Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

I apologize for not doing the vignettes and promo post.  I’ll do it sometime this week.

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of reading of books (mostly mysteries, which are an amazing recreation of every day life and what people thought because their thing is to immerse you in daily life and sound plausible/likely) written in the early 20th century.

The bad ideas that are devouring Western civilization were there before WWI, but it was only after WWI that they took hold of population at large and went viral.

Now, there are tons of reasons for that. Technology allowed for faster, better and cheaper manufacturing, which in turn grew cities and shrunk the countryside, weakening family bonds.  Transportation also became faster, cheaper and easier.

Oh, and we finally had enough surplus that you could be very, very silly without starving to death.

Oh, yeah, and the mass production led to mass distribution of ideas.  The strongholds of transmission of those were immediately seized by the crackpots, who are the people who can devote their entire lives to very silly things.  (I should know.)

None of that, however, justifies the corroding self-hatred of the west.  Posturing against the past generation does not justify deciding every civilization is better than yours, that criminals are the only people worth helping (if you want to study those ideas, and also the protests against them you could do worse than reading Agatha Christie’s They Do It With Mirrors.  Christie was a thoroughly conventional middle class woman, and so her opinions are worth reading.  Though the book was written in the fifties, it “feels” older, because we all preserve something from the times of our upbringing.)

No, that was learned in the battle fields of WWI, where industrial civilization turned to mass killing in batch lots.

The fact the rot took hold in Europe first, where the destruction of WWI was more obvious would support the trauma theory.

Rivers of ink were spilled on WWI, and I haven’t read enough to tell you how much is true, and how much is ideological distortion.

I just know that somewhere after WWI and its echo WWII the bien-pensants in the west switched to thinking loving your country was a sin and that people who loved their country were war mongers.

Perhaps it is a way to justify the cowardice of the chattering classes who hoped the Soviet wolf in its inevitable victory would eat them last.

To my mind the West is still bleeding from a gaping wound inflicted by the long war of the 20th century.

It is important to neither romanticize war nor to demonize it.  War is a function of being human.  Yes, WWI might have been a senseless war (how do I know? All the materials on it have a point of view, and much of the later ones are corrupt) and it was certainly approached in a spirit and in a way that maximized both trauma and numbers of dead.

Was that because Western civilization is inherently bad?

Ah. I shudder to think what other civilizations given the newness of the mass-killing tech would have done.

Is industrial mass production inherently bad?  Well, it lifted most of the world out of famine and dire poverty, so no.  But applied to war it can be horrific.  We simply didn’t (to an extent still don’t) have the technology to fight smarter.

I suspect it’s likely given that stage of civilization and production, the war would have happened, more or less as it did.

And I imagine it would have been worse if it hadn’t happened.

Which is hard to understand, or picture for us.  The path not taken is ever sweeter.  But real life doesn’t work like that.

On veterans day let us contemplate that war is terrible (and to be avoided if at all possible) but it’s not the most terrible thing.

And that sometimes it is needed for people to sacrifice themselves, if not for a cause or an idea, for their homes and those they love.  Or as Heinlein put it “Roman mothers used to tell their sons ‘come back with your shield or on it’.  Then they stopped staying it.  Rome, itself, did not last much longer.”  (Note I’m quoting from memory of the first time I read it which was in Portuguese. Errors of expression all mine, not RAH’s)

To be human (or really animal and from Earth) is to war.  To war is to risk death.  There are things worth dying for, else there’s nothing worth living for.

Our civilization has run away from the idea of things worth dying for (possibly because of the trauma of WWI) and therefore no longer knows what’s worth living for.

On this day let us remember those who gave their lives for home and country, so others could live free and flourish.  Whether we are descended from them or not, their blood shaped the world we live in.

Ours it is to make sure their sacrifice — whether now viewed as futile like WWI or vital like WWII — is not forgotten nor cheapened.  The left cheapens their sacrifice because they don’t understand there are things more important than self.  Things worth risking sacrificing self for.  It’s a strange and myopic view, one that leaves them stranded in a formless world in which only the wants and transient wishes of the self count.

We do not know, yet, the ramifications of the wars of the 20th century.  It is therefore impossible to know which were vital or which were disastrous.

All we know is that without men willing to fight to protect others, only evildoers would fight — and win — and shape the world in their image.

Those who served and lost their lives are beyond thanking.  But not beyond remembering.

Those who served and fought for my country and made it possible for my country to survive in a world inimical to our ideals and envious of our wealth: you have my gratitude.

May we have many more like you in future generations, and not suffer the fate of Rome.

You know, I know, everyone with a basic understanding of reality knows that it’s impossible — even given truly bad practices and lack of ballot custody — that every time ballots are “found” they are uniformly for the democrats.

You know, I know, everyone knows that not only is election integrity in the US so bad it would make camel herders blush, but we joke about it.  We’ve been joking about it since I was first in country.  Chicago is a byword, but we’re starting to get a feeling the practices of Chicago are more or less universal.  In America all the dead are rising and voting… democrat.

And our opponents are okay with that.  They’re fine and dandy with that.  They’re fine with busing people from precinct to precinct to vote fraudulently.  And they’ve done everything they can for maximum fraud and maximum deniability: vote by mail, early voting, same day registration.  Dear Lord, the voting integrity was bad in the 90s, now it’s ludicrous.

And they’re okay with that because their RELIGIOUS fervor in their political credo tells them that we have the upper hand — never mind that we don’t — due to “institutional bias”.  Their enormous racism leads them to believe no system designed by “dead white men” can be fair.  Sure, they don’t see the logical inconsistencies, but their literature and “studies” professors taught them to see all sorts of things that aren’t there, and to take on faith that the only reason the country isn’t socialist is “white males.”  Their faith also tells them that if the people being oppressed (or self oppressed, or that have internalized white supremacy and patriarchy, or another million nonsense phrases to signify “if you’re not doing exactly what I want, there’s something wrong with YOU.) COULD vote their “true” feelings, they’d vote for the dems/socialists/communists (where on that continuum are most of them now?)

