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Paul Craig Roberts
Institute for Political Economy
As Immigrant-invaders surge into Blue Cities, Democrats suddenly embrace a Border Wall
As Immigrant-invaders surge into Blue Cities, Democrats suddenly embrace a Border Wall
Glenn Greenwald
Now that Immigrant-invaders are showing up in blue cities, the Democrats have decided to build the racist Trump border wall
It was great when the Democrats could hug the immigrant-invaders at a distance with words, but it is different when the immigrant-invaders get too close
What hypocrites Democrats are.
Watch the full episode here:
https://rumble.com/v3n8lky-live-show-system-update-156.html
Good evening. It’s Thursday, October 5.
Tonight, Joe Biden and his Department of Homeland Security are building a wall on the border, the very same border wall that they and their media allies spent all of the Trump years denouncing as a tribute to white supremacy and redolent of what both the Nazis and Stalinists built.
When it comes to the question of undocumented migrants, everything changed for American liberals. As soon as those immigrants stopped being an abstraction that Democrats could coddle and hug like a plastic toy or a distant mascot, and instead began arriving in large numbers, or sometimes even just small numbers, in the communities, cities and states that Democrats govern and where liberals reside. Indeed, several of the most prominent Democratic governors and mayors this year went from maligning everyone who favored border restrictions as an evil white nationalist who hates brown people – that was when lowly border communities in Texas and Arizona were the ones receiving most of the immigrants and bearing the burden of integrating them – to shrilly complaining about the surge of immigrants and demanding that Biden do more to stop them as soon as they began arriving in New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, and those states and cities became responsible for housing and taking care of those immigrants. It really is that craven and disgusting, the way they just switched from hugging immigrants from a distance to demanding they be stopped as soon as they became their neighbors. Our budgets are being strained by these immigrants, they shouted. We have no room for these people! Keep them away from us!
Biden heard all of those pleas and listened this time because it’s now Democrats and the Democratic Party base being affected by immigration affluent residents of cities and suburbs in the north rather than just the deplorables in the red states. And so, Biden’s Homeland Security last night announced the following in an official decree in the Federal Register:
The United States Border Patrol’s (Border Patrol) Rio Grande Valley Sector is an area of ‘high illegal entry. As of early August 2023, Border Patrol had encountered over 245,000 such entrants attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in Fiscal Year 2023. […] Therefore, I must use my authority under section 102 of IIRIRA to install additional physical barriers and roads in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. Therefore, DHS will take immediate action to construct barriers and roads. (U.S. Federal Register. October 5, 2023)
With the 2024 election approaching, Democrats need to assuage concerns over immigration, especially now that it’s affecting their own voters or the voters they want to attract. At the same time, they can’t afford to alienate immigration groups and other liberal activists by admitting what they’re doing, namely, building the wall that American liberals spent years denouncing as a Nazi landmark. So, the White House is simultaneously announcing the building of Trump’s racist wall while insisting that they’re not really doing it and demanding that the media defend them. We’ll look at this duplicity to bring clarity about what is really going on, but also to demonstrate the defining hallmark of American liberals: they love righteously condemning other people and demanding that other people, the lesser people, make sacrifices and endure burdens, but then scream bloody murder the minute they are the ones who are affected.
Then: One of the nation’s leading experts on Big Tech and antitrust law is a friend of the show, Matt Stoller, who, among other things, is a fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. He’s the author of a highly popular Substack called Big, about monopoly abuses of big Tech and he wrote one of the best books of the 21st century on antitrust law and Big Tech that’s entitled “Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.” We’ll talk to Stoller tonight about a variety of very newsworthy topics not getting enough attention, including the ongoing lawsuit in a federal court right now between the Department of Justice against Google, claiming that Google is violating antitrust laws, as well as a recent lawsuit that is quite sweeping in its scope filed by the Justice Department against Amazon, claiming that Amazon is also violating monopoly laws. Since he worked inside Congress for several years, we’ll hear his analysis about the recent success of Rep. Matt Gaetz making McCarthy the first-ever speaker of the House, to be removed from that position by a vote of the Congress.
For now, welcome to a new as some sort of system update, starting right now.
