of devastating airstrikes against Iran.
During the hearing, the Pentagon revealed that the war so far had cost $25 billion. The fighting is on hold, but the military maintains its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz.
Early on in his testimony, Hegseth said the threat of Iran paled in comparison to one posed by Democrats: “The biggest challenge, the biggest adversary we face at this point are the reckless, feckless and defeatist words of congressional Democrats and some Republicans.”
Pete Hegseth
Forget that:
- Iran had effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz—through which 20% to 25% of the world’s oil consumption (about 20–21 million barrels per day) flows.
- As a result, gas prices rose overnight. By late April, the national average for a gallon of regular gas reached $4.02 to $4.04, compared to roughly $2.98 before military operations began.
- On April 5—Easter Sunday, no less—Trump posted on his website, Truth Social: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open up the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
- When this threat failed to impress the Iranians, Trump posted on April 7: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
- This implied threat of a nuclear holocaust led legal experts and international organizations such as Amnesty International to warn that attacking civilian infrastructure would constitute war crimes under international law.
Donald Trump
Implicit in Hegseth’s charge—and attitude—was the message: “It’s Democrats’ fault that we’re not winning the war that we—and Israel—started on February 28. And that a war that was supposed to last six weeks at most has now dragged on for two months—with no end in sight.”
It’s possible that the highly combative Hegseth had a specific remedy in mind for such criticism—one that had been applied by Nazi Germany to those who who doubted the “final victory” of the war that Adolf Hitler had started.
Those who did so—or openly criticized the need for the war or the genocidal way it was being fought—faced two ways of dying: Beheading or hanging.
So long as the Third Reich was winning—or at least in possession of actual German territory—the punishment of beheading was carried out upon conviction by kangaroo courts.
But when the Reich was immediately facing invasion—from the West by American and British forces, and from the East by Russian ones—there often wasn’t time for pseudo-legal folderol. Roving bands of Schutzstaffel (SS) or Wehrmacht troops openly shot or literally strung up such “traitors” from lamp posts.
Certainly Hegseth’s attitude reflected that mentality, as this exchange with Rep. John Garamendi (D-CA) revealed:
GARAMENDI: The president has got himself and America stuck in a quagmire of another war in the Middle East. He’s desperately trying to extricate himself from his own mistakes.
HEGSETH: You call it a quagmire, handing propaganda to our enemies? Shame on you for that statement. And statements like that are reckless to our troops.
During the Vietnam war (1965 – 1975) the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon lied repeatedly about the “progress” being achieved. The polite term used to describe this was “credibility gap.”
As a result, “grunts” often sported buttons reading: “Ambushed at Credibility Gap.”
When a nation’s armed forces are winning easy—or even hard-won—victories over an enemy, word quickly spreads through their ranks. When facing defeat—or stalemate—soldiers are equally quick to sense the truth of this.
So Hegseth’s accusation that Garamendi’s accurately calling the war “a quagmire”—at least so far—could not prove a morale-buster for the soldiers fighting it.
Throughout his testimony, Hegseth acted like a man in charge of an inquisition, rather than a public official called on by Congress to answer questions.
A typical exchange between him and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA):
KHANNA (D-CA): Do you know how much it will cost Americans in terms of their increased cost in gas and food over the next year because of the Iran war?
HEGSETH: I would simply ask you what the cost is of an Iranian nuclear bomb.
KHANNA: I’m going to give you that opportunity.
HEGSETH: I would simply ask you what the — you’re playing gotcha questions about domestic things.
KHANNA: No, it’s not. You’re asking — you’re saying it’s a gotcha question to ask what it’s going to be in terms of the increased cost of gas?
HEGSETH: Why won’t you answer what it costs to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb?
KHANNA: I give you that, sir. You don’t know what we’re paying in terms of gas. You don’t know what we’re paying in terms of food. Your $25 billion number is totally off. It’s the incompetence. It’s the incompetence.
What she should have said was: “You’re here to answer questions, not ask them.”
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In Business, Entertainment, History, Medical, Politics, Social commentary on May 18, 2026 at 12:16 am
With the world bracing for a hantavirus outbreak, it’s well to remember the last time a pandemic erupted—in 2020.
On November 8, 1963—57 years before COVID-19 invaded the United States—Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” offered a prophecy of future disaster for the country.