So all they’re doing with their fraud and their transparent corruption is balance the scales.  They giggle gleefully as they do it, because  they think they’re striking one against “the system.”

Only what they’re destroying is our faith that we can live as we want and be left alone.  What they’re destroying is the ability to own property and trade, the same system that made them fat, happy and stupid.  Oh, so very stupid.

We who are grown up, we who know history, we who know when applied to the real world their illusions bring only death and mass graves, know they’d be the first in those mass graves if they won, pushed there by their comrades.

We can’t let them win.

But we don’t move.

We don’t move — and some of us, ludicrously, try to pretend fraud isn’t happening. BAH! — because the minute it’s out in the open, the minute the music plays and the dance starts, there’s no turning back.  We like our lives, we love our country. We don’t want to see it riven.

The idiot children — even those older than I — take our silence, our horrified immobility for an admission that what they’re doing is right and just, that it’s a balancing of the scales, that we OWE them.  And they grow ever more crazy and blatant.

We’re still quiet, but anger is growing.  This year more than ever, as the dems prepare to STEAL three senatorial races, without so much as a fig leaf, people all over the country have gone strangely quiet, and in private, horrifyingly angry.

This only ends one way, and the left, ever incapable of forecasting a different result of their actions than what they’ve experienced before, keeps pushing and pushing and pushing.

If you’re a believer pray, pray very constantly that a miracle occurs, that a legal solution is found, that our vote system is cleaned up, that the lawlessness ends without blood shed.  Pray that our cold civil war remains cold until things change enough that it resolves naturally.

If it goes hot, given my necessity for daily meds, my life expectancy is a year or two.  But that’s not what scares me. What scares me is what comes after.  Our last civil war, emphasizing federal power, made us vulnerable to today’s mess.

But there are worse things than personal death.  And there are more horrible things than war.

Take a deep breath. Take stock of your preparedness, your ability to survive.

Take a deep breath.  This weekend, enjoy your life, your family, and this fractured, tentative pause.

Before the music starts and we must dance.

I was thinking of the village today.  No, not with any great nostalgia, (except the nostalgia every middle aged person feels for the innocence of childhood.  Also, I miss grandma) and I realized that their narrative in the head was as simplified and as erroneous as any we see among millennials.

Sure, it was a different narrative. And in many ways more functional.

They studied history in school — fourth grade was mandatory — but somehow emerged with the idea that Catholicism was the FIRST religion ever. (Not just the first Christian flavor.) That Portugal was the most developed and best country in the world. That they were, in a way, chosen people.

There were a ton of other things in the “narrative and picture of the world in head” which included, but was not limited to, stuff on how and when to plant, how we wore our clothes, what we ate when, etc, etc, etc world without end.

My family was slightly askew to this: better educated, and HONESTLY just odd.  We didn’t function the same way.  But most of us faked it well enough to fit the general framework.  Well, maybe excepting me.  The village didn’t know what to make of me in their framework, so I ended up being painted by rumor as either the red woman of Babylon (which was hilarious, since I got kissed the first time at 18) or crazy, or drug addicted.  The rumors flew back and forth in contradiction.  They probably still do among those that remember me, and are left in the village.

And yeah, the narrative irritated me me as much as the left narrative does, because it wasn’t TRUE.  And being odd, I’ve got a weird passion for the truth, even when it hurts.

But today I was thinking that at least the village’s narrative was functional.  Okay, so, besides the unbending (sort of, when you grow up you find people make all sorts of exceptions, like, having a baby out of wedlock is the end of the world and you’ll be shunned forever.  Uh.  Not.  If you marry later and behave decently, then it will be expunged.  Even if you don’t marry the father of the first baby, people will forget, deliberately and not, and you’ll be an honest woman and mother) moral — and frankly behavioral — rules, which are very helpful for humans in general, because we like to fit in, there was the belief they were part of a great country, contributing to something immortal.

Look, most people in the village were going to live and die there (many my age already have) doing unimportant jobs, and being forgotten except for a name in the family tomb.  But that doesn’t matter, if you feel you’re part of something great, building the next greater and better thing.

People live like that for generations and are happy.  Self-esteem works for cultures. Because humans are creatures of the band and the tribe.  And being proud of your band or tribe encourages to behave better as a human being.

The problem with the millennial head canon, and really with the narrative that has infiltrated the west starting in the 20s and becoming dominant by the sixties, is that it’s a dysfunctional head canon.  It’s a head caonon turned on itself, eating itself from within.

I mean, it’s objectively wrong, too, a-historical and in many ways anti-historical but that’s not what makes it bad.

What makes it bad is that it’s exactly the type of narrative victorious enemies impose on the conquered (partly because it’s the result of Soviet agit-prop, so, exactly that.  Though they never conquered us, they did conquer our academia and education.)

My kids’ history books — and remember the boys are now in their mid-twenties, so this was a while ago — were all based on Howard Zinn. ALL of them. They’re all America is bad, the west is bad, white people are bad.  It’s worse now, from what I hear from younger friends.

Day after day, week after week, month after month,school year after school year your kids in public school and most private schools, honestly, are bathed in a sea of “you’re bad, the culture who created you is bad.  You’re bad for being born. You’re bad for being American.  Europeans are bad. Being rich is bad. Being comfortable is bad. Being happy is bad.”

Honestly, I’m surprised at how many kids shrug it off and go on to be happy and productive.  What is no surprise are the multiple tatooed, gender fluid, no hope of ever being anything but a mental patient numbers they turn out.  Anyone who has studied the history of a conquered country recognizes the dysfunction.

Kids find only ONE refuge: to be a victim.  Because that exonerates them.  Hence why victimhood is now the supreme good.  Which is dysfunctional, too, because victims can’t be happy or successful and must be held down forever.

One way to reject that narrative is what Europe is taking more and more, and I expect any minute now will take them to jackboots.

Europeans are as muttish as we are. They’re a mix and mingle of most of Europe.  Oh, Southern Europeans are MOSTLY Southern Europeans, and ditto North Europeans.  But not always.  Remember all those wars and invasions? the treaties? the traders? even the royal visits?  Yeah.  Primly “Every contact leaves a trace.”