Biden Builds the Wall
Unless you were hatched out of some kind of a shell within the last 72 hours or last week, you are well aware that American liberals, meaning leaders of the Democratic Party and their media allies, spent most of the Trump years claiming that Donald Trump was a fascist and a white nationalist and essentially a Hitler kind of figure, an unprecedented threat to all things decent. So much so that liberals used to say that about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney not that long ago began insisting that actually Bush and Cheney were patriots, they were noble and kind people, even if they had some policies that liberals disagree with, to isolate Trump as this unique pathogen, this singular threat to all things decent in American democracy. Whenever I would press liberals to explain what is it that Trump did that makes him a singular evil, considering, for example, the fact that Trump was the first American president in decades not to involve the United States in a war – he doesn’t have any Iraq war invasions based on false pretenses on his record, no torture regimes or rendition or due process denials in Guantanamo, he didn’t change the regimes of Syria and Libya and lead those countries as complete bloodbaths and wrecks the way President Obama did.
What is it that Trump did that makes him such singular evil? Almost always, liberals will say that what distinguished Trump from every other American leader, that made him a Hitler figure, was his immigration policies, specifically his desire to build a wall and to prevent immigrants from entering the red states illegally in such large numbers. That is almost always what they will point to. And the fact that Trump’s wall, the wall that he wanted to build to keep illegal immigrants out was a racist wall, a tribute to white supremacy, was something that was stated over and over and over, not by random liberals, but by the leaders of the Democratic Party, by governors and mayors and leading media allies of the Democratic Party. This was gospel: Trump’s wall was driven by nothing except racism and white nationalism and even Nazism.
But now – lo and behold – it turns out that Joe Biden and his administration are building that wall. They’re extending that wall, they’re expanding that wall, the very same wall that Trump wanted to build, that Trump built some of, and that liberals and Democrats spent years insisting was a monument to Nazism. The reason they’re building that wall is that now illegal immigrants, people who are undocumented, are arriving no longer only in border towns and red states like Texas and Arizona and seeking their way into parts of the American South or Oklahoma or even into California, but they’re arriving in the most important cities to liberals, the cities where they inhabit and reside, where liberal elites live their lives. And now that it’s affecting American liberals instead of their political enemies, liberals have suddenly gone from, “We love immigrants” and “Anybody who wants to limit the amount of immigration to a red state is a racist and a fascist” to “Biden, we demand that you do more to keep these people away from us. We don’t have any space for them. We can’t afford to take care of these people.”
So, you see the propaganda already at work. They’re building a wall but CNN has to insert in there that Biden says the wall “is not working” and they change the word from “wall” to “barriers.” But, clearly, what they’re doing is they’re building a wall.
CNN’s headline – what it is now, this weird, Orwellian formulation “Biden says border walls don’t work as administration bypasses laws to build more barriers in South Texas” almost saying, “Biden says, ‘I hate border walls’ at the same time his administration announces they’re going to build more border walls. This is CNN trying to defend the administration by kind of giving up the effort. It’s not a very good effort because the only thing they can really do to help Biden here is to not use the word ‘walls’ but to use the word ‘barriers,’ even though obviously they’re building a wall.
When this headline was first put up this morning, it was much different.
I wrote the headline because there’s a change to Twitter – to X – which the headline no longer appears on the screen, it only shows you the feature photo that the article uses, and you have to click on that to go to that site; so, it’s a change to how X formats its tweets. But here I wrote the headline as it appeared this morning before they changed it to help Joe Biden. And there you see CNN: “Biden administration bypasses 26 federal laws to build an additional border wall in South Texas.”
Do you see what propagandists CNN is? They tried to change it to comport with the Biden administration’s denials that what they were doing was actually what they were doing. But this morning, before the Biden administration realized what a crisis this was going to create, what a reaction this would cause, before they denied building a wall, even though they last night said they were building a wall, CNN didn’t know what else to do and so they told the truth. “Biden administration bypasses 26 federal laws to build additional border wall in South Texas.” That’s exactly what they’re doing: they’re building a border wall, the same border wall that Trump tried to build.
If you look at the article and, again, this article has been rewritten since this morning as well to comport with the Biden administration’s very irrational and naive attempt to try to deny that they’re building a wall. It says the following:
The Biden administration will waive 26 laws to build additional border barriers in the Rio Grande Valley, […] (CNN. October 5, 2023)
Do you see how they won’t use the word wall, even though they did in this morning’s headline? Now they’re saying ‘border barriers,’ which I think is a wall, right? A barrier on the border. That’s called a wall.