“The Old Man in the Cave” is set in a post-apocalyptic rural town in 1974, 10 years after a nuclear war has devastated the United States.
A nuclear explosion
The townspeople have discovered a supply of canned food. However, they are waiting for Mr. Goldsmith [John Anderson], their leader, to return with a message from the mysterious and unseen “Old Man in the Cave.” Then they will learn whether the food is contaminated with radiation.
When Goldsmith returns, he informs them that the old man has declared the food is contaminated and that it should be destroyed.
Shortly thereafter, three soldiers led by Major French [James Coburn] enter the town and clash with Goldsmith as they try to establish their authority.
French is clearly a precursor of Donald Trump: Demanding instant obedience and threatening death to anyone who disobeys him, he claims he will organize the region to rebuild society..
Donald Trump
French attacks the townspeople’s belief in the seemingly infallible “Old Man in the Cave.” He tells them they have survived these past 10 years—but they haven’t lived.
Fifty-seven years later, Donald Trump will furiously attack not COVID-19 but the medical advice of his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—especially that provided by Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious disease.
He will disdain the wearing of masks and social distancing, and attack those Democratic governors who impose stay-at-home orders to contain the virus. He will offer a series of rosy predictions—none of which come true—that the virus will soon end.
His “cures” include ingesting Clorox bleach and/or having UV light shined up one’s anus.
COVID-19 virus
And French holds himself out as the man who can deliver them a wonderful new future.
Fifty-seven years later, Donald Trump will similarly declare: “I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”
French tempts the townspeople to eat the food Goldsmith warned was contaminated. There is a wild orgy of gluttony as they greedily consume it.
Only Goldsmith refuses to partake in the food orgy.
The townspeople turn on Goldsmith and threaten him with death unless he reveals the identity of the “Old Man in the Cave.” Goldsmith finally takes the assembly to the cave to reveal his source: A computer.
French incites the townspeople to stone the computer with rocks and canned goods until it explodes. Then French leads the people into celebrating their new-found freedom from “tyranny”.
Fifty-seven years later, Trump will similarly incite his followers to attack the United States Capitol building to halt the legal transfer of Presidential power from himself to Joe Biden.
But as Goldsmith had insisted, the “Old Man” was correct: The canned goods were contaminated with radiation. All the townspeople—including French and the soldiers—die, their bodies left lying throughout the streets.
Trump will similarly tempt millions of Americans to ignore the deaths of tens of thousands of their fellow citizens from COVID-19 and the overwhelming of the nation’s hospitals. The result will be a vast increase in deaths.
Many of the businesses Trump hoped to keep open—to ensure his own re-election—will be shuttered.
Only one man survives—Goldsmith, who has refused to eat the forbidden food and somberly walks out of the now-dead town.
As always in a “Twilight Zone” episode, it is Rod Serling who gets the final word:
“Mr. Goldsmith, survivor. An eyewitness to man’s imperfection. An observer of the very human trait of greed. And a chronicler of the last chapter—the one reading ‘suicide’. Not a prediction of what is to be, just a projection of what could be. This has been The Twilight Zone.”
Rod Serling
Except that Serling was wrong: “The Old Man in the Cave” has proven an uncanny prediction of what did happen in America.
* * * * *
The chief lesson to be learned from the COVID-19 epidemic is that catastrophe inevitably results when natural disaster collides with an evil and incompetent administration.
And the man who stands most responsible for the deaths of 400,000 Americans in 2020 is Donald Trump, then the 45th President of the United States.
Under his tyrannical rule, the United States suffered not simply from a lethal virus but a combination of denial, lies, Republican subservience, chaos, extortion, propaganda as news, quackery as medicine, premature demands to “re-open the country,” ignoring the danger and—finally—resignation (“Learn to live with the virus”).
Even after three vaccines were produced, millions of Americans—almost all of them Right-wing Trump supporters—refused to protect themselves and the families and friends they claimed to love.
All of which bodes ill for Americans if hantavirus makes a similar attack on the United States under a second Trump administration.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on April 30, 2026 at 12:18 am
Eighty-one years ago, on March 19, 1945, facing certain defeat, Adolf Hitler ordered a massive “scorched-earth” campaign throughout Germany.
All German agriculture, industry, ships, communications, roads, food stuffs, mines, bridges, stores and utility plants were to be destroyed.