But that’s not how they think of themselves.  Until very recently, and still now, but not out loud, they thought of themselves as separate RACES.  The Portuguese race, the English Race, the Irish Race, etc.

They’re defaulting to that.  Partly because they have to.  They’ve gone as far down the drain as they can without perishing entirely, and apparently there’s some kind of instinctive fail safe.   And their fail safe is kicking to “blood and soil.”  That’s fine.  I’m not one of those people who insists the solution for everything is the same world over.  Cultures are different.  Really different.  And if their new head canon allows them not to self-destruct, I’m all for it.

Obviously this won’t work for Americans.  It can’t, despite the delusions of a lot of people (a growing number, as the left has divided us into tribes, and doesn’t realize that will create real racism.  Or that accusations of white supremacism breed real white supremacism.)

Americans are not only too visibly mixed, we know it.  And the numbers of minorities (increasingly, thanks to the left anyone who isn’t NORTHERN European in appearance as well as ancestry) are too large to be submerged and subdued.

Besides, for this to happen we’d need to ditch the constitution.  And yeah, sure, the crazies say we should.  But we can’t.  Because that’s what made us a country, and what made us the best thing the Earth has ever seen, lifting up our lamp to lift the world into its most prolonged and absolute era of prosperity and safety for most humans.

But we need a narrative to save us.  Humans don’t really keep the whole world in their heads, as it is, at all times.  They can’t.  That’s not how we’re build.  We need a simple narrative to teach the children, to make them proud of who they are.

Note the first thing the left went after was the stories of greatness: the founders, our brave fighting men, the courage and honor of simple Americans.  They started with “but not…”  And then on the basis of that doubt, they demolished everything, including, ultimately the statues, because these were “slave owners.”  No allowance was made for the past or for their values and society being different, or for doing the best you can in an horrible world.

The same people who excuse all of foreigners, even stoning women to death for taking a ride in a car with a non relative, and dropping walls on gay people, also think it makes perfect sense to excoriate our founding fathers for being men of their time.

Because the conquering culture wants us utterly destroyed.  They don’t care as long as we’re gone.

Raise your children to be Americans.  Tell them stories of our great men and women and our greatness in the world.  When they bring up the vileness taught to them in school tell them those are lies, planted by our enemies, in the long cold war.  Our people aren’t perfect, no one is perfect, but we’re the best damn thing in G-d’s creation.

Without us, the light would go out. Keep the light going.

Teach them that.  Discuss it in more detail as they grow up.  Yeah, explain the flaws in the picture, but explain that the flaws don’t invalidate the picture.  Give them a head canon that emphasizes American greatness and bourgeois virtues.  Tell them the truth about the school — that it’s trying to destroy them. That if they follow the path of the schools they’ll end up dysfunctional and lost.

Build.  Build a healthy head canon now.  And pass it on.  Because without it, we’re going to end up in war and the stories we tell ourselves will be the dystopian crap that has been pushed at sf/f for decades.  (The power of the head canon is such I swear half the people who grew up reading them WANT them. Because it’s what they expected. That’s why prosperity upsets them.)

And while you can escape from physical chains, it’s much harder to escape the self-hatred that chains your mind.

I am a bookish person and my family has always excelled in philosophy which is a required course in Portuguese High School. In a point system that theoretically went from 1 to 20 but in which, practically, 14 was an A and you rarely saw anything higher, Father, brother and I averaged between 18 and 20 in philosophy.  (And history.  And for me in English, but that might be personal.)

Philosophy is a neat thing, because most of it is the study of closed systems.  I.e. people build entire worlds in their heads and the philosophy survives or not depending on how well it describes the real world (and therefore how useful it is to the people to whom it is communicated.)

If you study the history of philosophy, you find that the theories get more and more fanciful as they go, and less and less applicable to anything that means much of anything in day to day life.

I haven’t graphed it — though if I tell husband he probably will.  Lately he’s been spending a lot of time with things like workforce statistics and graphs.  I suspect there will be a post or a series of posts — but I suspect the “the theory is very pretty, but day to day it makes no difference” becoming popular travels along the same curve as human prosperity.

Someone who lives and dies by planting and harvesting doesn’t even have a philosophy.  He has the proverbs that come from experience.  Early to bed and early to rise, you know, and if it’s red in the west the hens get to rest or whatever.  Look, I have no clue.  Grandma, who, though not living from it, got a substantial portion of our food from her vegetable garden was full of these sayings.  “It will be a hard year.  Easter is in March” is the one I remember.  Mom says it differently “Years with Easter in march are years of famine or of great dying.”

Now correlation is not causation.  If Easter is on March 31st as opposed to April 1st, is that cause to be worried? And is this tied to agricultural cycles in Portugal? Or is there some grand cycle we can’t explain and whose mechanisms we can’t penetrate that has that as a side effect? I don’t know.  I know I get vaguely uneasy when Easter falls in March.  And I’ll note it did in 2001.  Which means the crazy hamster at the back of my head got a little crazier.

But when you live close to the bone, in the potential of famine and death, you hold on to these bits of wisdom and don’t try to think of underlying causes. When you have more time on your hands, and finding a crust of bread for the table is not the primary thing on your mind, you have the opportunity to scrute the inscrutable and unscrew the primary cause of the universe.  That great solipsistic cry of “I think, therefore I am” is not the cry of someone who needs to find his next meal, where the imperative becomes “I must find something to eat, or I’ll stop being.”

Even our images of the struggling philosopher — or artist — are not connected to true famine or true conditions of exigency.  The “starving artist” might catch some illness from not eating enough (though in real life he was more likely to catch a disease due to screwing too much, or at least two indiscriminately, but let it stand. Sure, the philosopher or artist is sacrificing for his art, but that is not something people do in a society subject to famines and mass dyings. There you do what you have to do to stay alive.

