A wide ranging piece, albeit one about 2024 at its core:
Another another another "another Humpday Shrapnel post" post post
Humpday news in digestible bites
JEFF GOLDSTEIN
SEP 11, 2024
According to ABC News, “there is no evidence of migrants eating pets.” This in response to claims from locals, and then from conservative media and even Donald Trump himself during last evening’s debate, that Haitian migrants dumped by the multiple tens of thousands into Springfield, Ohio — now over a third Haitian in total populations — are casing local parks for loose meats in the form of pond ducks and migrating geese. Locals are also suggesting that Haitian immigrants are stealing people’s pets and eating them, a charge several leftwing talking heads have labeled “racist,” because of course they have.
The evidence ABC News and other legacy media outlets are citing is a denial from city bureaucrats, which is good enough for them, naturally. A government functionary confirmed what they wanted to hear, so, you know, “debunked!” Except that first hand accounts continue to flood in from Springfield residents, and the Federalist has exclusive police audio and the link to a police report that seems to corroborate many of the claims made by locals.
If you haven’t already read my longer take on the left’s response to the Springfield issue, you can read it here. For today though, what I want to focus on is JD Vance’s response to CNN, who attempted to frame him a rank conspiracy monger, and by extension, to dismiss those people in Springfield who have made their concerns known both to city officials and now, to any media outlet who will listen to them. Which — shockingly! — does not seem to include CNN. Vance’s reply to Kaitlan Collins in instructive:
The media didn't care about the carnage wrought by these policies until we turned it into a meme about cats. And that speaks to the media's failure to care about what's going on in these communities. If we have to meme about it to get the media to care, we're going to keep on doing it.
Good stuff. Meme them into oblivion. And please. Someone go talk Erick Erickson down off the roof and get the dear lady some laudanum and some yellow wallpaper.
About the Presidential debate. I didn’t watch it live. Just couldn’t do it. An ambush was what I expected, and an ambush, by all accounts, was what ABC News delivered. During the debate, however, I was regularly texting with my wife, who was giving me her feedback. She leans conservative, but on a workaday basis she’s way less invested in presidential politics than I. Her thoughts: Harris may have done enough to appear competent, though she dodged most of the questions and was helped out by the moderators, who were in the bag for her. Trump was sometimes disciplined and sometimes not. He got baited a few times, he rambled, he wavered from pedantic to vague, but he ended strongly. Most of the memorable moments of the debate came from him.
This assessment tracks with what I learned following along on X — though Harris coming out and requesting a second debate immediately afterward has me thinking that something in the internals of the Harris-Walz snap polls weren’t what the campaign was hoping for. One potential reason is that Harris was largely scripted, curiously mannered, and the moderators spent most of the time debating Trump for her. In several instances I’ve read about this morning — outside of the Washington Post, which everyone but Alex Berenson seems to know is no longer a news source — response from undecideds has been less than stellar. If Harris hopes to use platitudes and dodge questions as the moderate “joy” candidate, the strategy of laying entirely low may not prove as effective as it did for Biden in 2020. Her attempts to distance herself from Biden Administration policies and her own policies of just a few years ago, came with no attendant rationale. And it appears, at least thus far, that not everyone is buying her transformation from Marxist club girl to buttoned-up Bush Republican.
The saga of Venezuelan gangs taking over Aurora, Colorado highrises has taken another bizarre twist — though not one we shouldn’t have anticipated. Per Chris Rufo and Christina Buttons:
Beginning last year, a large influx of Venezuelan migrants, some of them members of the notorious Tren de Aragua street gang, reportedly had “taken over” a series of apartment buildings in Aurora—and unleashed terror. Last month, Venezuelan migrants were allegedly implicated in an attempted homicide, an arrest of purported gang members, and shocking security footage that showed heavily armed men forcibly entering one of the apartments. In response to the chaos, police mobilized en masse and vacated one of the complexes after the city, alleging code violations, deemed it uninhabitable.
An obvious question: How did members of Venezuelan gangs suddenly find themselves in suburban Colorado? To answer this, we have conducted an exclusive investigation, which leads to a troubling conclusion: the Biden administration, in partnership with Denver authorities and publicly subsidized NGOs, provided the funding and logistics to place a large number of Venezuelan migrants in Aurora, creating a magnet for crime and gangs. And, worse, some of the nonprofits involved appear to be profiting handsomely from the situation.