If implemented, it would deprive the entire German population of even the barest necessities after the war.
Opposing him—at first openly, and later secretly—was Albert Speer, his former architect and now Minister of Armaments.
Albert Speer
Speer argued that there must be a future for the German people: “If our enemies wish to destroy us, why help them? We must leave the people something.”
But Hitler refused to back down: “I don’t want to hear any more.”
He gave Speer 24 hours to reconsider his opposition to the order.
Speer could not directly promise to carry out Hitler’s “scorched earth” order. So he gave Hitler a vague answer that essentially committed him to nothing: “My Fuhrer, I stand unconditionally behind you!”
“Then all is well,” said Hitler, suddenly with tears in his eyes.
Adolf Hitler addressing boy soldiers as the Third Reich crumbles
“If I stand unreservedly behind you,” said Speer, “then you must entrust me rather than the Gauleiters [district Party leaders serving as provincial governors] with the implementation of your decree.”
Filled with gratitude, Hitler signed the decree Speer had thoughtfully prepared before their fateful meeting.
By doing so, Hitler unintentionally gave Speer the power to thwart his “scorched earth” order.
Trained as an architect, Speer had joined the Nazi Party in 1931. He met Hitler in 1933, when he presented the Fuhrer with architectural designs for the Nuremberg rally scheduled for that year.
From then on, Speer became Hitler’s “genius architect” assigned to create buildings meant to last for a thousand years. “If Hitler had been capable of friendship,” Speer said after the war, “I would have been that friend.”
In 1943, Hitler appointed him Minister of Armaments, charged with revitalizing the German war effort.
Nevertheless, Speer now crisscrossed Germany, persuading military leaders and district governors to not destroy the vital facilities that would be needed after the war.
“No other senior National Socialist could have done the job,” writes Randall Hanson, author of Disobeying Hitler: German Resistance After Valkyrie.
“Speer was one of the very few people in the Reich—-perhaps even the only one—with such power to influence actors’ willingness/unwillingness to destroy.”
Despite his later conviction for war crimes at Nuremberg, Speer never regretted his efforts to save Germany from total destruction at the hands of Adolf Hitler.
* * * * * * * * * *
Why have Republicans almost unanimously stood by Donald Trump despite the wreckage he has made of American foreign and domestic policy?
Fear—that they will lose their privileged positions in Congress if they don’t.
This could happen by:
- Their being voted out of Congress by Trump’s fanatical base; or
- Their being voted out of Congress by anti-Trump voters fed up with Trump’s appalling behavior.
House and Senate Republicans’ support for Trump hinges on one question: “Can I hold onto my power and all the privileges that accompany it by sticking—or breaking—with him?”
The Original Nazis were guided by Hitler’s belief that the world was polluted by corruption and ugliness—and their mission was to remove that ugliness and corruption.
This meant removing those peoples they deemed inferior—Jews, Slavs (Poles, Serbs, Russians), Communists, liberals, gypsies, the physically and mentally handicapped.
Today’s Fascistic Republicans believe themselves to be the only legitimate political party. And so do their supporters.
No sin—or even crime—is intolerable if it’s committed by a Republican.
In his bestselling 1973 biography, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, British historian Robert Payne harshly condemned the German people for the rise of the Nazi dictator:
“[They] allowed themselves to be seduced by him and came to enjoy the experience….[They] followed him with joy and enthusiasm because he gave them license to pillage and murder to their hearts’ content. They were his servile accomplices, his willing victims.”
Like Hitler, Trump offered his Republican voters and Congressional allies intoxicating dreams: “I will enrich all of you. And I will humiliate and destroy those Americans you most hate.”
For his white, Fascistic, largely elderly audience, those enemies included blacks, atheists, Hispanics, non-Christians, Muslims, liberals, “uppity” women, Asians.
For most of the first three years of his first term, he faced little opposition. What cost Trump the White House wasn’t Democratic or Republican courage but a deadly disease—COVID-19—which Trump refused to take seriously.
Democrats cowered before Trump’s slanders—thereby ensuring more assaults.
Most of the press quailed before Trump. Only a few media outlets—notably The New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post––dared investigate his crimes and blunders.
In 1960, the Russian poet, Yevgeney Yevtushenko, published “Conversation With an American Writer”—a stinging indictment of the cowardly opportunists who had supported the brutal tyranny of Joseph Stalin:
“You have courage,” they tell me.