The problem — okay, one of the many — of the 20th century is that it was the first century (the end of the nineteenth perhaps also, haven’t looked at figures) — where a majority of humanity (at least in the west) was beyond that absolute need to root, hog or die.   You could live better or worse, but you no longer spent your entire life in immediate need.

Thus the great wars of the twentieth century were caused mostly by high flown philosophical theories, often — but not always — slating to a national identity.

The problem with the Nazis was not that they loved Germany.  If a human doesn’t love his homeland (or her chosen homeland.  Shut up or I’ll throw a fish at you) and his tribe, he’s already more than a little mad.  We’re creatures of band and territory. To try to suppress nationalism is to go against human nature, and it can’t be done anyway.  You can suppress nationalism, but then you get tribalism.  And since overcoming tribalism (loyalty to family or those who look like us only) was a great part of what enabled civilization to flourish and get us beyond the need for looking for the next meal, that’s a massive step backwards.  What you can’t do is eliminate the need for the band or the tribe.  Ain’t gonna happen.

The big problem with Nazism was the whole mess of the racial theories.  Not that the Nazis were unique in this respect.  Read any science fiction from the 30s and what you find is a hot mess of “racial hygiene” and other pseudo scientific nonsense.  But the Nazis wrapped it all in German RACIAL superiority (if Germans are a race, I’m a pseudopodous mouse) etc, etc ad nauseum. They marched under the shiny philosophy that if they won the world would be perfect because they were the master race, after all.  Also they could do whatever they wanted to to people of different origins, because those people were not so far distant from animals.

Portugal managed to be national socialist without building vast camps or considering anyone subhuman (or notably hating Jews.  Though frankly, given how emulsified Jewish populations were in the general Portuguese population, Jew-hatred would have depopulated the country.) and “just” making everyone poor and freezing life at around the 1940s. Because in Portugal the philosophy was not that strong.  It was mostly crap-stuff from Rome.  (I learned most Roman “people building” stories in elementary school.) and much chest puffing about how great the Portuguese were because we had the greatest history in the world. It wasn’t great. It was authoritarian, but its death rate was probably no more than is from international socialism: opportunity costs, inventions that weren’t made, the sclerotic national health.  That sort of thing.  Not the digging of mass graves and the piling of bodies like cord-wood.  (Yes, the colonial wars, and Americans tend to be sympathetic to colonies, and I get that.  But if you understand most colonial wars for “independence” or against Portugal were instigated (and often staffed by Cubans) by the Soviets, I don’t think a free country could have avoided fighting, anyway.  Of course when the international socialists were in charge the territories in Africa were handed over to the soviets and their Cuban mercenaries.  What happened then is the type of thing I don’t even like to think about.  I was only 11 and couldn’t have done much about it, even if I understood it, but I still feel I should have. May G-d have mercy on our souls.)

In the same way the problem with the crazy version of socialism that international socialists try to impose was not that it was a form of Russian nationalism, which it really was, if you looked at it at all closely, nor that the Russians were trying to take over Europe.  It was that they tried to take over Europe under the banner of Marx’s just-so stories.  Marx was really a later-day Don Quixote, living without working and expounding ideas already disproved in his time to people as detached from reality and real economics as he was. Which is actually a good metaphor, because those infected with Marx’s internally coherent (before Gramsci got hold of it) theories are incapable of seeing the world as it really is, and go forth fighting dragons that are really windmills for romanticized minorities that are really just people.

Jorge Luis Borges once called Don Quixote the least necessary of books.  Nothing would change if it had not been written.  I think he was wrong.  Don Quixote is a metaphor for the “age of ideologies.”  At the dawn of mechanization, which made abundance and freedom from toil possible, Cervants foresaw how possible it was to get completely detached from reality and beguiled by pretty tales.

The problem with knowing a lot of things that just aren’t so, is that they rarely (if ever) cohere with life-as-it-actually-works.  The day to day world isn’t glamorous, particularly coherent, nor does it inspire one to marsh on, shoulders back and head tilted up in the way of the art of every totalitarian regime ever.

But the made up theories and made up world — particularly in a society consumed by the certainty that everything can be known and proven or disproved by “science” — can be manipulated by people perhaps also beguiled by other philosophies (Marxism is an almost universal culprit these days.)

I never understood why the left in the US consistently identified the right with Nazis, when the “right” in the US isn’t even blood-and-soil, but just “Oh, for the love of bob, leave me alone already” or why or how the left could decide we, mostly small l libertarians (what is known as constitutional conservatives) are “authoritarian.”  And not just me but any number of you have been puzzled at the idea that they think we are sexually repressed, or that we hate sexual minorities, or that we want women to be chained to house and kitchen, or that we are incredibly, fervently religious, or a number of other things.

But the left believes this with such absolute fervor they continuously “attack” us on that front.  Take the rather vomitous naked pictures of lefties saying that they’d “grab us by the vote.”

Look, I was born with no body modesty.  I suspect it’s something in the brain that was just left out of my head.  Yes, it was a Latin country and I’m fairly sure I was sujected to a never end of lectures about how showing my body was immoral, but it was such an alien concept that I don’t remember any but one: a priest who stopped me at 11 or so, when I was climbing a wall in short skirts and gave me a lecture on how all the boys were looking at me.  I remember that one, because if the boys were looking at me… well, I don’t remember it that way and I think we were all too young, and also because at the time it puzzled me so profoundly.  I remember asking mom why anyone would be looking at my legs (at the time tanned and scratched pipe-cleaners) and I remember she didn’t tell me.

Eventually, at 13 or so (and fully developed) I was persuaded not to go out naked in public, that I should wear a bikini top at the beach or I’d be arrested, and that other people put some sort of construction on people going around in the altogether, so I should no longer get up from bed and rush downstairs naked because we had visitors.  (I had hair you could sit on, so I suspect no one ever saw much.  Brother called me Lady Godiva.)

Later, nudist or topless beaches didn’t even make an impression on me.

HOWEVER I’m 56, overweight and my body is shaped by two difficult pregnancies.  I don’t have body modesty, but I have body-shame, because frankly, it ain’t pretty.