[…] according to a notice posted to the Federal Register Wednesday, citing “high illegal entry.” (CNN. October 5, 2023)
So, they had to admit that to justify this expenditure under the law. And they did. CNN goes on:
Construction of the wall will be paid for using already appropriated funds earmarked specifically for physical border barriers, and the administration was under a deadline to use them. But the move comes at a time when a new surge of migrants is straining federal and local resources and placing heavy political pressure on the Biden administration to address a sprawling crisis. (CNN. October 5, 2023)
Do you see how the media is willing to admit there’s a crisis at the border now that not just red state governors and mayors and lowlife deplorables are complaining, but also the nobles in Chicago and New York and Washington?
Border Patrol reported nearly 300,000 encounters in the Rio Grande Valley sector between last October and August, according to federal data. Last month, Border Patrol apprehended more than 200,000 migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, the highest total this year.
President Joe Biden – who, as a candidate, vowed that there will “not be another foot” of border wall constructed on his watch – has been plagued by issues on the border since his first months in office, when the U.S. faced a surge of unaccompanied migrant children that caught officials flatfooted. (CNN. October 5, 2023)
And we’re going to show you that video. He really told The New York Times that. But now, the Biden administration has been plagued by issues on the border, since the first months in office, when the U.S. faced a surge of unaccompanied migrant children that caught officials flat-footed. That was the other part of the claim where I would ask why do you feel justified calling Trump a Nazi. how is he evil, and they would say “The border wall,” but then, they would also say, “Oh, they’re keeping kids in cages. Remember that phrase? It was just kind of a cliché, that slogan, “Kids in cages.”
My favorite moment of the Trump years was when Obama’s star speechwriter Jon Favreau, who now is the host of Pod Save America, the popular liberal podcast, cited Kids in Cages. He went on to Twitter and in classic liberal righteousness language said, “This disgusts me: to see these kids in cages. This is not who we are.” He posted that photo from AP only to turn out that the photo was taken not in 2019 or 2018 under Donald Trump, but in 2014 and 2015 under President Obama. He was asking “What kind of monster could possibly allow a policy like this that puts kids in cages?” reacting to that photo, and the photo was from the Obama years because, of course, the Obama administration detained people trying to enter the country and when they were children, put them in detention facilities, just like the Trump administration did, and just like the Biden administration is doing now. You notice, though, that you never hear any more about kids in cages, even though kids are still in cages – that’s because they were props, they were toys for liberals to exploit. They don’t care about kids in cages at all. At all. So why there’s no melodramatic border visit anymore and no talk of kids in cages?
The Biden administration spent all day denying this report. I’m going to show you what the Biden administration itself last night did and what they did so you can just make up your own mind about whether or not the Biden administration is telling the truth that they now deny they’re building the wall.
Here is from the U.S. Federal Register, which is where official agency pronouncements go; these are the decrees that the executive branch agencies have to issue under the law in order to do the things they want to do. So, for example, under the law, it’ll say Homeland Security is permitted to build border barriers as long as it first decrees in the Federal Register that there’s a crisis at the border justifying the construction of walls. They are required to issue these notices and are not required to act to use the authorities given them under the law in this case, to build a wall. Trump’s wall at the border. And this is what they said to justify it.
The Secretary of Homeland Security has determined, pursuant to law, that it is necessary to waive certain laws, regulations, and other legal requirements to ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads in the vicinity of the international land border in Starr County, Texas.
This is what they want to do. They are issuing this statement because they need to waive certain laws or regulations and other legal requirements so that they can ensure the expeditious construction of barriers and roads at the land border in Starr County, Texas. Does this seem to you that they are saying there’s an emergency and we need to expeditiously build a border wall? Because that’s what it seems to me like they’re saying, because that is what they’re saying. The DHS statement goes on.