The story begins in 2021, when the Biden administration signed the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) into law, allocating $3.8 billion in federal funds to Colorado. The City of Denver, which had declared itself a “welcoming city” to migrants, drew on this reservoir of money to launch its Emergency Migrant Response resettlement program, with the goal of housing and providing services to a massive flow of migrants.
Denver, in turn, signed multimillion-dollar contracts with two local NGOs, ViVe Wellness and Papagayo, to provide housing and services to more than 8,000 predominantly Venezuelan migrants. These NGOs are run, respectively, by Yoli Casas and Marielena Suarez, who, according to professional biographies, do not appear to have previous experience in large-scale migrant resettlement.
Nevertheless, the city flooded them with cash.
Response from Democrats and their media flacks has been, well, predictable. There’s no real gang activity at all, we’re assured. Just Republicans pouncing!
But no worries. All this means is that we’re about two weeks away from a second Axios piece, also by Esteban L. Hernandez, in which he argues that, of course Venezuelan gangs are taking over entire apartment buildings — and yes, the whole thing was shadow funded by the Biden Administration — but that’s because diversity is our strength, and plucky Venezuelan gang members are showing spirited initiative, building small businesses in the drug and human trafficking trades that will no doubt bring additional dollars into the community thru more tax revenue, which will go toward better schools and homeless shelters for runaway chihuahuas. They really are the best of us, after all.
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air. “Should Republicans Wet the Bed Over the Debate? Depends”:
Did Trump do what he needed to do? He certainly tried to keep the focus on the Biden-Harris record, in nearly every answer. Trump could have done better on focusing attacks on Harris' flip-flops, which ABC's questions touched on but didn't demand explanations from Harris. He did try to remind voters of her radical past (and likely present), but he could have done more and offered more specifics on those. And for the most part, Trump remained disciplined and avoided personal attacks, even when Muir tried to goad him into a debate over Harris' identity -- a question he should have repudiated entirely rather than engage, even to the limited extent he did.
Trump may not have been effective enough in all of these efforts for that to break through. But then again, he was debating three people on stage, not one, and part of his effort went into responding to Muir and Davis as well.
Fair enough. I think sometimes those of us deeply invested in politics overdetermine certain aspects of that world when it collides with everyday life outside of social media. Casual viewers of last night’s spectacle, some post-debate polling seems to suggest, evidently saw in Trump someone forced to debate three people; a man who was dogged by moderators frequently (and often inaccurately) “fact checking” him, then cutting him off; a man who was angry at the state of the country after four years away from his own largely successful presidency. Harris, alternately, mugged and posed and vogued and sniggered her way through split-screen shots, which only added to the appearance of an orchestrated ambush by the VP and her pals at ABC News. Americans like an underdog — and in this debate, it was clear who the “referees” were pulling for. Or rather, pulling along. So I guess we’ll see. As Gary Kubiak might say, “we’re fixing to find out.”
Meanwhile, over at one of the headquarters of the Deep State:
A former CIA officer and contract linguist for the FBI who received cash, golf clubs and other expensive gifts in exchange for spying for China faces a decade in prison if a U.S. judge approves his plea agreement Wednesday.
Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 71, made a deal in May with federal prosecutors, who agreed to recommend the 10-year term in exchange for his guilty plea to a count of conspiracy to gather or deliver national defense information to a foreign government.
The deal also requires him to submit to polygraph tests, whenever requested by the U.S. government, for the rest of his life.
As the increasingly cartoonish “alt-right” points to Winston Churchill as architect of their present predicament as asshole-end of the human centipede that is “intersectional hierarchy,” less insane people continue to notice how the US is being pushed more and more into an Americanized version of Maoism — which, incidentally, demands you reject Old History and begin again with what is new and woke, led by revolutionaries like, say, Andrew Tate, Candace Owens, some Danish MD who appears to have survived a zamboni accident, or that one dude who takes pictures of himself with sportscars and threw an Only Fans Girl off a roof. To the new “right” woke, Hitler was wronged by the evil allies and their Jew puppet masters. Knowing this, all history that informed the US liberal order and American exceptionalism is suspect. To get back on the righteous path, then, we must start anew, “unburdened by what has been.” It’s Year Zero for the Christian Nationalists. And blood and soil are the coin of the realm.
Sound familiar?
When I told you the alt-right was nothing more than the Klannish flipside of the New Left — regardless of how I mistakenly lumped Trump in with that coterie back in 2016 — I wasn’t just sniffing my own farts.
That I do for fun, on my own time. And before you think to kink shame me, be advised: you’ve never smelled my offerings.
Like butterscotch and Gray Flannel had a baby, my people. Chef’s kiss!
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