Most of the people taking the Grab them by the vote pictures had bodies worse than mine.  They should have had the basic understanding that no one, possibly including themselves, wanted to see them naked.  So what was the point of those icky pictures?

They thought they were shocking us. Because of course we are sexually repressed.  This is, btw the same kind of lunacy that caused them to think at the height of Sad Puppies that Kate Paulk — Kate fricking Paulk who is Aussie by birth and generates triple entendres like she breathes — was too delicate to write the word vagina.

Anyway, we know the left has this image of us in their heads, what most of us never understood is WHY.

I confess I’ve never done a deep dive on the crazy pseudo-scientific bullshit of the twentieth century.  I’m a depressive, okay?  I try not to read things that make me want to slit my wrists.

But yesterday I strayed into a link to an essay that called the 2016 election the “Flight 93” election, i.e. “Storm the cockpit or die”.  You might still die anyway, but it’s your only chance.  I followed it, because the left is STILL foaming at the mouth mad at it.  But you know, the essay isn’t wrong.  It isn’t even slightly wrong.

Anyway, this morning I woke up to write this post (well, A post, I actually didn’t have any ideas) and I’d left that essay up, so I was tempted by one of the links at the bottom.

The post is about Donald Trump and how he isn’t a real authoritarian and books claiming he is.  I don’t need to go into that here, but in the middle of it I found this:

The mid-20th-century creators of the concept of “authoritarianism” appear to have cooked their books. In the pathbreaking work The Authoritarian Personality (1950), the authors—including German sociologist Theodor Adorno, one of the leading lights of the Frankfurt School—created four “scales” measuring anti-Semitism, ethnocentrism, political and economic conservatism, and fascism. All of these indicators, they alleged, do not merely correlate highly, they are inherently connected. If you score high on the scale for one trait, you almost certainly score high on them all. Thus were the hitherto respectable—even fundamentally American—tenets of conservatism, and also the inborn and inexpungable passion of love of one’s own, now “scientifically” linked to anti-Semitism and fascism. Which is to say, to Auschwitz.

Coming in 1950, this was explosive stuff. The Left naturally intuited that here was the perfect moment to forever tar the Right with Nazism.

Nor was that all. The traits that place one on the “F-scale” (for fascist) include conventionalism, aggression, submission (hard to see how these go together, but let’s forge on), superstition, predilection for stereotypes, worship of power and “toughness,” destructiveness, cynicism, a propensity for projection, and—channeling Freud while anticipating the ’60s—sexual hang-ups. All of which the authors identified as mental disorders. Conservatives were not only proto-fascists, but also borderline insane.

The whole apparatus is a high-toned ancestor of those clickbait articles on pop-left-wing websites with headlines like “Study Shows: Conservatives Meaner than Liberals” or “Red State Average IQs 10 Points Lower than Blue.” Which is exactly what it is: “science” twisted to serve and popularize leftist political ends.

What Harvard’s Nathan Glazer said of the original study—“the authors of The Authoritarian Personality seem quite oblivious to authoritarianism on the political left, and so set a precedent for studying authoritarianism without need for unpleasant self-examination”—may not be true to the letter of these present-day updates……

I doubt most of the left knows of this book.  Or perhaps they do, at least the college educated ones.  But that book, digested by the chattering classes and fitting into the wholly made up universe of Marx and the extremely flawed (because mostly based on self-analysis, and that man wasn’t WELL) of Freudianism to regurgitate the certainties the left has about us.  And also the certain that they’re simon-pure and absolutely nice because well… because they think that everyone should fuck wildly (except, of course, if it offends feminists.  They might want to look in the mirror now) and they don’t hate Jews (but they hate Israel with anti-Semitic fervor and now have convinced themselves Jews control everything, but never mind) and they’re not nationalists and in fact despise their own country, and oh, yeah, they don’t want to control the press, except for that icky “right wing” press.

Actually, even in Adorno’s very flawed vision, the left scores high as authoritarian, particularly when you view nationalism as “loyalty to the tribe” which they have in spades, both to the leftist tribe and to whatever subdivision of victimhood they can claim.  The only thing that doesn’t fit, at first blush, is the sexual inhibition one.  But then you get into “all penetration is violation” and “you’re raping me with your eyes” and you’ve arrived.

But the fact is that all this is a bloody pack of nonsense.  Jew-hatred correlates ONLY with authoritarianism BECAUSE a totalitarian state hates all divergent minorities.  In the end they try to beat down every nail that sticks up, including the exceptionally smart, the exceptionally dumb, homosexuals, assexuals, creatives and introverts.  Jews are just a rather visible non-conforming group and therefore the canary in the coal mine.  Portugal, for instance, managed to be quite authoritarian without EVER descending into Jew-hatred.  And in America today anti-Semitism is far more prevalent on the left than the right, something most American Jews don’t seem to notice possibly because they’re beguiled by the philosophy.

They know a lot of things that just ain’t so.  And they’re fat and sassy enough they’ll never notice they don’t fit with reality until and unless their nonsense (like say the “No America at all” they were chanting again yesterday) comes to fruition and they realize that they are creatures of abundance, and that without abundance they can’t hold these just-so stories in their heads.  (A reason that Europe seems to be edging closer to Jackboots and former liberals are leading.)

And we, Lord bless us, are trying to prevent them from getting their reckoning.  Not that we love them that much, every unwashed dreadlock and flabby fat exposed fold, but because our fate and theirs are tied by living in the same area and being subjected to the same laws, and working in the same economy.

However, for the record, here is what real authoritanism is: when you feel you must control everyone else, including people wholly unrelated to you.  When you want to control what they read, what they think, what they say in every minor detail. When youu want to make sure they have no options but the ones you approve of.

It’s particularly bad if you do all this under some sort of “unified philosophy.”

And if people and groups with those characteristics get the power to do it, the result is always mass graves.