Important missions of the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”) include border security. Congress has provided to the Secretary of Homeland Security a number of authorities necessary to carry out DHS’s border security mission. One of those authorities is section 102 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, as amended (“IIRIRA”)
In section 102(a) of IIRIRA, Congress provided that the Secretary of Homeland Security shall take such actions as may be necessary to install additional physical barriers and roads (including the removal of obstacles to detection of illegal entrants) in the vicinity of the United States border to deter illegal crossings in areas of “high illegal entry” into the United States. In section 102(b) of IIRIRA, Congress called on the Secretary to construct reinforced fencing on the southwest border and provide for the installation of additional fencing, barriers, roads, lighting, cameras, and sensors on the southwest border. Finally, in section 102(c) of IIRIRA, Congress granted to the Secretary of Homeland Security the authority to waive all legal requirements that…
Therefore, I must use my authority under section 102 of IIRIRA to install additional physical barriers and roads in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. Therefore, DHS will take immediate action to construct barriers and roads. Construction will be funded by a fiscal year 2019 appropriation through which Congress appropriated funds for the construction border barrier in the Rio Grande Valley, and DHS is required to use those funds for their appropriated purpose. (U.S. Federal Register Notice, October 5, 2023)
So, there is a law that allows Homeland Security to build Trump’s wall, if they opt to declare an emergency at the border, which is exactly what they did, no one forced them to. No one required them to. They did it because the governor and mayor of New York, the governor of Illinois, the mayor of Chicago and the mayor of Washington, D.C., all of whom, every last one of them, spent the Trump years citing the Statue of Liberty and paid all kinds of homage to the beauty of diversity and immigration, before those immigrants started arriving in their cities and states in large numbers. Now that they are, they sound like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, saying ‘Keep these immigrants out of our communities, keep them out of our country.’
In 2020, Joe Biden, when he was campaigning for president, was asked by The New York Times about his views of the border and from his basement – that was during COVID. He didn’t go anywhere at the time – this is what he told The New York Times about his immigration plans.
(Video. Joe Biden 2020 Campaign. 2020)
L. Garcia-Navarro: President Obama was known as the deporter-in-chief for moving more than 3 million people during the Biden-Obama administration […]
Vice-President Joe Biden: You made me president …
L. Garcia-Navarro: I did… [It’s] The Obama-Biden administration. Trump campaigned to build that wall. Are you willing to tear that wall down?
Vice-President Joe Biden: No, there will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration, number one. […]
That’s it. “There will not be another foot of wall constructed in my administration.” Now, yesterday, they issued an order saying we’re going to build more walls. The reason is obvious, they didn’t care when it was their political enemies whose communities had to integrate these immigrants, whose budgets accommodated their needs. Now that they’re arriving in northern cities, suddenly it’s an emergency because the liberals are excellent experts, the world’s greatest experts, at gushing so righteously and nobly about all these elevated concepts of how good they are when it doesn’t affect them or their communities at all when it’s other people who pay the price, and the minute these things start to enter liberal communities, they do a complete 180 and start demanding exactly the policies that before it hit hard affecting them they denounced as Nazism and white supremacy. Let’s listen to the rest of Biden:
(Video. Joe Biden 2020 Campaign. 2020)
Vice-President Joe Biden: […] What I’m going to focus on and here the fact is that somebody in this group has written a lot about the border. I’m going to make sure that we have border protection, but it’s going to be based on making sure that we use high-tech capacity to deal with it. And at the ports of entry, that’s rolling back confiscations.
(Voices overlap)
L. Garcia-Navarro: What about the land confiscations?
Vice-President Joe Biden: It will end. Stop. Done over. Not going to do it. Withdraw the lawsuits. We’re out. We’re not going to confiscate the land.
So that was all before and everything is different now.
A certain congresswoman named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went to the border, or at least she went to a parking lot at the border, and she stood outside of a fence and took a series of photographs showing various degrees of anguish and upset. A lot of you probably don’t know this, but in the world of art galleries, this is referred to as “AOC: a vision in white.” These are very coveted photographs because they show so much passion for people, so much empathy and concern. So, this is in 2019 when she went down – there might have been 2018, but Trump was president, of course – and she put on this whole theatrical demonstration. She hasn’t been down there since Trump was president, she doesn’t care at all about what’s happening at the border. In 2019, AOC tweeted the following – of course, Trump was president:
So, she’d go on to say some Democrats are willing to “compromise and spend billions on a trope Because we’ve accepted some kind of racism as realpolitik in America,” but now that Biden is building the wall, the wall that is based not in fact or evidence, but racism and not evidence-based tropes about immigrants being dangerous, I guess we’ll see whether or not AOC will condemn Joe Biden for being a white supremacist. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you. I think that would be quite dangerous for your health – sure, probably expressing some kind of disturbance just because, even for AOC, this is too much not to bet. She most definitely won’t accuse Joe Biden of being a racist or a white supremacist for building a racist and white supremacist wall.