It’s not true. I was never courageous.
I simply felt it unbecoming
to stoop to the cowardice of my colleagues.
Too many Republicans know all-too-well how it feels to stoop to the cowardice of their colleagues.
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In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Military, Politics, Social commentary on April 29, 2026 at 12:10 am
Since Donald Trump retook the office of President on January 20, 2025, Republicans have lustily supported or remained silent about his litany of criminal, if not treasonous, actions:
- Trump fired the inspectors general—who are charged with protecting the government from waste and corruption—from more than a dozen federal agencies.
- Several career lawyers who worked on the criminal investigations into Trump during the Biden administration were fired by Acting Attorney General James McHenry because he “do[es] not believe that the leadership of the Department can trust you to assist in implementing the President’s agenda faithfully.”
- Trump ordered a purge of about a half-dozen executive assistant directors at the FBI. These were some of the bureau’s top managers overseeing criminal, national security and cyber investigations.
- Their “crime”: Trump blamed them for investigating his inciting the January 6, 2021 coup attempt and his illegal holding of highly sensitive national security documents after leaving office.
- Without explanation, Trump fired Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which protects consumers from unfair, deceptive and fraudulent business practices.
- Following Trump’s executive orders, federal agencies deleted multiple federal web pages and data. Among the agencies: The Pentagon, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Census Bureau. The changes affected content related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), gender identity, public health research, environmental policy and social programs.
- Following Trump’s anti-DEI executive order, the United States Department of Defense (DOD) deleted content that included the achievements of nonwhite groups, such as Navajo code talkers, black Tuskegee Airmen, Medal of Honor winners and women veterans. As in Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union, those that Trump hates are made to disappear from history.
- Trump fired the board members at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and appointed himself as chairman—just as Joseph Stalin made himself arbiter of what was permissible for artists in the Soviet Union.
- Trump held what amounted to an ambush meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House. Siding with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, Trump blamed Zelensky for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
- Trump demanded that Zelensky sign over mineral rights to the United States without America’s providing a security guarantee for Ukraine. Zelensky left without signing such an agreement.
- The Trump-authorized and illegitimate Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by billionaire Elon Musk, dismantled multiple agencies, invaded the privacy of untold millions by accessing sensitive data systems and fired tens of thousands of federal workers.
- Trump filed frivolous and extortionate lawsuits against major news networks CBS and ABC.
- Against CBS: Trump claimed that its news magazine, “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an interview with Kamala Harris to damage his presidential campaign and influence the election. He initially sought $10 billion in damages, then increased it to $20 billion. Paramount, the owner of CBS, agreed to pay $16 million in legal fees and a contribution to the future Trump Library.
- Against ABC: He claimed that its commentator, George Stephanopoulos, falsely stated he was found liable for “rape” in the case brought by columnist E. Jean Carroll. The jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation, but not rape. The judge later clarified that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.
- Nevertheless, in December 2024, ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to a foundation for Trump’s presidential library and $1 million in legal fees to settle the lawsuit.
- Trump solicited and received a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar for use as Air Force One, in direct violation of the Emoluments Clause of the United States Constitution, which prohibits federal officials from accepting gifts from foreign countries.
- The jet will cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars to bring it up to presidential standards, including a security sweep of the entire aircraft and costly upgrades to ensure classified communications. After Trump leaves office, it will be transferred to his Presidential library.
Qatar’s donated plane
John Taggart from Claydon Banbury, Oxfordshire, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
- On February 28, 2026, Trump—in concert with Israel—launched an unprovoked series of devastating airstrikes against Iran.
- On March 11, Trump told a reporter: “You know, you never like to say too early you won. We won. We won the, in the first hour, it was over.”
- But then—to Trump’s surprise and fury—Iran closed the narrow Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20%-25% of the world’s total liquid petroleum consumption (about 20–21 million barrels per day) flows.
- Overnight, gas prices rose. By late April, the national average for a gallon of regular gas reached $4.02 to $4.04, compared to roughly $2.98 before military operations began.
- On April 5—Easter Sunday, no less—Trump posted on his website, Truth Social: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open up the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
- This was followed on April 7 by another post: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.”