And no, it makes absolutely no difference if you’ve convinced yourself that it’s your opponents who “really” want to do this, or if you engage in psychic projection to figure out what’s driving the opposition.  (Which is how “we want fun stories, we don’t give a damn about politics” became, to the left “they want stories with no women or gay people or minorities. And they don’t want those people write either.” Something that, looking at the principals, or at the stories they write would have exploded in a New York minute.  But they’re Don Quixote beguiled by the story in their heads and unable to see reality.)

That you’ve convinced yourself that people voted for Donald Trump — Donald EFFING Trump, people — because they think he is a paragon of Christian virtue and modesty just doesn’t make it so.

Look instead at who does what they can to ensure books and movies and series with opposing viewpoints (or even slightly divergent.  Or even you know the creator didn’t buy into the latest politically correct “truth”) don’t see the light of day.  Look at who is willing to destroy careers and lives to ensure their narrative isn’t challenged, even slightly.  Look at who tries to shut down websites, leaves bad reviews to books never read, and calls those who agree with them “the good people.”

Those are the real authoritarians.  Whether people want to sleep with everything that waves in the wind or with no one has nothing to do with it.  Freud was wrong and studies on this are tainted.  The Victorians have been long-dead, and they weren’t nearly as prudish as the left likes to believe (in fact, if you read their books you find young people accusing them of having a “mind like a sink” in which everything was sexual.) And we on the right? Bah.  We actually do embrace a wide diversity.  Yes, even in political thought.  My friends range from Libertarians for whom any rule is an imposition to Socons who think that children not always obeying their parents is a sign of the apocalypse.

We debate things hotly and sometimes incandescently, but we don’t require other people fit every spot of our mental map to be friends, or indeed to be PEOPLE.  Which is what the real authoritarians do.  The left, OTOH will excommunicate you for having ONE thought out of line with their mental map.

Perhaps they know their mental map doesn’t fit anything? Surely after the fall of the Soviet Union, they must have an inkling it doesn’t fit REALITY?

Perhaps this is why they’ve decided, instead, to put their hands over their ears and lalalalala very loudly in the face of disproving facts?

It seems to be the case.  They seem to have decided that if they just believe hard enough and push hard enough reality will conform to their dream-world.

So, you know, for conservatives and libertarians — most of whom, frankly would rather be concerned with their private lives, doing their work and raising fat babies — it’s not just that 2016 was the Flight 93 election.  It’s that we live in Flight 93 times.  The left, after 100 years of dominance of the culture, has made it clear we must keep charging the cockpit or die.  We have no other choice.

Most of us completely understand the words of Based Lindsey Graham: You want power so bad, and I hope to God you never get it.

Because we can’t let them get it, not in the amount they want.  Because their programming is to destroy western civilization in the firm belief they’re bringing about paradises of freedom when in fact, they’ll take the world into an authoritarian age of misery, famine and tribalism.

Meanwhile, they’re living in Ruby Slippers times.  If they click their feet hard enough and wish hard enough….

And that is where we are, and why it doesn’t look good.

The only thing I can tell you is that in the end we win, they lose.  But it’s going to be a hard, hard road to a place where they realize they’re wrong.  Dreams are so hard to kill.

Be not afraid.  Let’s roll.

Who knew? PT Barnum was right.

Apparently it is possible to win the House of Representatives in America even in an extraordinarily prosperous time (though I’d argue most of us haven’t recovered from the debacle that started with the Dem legislative take over in 06, so it doesn’t FEEL prosperous yet.) by promising to raise people’s taxes and to throttle energy production.

Or… of course, we have a fraud and an MSM problem.

I’ve talked about fraud here before.  In CO in 2012, when I both poll-watched and was in touch with poll watchers throughout the state on a party line, we were counting 1/3 people being told they had voted before.  On the party line, I learned that in Denver it was 2/3.  You can’t beat shit like that.

Yes, the people turned away were allowed to vote a provisional ballot, but you see… the thing is that that only gets counted if they come up short — ie. if the difference between the winner and loser is less than the number of provisionals — but the other ballot just gets counted.  It’s already in. It’s already in the system.  Do. The. Math.

Even so, 12 was tight, and they had to find boxes of votes up in Boulder county.  Which is why the first thing the dems did when they captured Colorado legislature was to go all vote-by-mail.  To save money.  You know how fiscally conscious dems are, right?

I’m told something similar happened when Oregon went all voteby mail.  We’ll never win another election here, unless this is reversed. Period. Dot.

And now the architect of this change, which most people who aren’t really involved think was some super duper way of campaigning, is our governor.

Pray for my beloved Colorado.  I don’t want to HAVE to move.  It’s in the cards, in ten years or so, mind, since likely the boys will settle out of state for various reasons and we love our friends here, but have only two sons and would like to be near them (with our luck that will mean I need to make a lot of money indie, and we need two pieds a terre one near each boy.)  But then one boy or the other might stay here, and we WANT to stay here for ten years at least.  In this house.  I love my eagle’s next house, where the eagles fly at my office-window level.  And we’re doing stuff to it, like put down wood floors, to make it my dream house.  I don’t want to be forced out by Colorado going California fast and hard.

I have ideas on how to get around it, and an article for PJ about vote by mail and early voting (And btw, US born and raised people are all ADHD or short term memory loss.  Every time I come out against those, everyone piles on that I want our military not to vote.  Not a problem. They always had vote by mail.  Or they tell me I don’t want them to vote because they’ll be busy/not in country on election day.  Oh, please.  There was always SOME early voting, but you had to show you needed it.  One year I voted two weeks early, because we were going to be in Portugal on the week of the vote.  I had to show my plane tickets, is all.  And a friend who could not vote because she worked all day every day, and wouldn’t be let out, took a letter from her boss.  What I oppose is vote early or by mail for “convenience”.  Will you sell your franchise for convenience?)

And we have an MSM problem.  A BIG MSM problem.  Not a single democrat would have got the vote, if the MSM had, you know, reported on them and their actual agenda.

As in, if the MSM had shown them chanting “No America at all”, if Louis Farrakhan were shown shouting “Death to America,” (Since that’s all right with the MSM, let’s all shout “Death to Louis Farrakahn.”  No? Why not? What’s the difference?)