In August, just a couple of months ago, The New York Times interviewed her.
So many articles on how she’s growing up, our little AOC, growing up into a Washington insider. She promised to disrupt the Democratic Party, but now she’s a team player. She practically boasts about it every day. Just today, she proudly remembered that when she got to Congress, after winning in 2018, it was time to vote for the House speaker. When it got to her, she said Republicans looked at her when she voted for Pelosi for House speaker. They were disappointed, she claims. And so, I posted the segment of the interview I conducted with her in 2018 when she was running for Congress against Joe Crowley. Almost nobody was paying attention, I interviewed her, and I specifically asked her, If you win – and at the time no one expected she would – I said, If you win, do you plan to go to Washington and vote for Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer to continue in their leadership positions? And she told me, “No.” She said, “No, I don’t think it makes any sense for them to continue. They’ve been there too long. It’s time for new people.” Then she gets there and the first thing she left out months later, after promising small donors and voters she would vote against Pelosi, she got there and did exactly the opposite. Now she’s boasting of it on the grounds of what a great team player she is.
But The New York Times noticed the fact that she’d made this very melodramatic trip to the border and yet hasn’t been there under Joe Biden. They asked her, “Why haven’t you been at the border? You said the border was the site of Nazi atrocities. Nothing’s really changed under Biden. So why aren’t you going back and getting in your white costume and taking some more pictures?” And this is what she responded,
NYT: I mean, it doesn’t start at our border. And I know that this has been a right-wing talking point, but I do want to understand your thinking here. Why haven’t you used your considerable clout as a Latina leader to visit the border and highlight the ongoing issues there now, as you did during the Trump administration?
Well, this is something that we’re actively planning on. What I have done is tours of our New York-area facilities. Right now, this crisis is in our own backyard, and we have toured the Roosevelt Hotel, and I think it’s been very important for us to — especially to my constituents, who are demanding accountability on this — to look at that front line that is right here in New York City. (The New York Times, August 30, 2023)
What frontline is in New York City exactly? Unless you’re saying the front line is the difficulty of absorbing immigrants into the city in large numbers, which is what Eric Adams is saying, which is what Governor Kathy Hochul of New York is saying. Is AOC now saying that immigrants are a danger and migrants are a burden, which in the Trump years she called a racist trope?
So anyway, if you’re wondering why AOC hasn’t gone to the border, it’s because she’s too busy on the front line that they wrote about at a hotel in New York.
As a reminder of the sort of thing that was being said about Trump’s wall. Here is one of the most popular liberal op-ed columnists for The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie, in 2019. The title of his op-ed was “Trump’s Wall of Shame.”
So, he said the wall was “a lasting reminder of the white racial hostility stirring this moment.” I wonder if are going to get a Jamelle Bouie op-ed this week saying that Joe Biden is a white supremacist in building a monument to white supremacy.
It’s a monument to white supremacy, just like Confederate monuments, “President Trump’s vision of a massive wall along the Mexican border is about propaganda and racial oppression, not national security.” That’s the same wall that Joe Biden is now building.
There’s a whole other side of this issue, which we want to show you, which is the fact that all kinds of leading Democrats – Democratic governors, Democratic mayors – also spent the Trump years – it wasn’t just AOC and media figures denouncing this wall as white supremacy, as racism, as grounded in the worst of America, our hatred of brown people and our fears of having new people come into the country – You don’t look like us. And now that New York and Illinois and Washington, D.C. are required to raise their budgets to integrate immigrants into their communities in large numbers – immigrants who are undocumented, who are there illegally, who don’t have identification, who don’t have money, who don’t have a home – it is required to house them and take care of them in large numbers, suddenly, they all start sounding like immigration hawks. The exact same people. He went from singing the praises of immigrants and calling people who are concerned about racism to demanding that immigrants be kept out of their states and cities, now that it’s affecting them and their constituents. This is really what liberals are.