- Legal experts and international organizations such as Amnesty International warned that attacking civilian infrastructure would constitute war crimes under international law.
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ILLEGAL ALIENS–THE WORLD’S UNWANTEDS: PART ONE (OF FIVE)
In Bureaucracy, Business, History, Law, Law Enforcement, Medical, Military, Politics, Social commentary on July 3, 2026 at 12:06 am“Good fences make good neighbors.”
Robert Frost penned those famous words in his 1914 poem, “Mending Wall.”
For millions of Americans, illegal immigration was the issue empowering the candidacy of Donald Trump to regain the Presidency in 2024.
For them, Frost’s opening line has become gospel: “Something there is that truly loves a wall.”
A September 16, 2022 article in The Daily Mail headlined:
“America’s $78B Bill for Teaching Schoolkids With Poor English is Rising by BILLIONS in Biden-era Immigration Surge, Study Says, and 76,000 New Language Instructors Are a Tall Order in a Teacher Shortage.”
Among its findings:
These alarming statistics were produced by a study from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).
The 5.1 million students lacking English language skills need help in all their classes.
As a result, it costs 15 to 20 percent more to educate them than American-born students who grow up learning English.
Illegal aliens climbing over the border fence
With the United States facing a severe teacher shortage, some states have lowered their hiring rules to recruit teachers with only a high school diploma.
In 2020, the 5.1 million illegal alien students in public schools cost American taxpayers $78 billion—an $18.8 billion jump from the cost in 2016.
Of those students, 1.15 million were in California, costing the state $19.5 billion. One million more lived in Texas, costing that state $11.4 billion. And 278,000 lived in Florida, at a cost of $3.1 billion.
Only 370,000 teachers nationwide are trained to teach them, and 76,000 more will be needed during the next five years.
Immigration remains a highly divisive issue among Americans. “Red” Republican states want to close borders. “Blue” Democratic states are more open to newcomers.
Yet even famously liberal enclaves of support for illegal aliens like New York are beginning to have second thoughts about taking in unlimited numbers of uninvited foreigners.
On October 7, 2022, then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared a state of emergency in response to the city’s migrant crisis, which he said would cost the city $1 billion that fiscal year.
Eric Adams
“We now have a situation where more people are arriving in New York City than we can immediately accommodate, including families with babies and young children,” Adams said.
“Once the asylum seekers from today’s buses are provided shelter, we would surpass the highest number of people in recorded history in our city’s shelter system.”
Behind this unwanted influx lies Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
By May 1, 2025, Texas had spent more than $229 million busing illegal aliens found in Texas to famously liberal supporters of illegal immigration: Washington D.C., New York City and Chicago.
Abbott announced the program on April 13, 2024, as his response to the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
Greg Abbott
In October, 2023, New York City had 90,578 people in its shelter system. Thousands of these are American citizens who are homeless. They are competing for assistance with illegal aliens who were bused to New York City from the southern border since April, 2022.
Three Communist-ruled countries—Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba—are responsible for this huge surge in illegal aliens and their continuing drain on America’s schools, housing and hospitals (among other facilities).
Rising levels of repression, food shortages and economic stability are motivating Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans to enter the United States. And assisting them is the longtime policy of the United States government to automatically accept those leaving Communist countries as refugees.
At some point, the United States must face the economic and social absurdity of allowing some cities and states to provide sanctuary to every illegal alien who appears.
Even Eric Adams, emphasizing that New York City remains a sanctuary city, warned it could not cope with such an overwhelming influx of migrants:
“We are not telling anyone that New York can accommodate every migrant in the city. We’re not encouraging people to send eight, nine buses a day….We’re saying that as a sanctuary city with right to shelter, we’re going to fulfill that obligation. That’s what we’re doing.”
Abbott clearly believes he has the right to inflict thousands of illegal aliens on other states. And illegal aliens clearly believe they have the right to demand unlimited access to the United States.
At some point, America must stop allowing itself to be a dumping-ground for other countries’ unwanteds.
* * * * *
An “open door” policy proved essential 250 years ago, when most of America was unsettled and largely unpopulated.
But the United States is no longer a largely unpopulated, agricultural country. Most of its population lives in coastal cities—which is where most illegal aliens tend to settle as well.
Space is limited in schools, hospitals and housing, and the more people who cram into limited spaces, the more frictions they inevitably create.
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