If the MSM had reported on how well the economy is doing without trying to credit it to Commie Barrie. Etc.

Mind you, millenials might still vote commie, because they are profoundly misseducated, particularly on history.

As is, with those two advantages: the unchecked fraud and the MSM wholly on their side, they managed to get the house by a razor thin margin.  Yeah, it’s not impressive.  It’s certainly not a blue wave.

But it’s enough.  Look, somehow, people think health care is the most important thing right now (it is, but not for the reasons they think. Obamacare forced a lot of good doctors into early retirement rather than deal with the crazy. I know. Friends and I lost doctors that way. (And a lot of the ones who stayed are wholly invested in the Obamacare “force you to lie to us” questions.  Which, yeah, is what it is.  If one drink a night with dinner is alcoholism, then I’m going to tell you I don’t drink that.  (Note that this makes whole countries alcoholics. Also, now that I’m on a million and a half meds, I don’t drink much, really.  But I lied to them for YEARS.)  Let alone other things.  Half of my mental answers to the stupid questions are “none of your business with bells on.” Which frankly means a lot of the ones left are social workers and busybodies at heart, and not the best doctors.)  With Nancy Grey Goose Pelosy (seriously, her alcohol bill a taxpayers expense when she was speaker was gargantuan.  Speaking of alcoholics, she seems to have one tied on AT ALL TIMES) in charge, the solution to this worry, as she already hinted, is Single Payer.

Now you’ll say we have the Senate and Trump.  The Senate has squishes and healthcare is Trump’s least conservative stand.  He simply fails to get that Single Payer is bad.  So we’ll likely get that foisted on us.  As I get older, and yes, my body being tricky, this worries the living crap out of me.  I’d like to live another 30 years, as is customary for my family. I have books to write, damn it.  This will not happen under single payer.  Not unless I make a lot of money and go private as soon as it’s available.  (Okay, so I see a lot of writing in my future.)

That I’d say is our biggest danger.  That and our inability to clean out the inky stuff in the FBI, CIA and federal bureaucracy with the House in enemy hands.  And of course, the ever-present possibility they’ll find ways to institutionalize fraud as they did with CO.  But for that they usually need two chambers and a complicit executive.

Oh, and the possibility they’ll screw us financially. And that their constant drip drip drip of investigations on crazy sh*t — they are already demanding Trump’s tax returns — in conjunction with their MSM amplification will create such an image problem that they can elect whoever they want in 2020.  If you thought Obama was bed, wait for the Kamala Harris administration.  You’ll die laughing.

Of course Americans are slow to fight, which is why we got here, but if that goes on… there will be blood on the streets.

So, is all lost? No. Despite the fact that I woke up with a splitting headache and a sense of doom.  (No, not hangover.  I actually ended up not drinking, because… mostly because not indicated with meds.)

Here are our strengths:

The MSM is less believed every year.  The full court press, the crazy sh*t they’ve been spinning should have seen them win 60 seats in the house and flip the senate.  It would have, even ten years ago.  But they were so openly corrupt during the Obama years that people lost faith.  Most of the people still listening to them are my parents and inlaws ages, and I’ll be blunt, most of them won’t be around much longer.  (And a lot of them are only voting because of democrat “helpers”in nursing homes.)  And their audience is skewed more to those who are sitting and listening to their propaganda all day, which is not the healthiest segment, at that. Remember working out makes you conservative? (My parents seem to bear that out)

In another 2 years, their influence will be smaller. In four, even more so.

And we are finding new ways to reach people, in news and in entertainment.  This blog took a step into more serious reporting with Bill’s posts.  There will be more like that (though not necessarily from Bill.)  We need more of that.  Our penetration is small, but there are ripples, and ideas spread.

There isn’t a hell of a lot we can do about vote fraud — except report on it, ceaselessly — but we can do something about information.  And about entertainment.  In fact, my friends, that’s my particular trench in the culture wars, and I MUST — for various reasons some personal — amplify my efforts.  Those of you who can, should too.

The other sign of hope, and not so much statistical but among the kids we knew while the kids were growing up, is that millenials started moving away from all the crap they learned in school, as the rest of us did, when facing the real world.  The fact that there are JOBS under Trump has exploded all their preconceptions.

Yeah, they’re squishy and occasionally they still fall for “Orange man bad”or for “commie so cool.”  If you have contact with them, educate them.  Don’t bludgeon them.  The young are prickly.  TALK to them.  Explode their preconceptions and the crazy economics and history they were taught in school.  Do what you can.

And while at it, if you have kids, homeschool.  No, I don’t mind homeschool fully, though of course if you can, do it.  I never could.  But I homeschooled AFTER school.  Read their books.  You’ll find most of them are based on Howard Zinn’s bullshit.  So, buy other books. Teach them world history.  Explain why the establishment lies to them.

Teens are naturally rebellious.  For generations, the left has sold the idea they’re anti-establishment.  Make sure people understand the left is the establishment.  They have such easy-to-mock types, and a lot of them will be on display in the House of Representatives.  Encourage the kids’ right and just rebellion against the sclerotic establishment.

This is not the end.  It’s not even the beginning of the end.  It might not be the end of the beginning.

We’re starting the long work of turning around a leftist narrative and governance that is now almost 100 years old.  No one promised us a rose garden, and in a long war, the other side will win some battles.

Yes, I know, the other side is SO unhinged it’s scary when they get any power at all.

On the other hand, it will happen.  We must harden, we must survive.

The next two years will be tricky.  We need every single one of you to fight for the cause of liberty and continue the work of freeing us, mind and body, from Marxist shackles.

Go on.  Go work.  Be not afraid.

We keep saying the left has gone insane, and frankly, it seems likely.

I mean, what kind of political party/choice marches in the street shouting they don’t want their country which allows them to do this to exist?

What kind of people convince themselves that our free for all republic, which practically begs women and minorities to participate is a white supremacist patriarchy? (Other than people who have never even heard of a white supremacy or a patriarchy, much less lived in or visited one, of course.)

What sort of people gin up accusations against an innocent man, for the sole purpose of retaining power?

What kind of people tell us that this time socialism will be done right, in the face of a hundred million graves?

What kind of people want to “punch a Nazi” and define Nazi as “anyone who disagrees with me and doesn’t want a powerful centralized government”?

Their antics, their insanity, the phantoms and alarums conjured up by their media arm? Their lies? Their hate of everything that can keep civilized society going?

The question is, why are they insane?  Or more importantly, why do they ACT insane?

The first one can have many answers, and it could be said that people who support a controlled economy went bonkers when communist country after communist country came apart at the seams, and exposed the fact they’d always been hell on Earth.

They behaved as though communism/socialism/statism were a religious faith.  When prophecies fail to work out, religious fanatics paradoxically experience a recrudescence of faith.  This seems to have worked for the left, after the curtain fell.

If we wanted to prod on that, we’d probably uncover their inability to accept the inherent evil and tragedy of human life and desperately wanting the government as a god-substitute to “just make the bad things go away.” It’s not a grown up response, but it’s very human.

BUT given all that, it’s still inarguable that they are acting crazier than they have even since the wall fell. It’s inarguable that they’ve lost all touch with reality and keep thinking they can scare/beat/intimidate us into doing what they want.  They keep showing it too, and showing how much they hate America. And yeah, they hate America (No ICE, no Wall, no America at all! is their chant.) with every fiber of their being and are convinced it’s oppressive and evil. Which yeah, argues for insanity.

Part of their crazy act is screaming increasingly crazier lies, like, you know, that the election was manipulated by Russians. Or that the tax cut cost you money.  Or–

Why?

Because it worked before.  They took George Bush, possibly the most liberal squish Republican president ever, and screamed 24/7 about his being a blood-thirsty monster and literally Hitler.  About his wanting to put them all in camps.  About his wanting to conquer the world and steal its oil.

My colleagues would sit at science fiction con panels and tell us how much the Bushhitler regime had cooled their willingness to speak against it.  And how they were afraid of a knock at the door.  They’d say this in front of 300 people and act brave, unaware that the very circumstances made them liars.

There were peace demonstrations.  There were screams at the fact we might play Britney Spears at Gitmo detainees or deprive them of sleep.

And all of that is a fraction of what they’re doing to Trump.

They’ve gone violent, shot our representatives.  They’ve called for the rank and file to be violent with us.

We’re looking at them and wondering how they’ve gone so crazy, and what they’ll do next.

Well… you have a choice on that.  Not a huge choice, but a choice.

They’ve gone crazy because it paid off in the past.  Their lies and constant screaming about George W Bush got him from the most popular president ever after 9/11, to barely squeaking through his next election, to losing the midterms in 06.  (After which the left got hold of the economy and destroyed it, and because people on the street blame the economy only on the president, that got them their demi-god Barry the Unready and a sweep of the legislature in 08.  (It also took CO to the dems, from which we might never recover.))

So, why are they acting crazy and going crazier? Because it worked before. They think it will work again.

If you don’t get off your duff, get out there and vote straight ticket GOP, if they win even just the house, it will have worked again.

They will be confirmed in their insanity plus terror tactics.

Do you really want to see how bad it gets next?

No?

Good.  I don’t either.  Get out there and vote for your local GOP horrors even if they’re only marginally better than your local dem horrors.

What’s at stake here is delivering a sanity check, a bucket of cold water to the left, and trying to bring them to rationality and sanity.  Or at least, you know, within shouting distance of it.

Because if this goes on, it ends in rivers of blood.  And that’s not what I want for my kids, my grandkids or my country.

So go and throw a bucket of cold water over the hysterical left.

It’s all you can do.

*Yeah, I know I said I’d be back today. Turns out I have a doctor’s appointment at noon (long story) and then there’s an unavoidable errand in the afternoon, plus I’m still mired in short story mostly because I can’t get to my research books, which is why I’ve been painting/resurfacing the bookshelves…. yeah.  (I’ll post a picture when they’re all up, but it turns out we need to put the flooring in first, because… well, because these are kind of permanent.  Unless we win the lottery and I have a library tower built or something.) So I was researching on ebook — which I hate — all through the weekend, and I’ve been absent at PJM at the worst possible time.
I had no clue what to do today, until Bill sent me this.  He says it really is the end of the series.  Probably.  And I will be back tomorrow, for sure. Unless the doctor tells me I’m dying.  Considering this is an allergist, that’s highly unlikely. – SAH*

Examining the Migrant Horde- Pt 3—The Rogues Gallery by Bill Reader

A note to the readers on terminology: It has been correctly pointed out that I’ve called several countries on the North  and Central American continents part of South America. Fair play to you. I have for years been in the somewhat lazy habit of combining South and Central America and even Mexico into one group because arguably, geopolitically, the interests and politics of South and Central American countries run together with each other much more than with ours. They are, indeed, part of the Southern areas of the Americas. However, that is not the conventional usage. I have tried to be more mindful of this conflation in this piece. [Yeah.  I changed it to Latin America in the text, which serves same purpose.  Also new commenter and fixating on this, I think betrays what Larry C. calls “dismiss, dismiss, dismiss” move.]

Welcome back to our continuing series on the Migrant Horde. In our first article we touched on the inconsistencies in media reporting regarding how fast the “migrant caravan” (or should I say, the first one) was going. We explored that vehicles are essential for them to travel at the speed they have, and discussed what’s transpired since, including the strange situation with the charter buses.

In our second article we met our key players, including the LIBRE party (relatively poorly known in American media), which Bartolo Fuentes was a representative of, and which formulated the seeds of this whole thing. We met Pueblo Sin Fronteras, learned a bit about the structure of the migrant caravan, and explored what’s currently known about how they’re keeping fed, hydrated—and paid—on the road.

Today it’s time for us to meet the people themselves, to the greatest extent that that’s possible. That means, these days, that we first need to tabulate. Up until now we’ve talked, for simplicity, about migrant caravan number one, mostly because it’s the best reported on, it’s the one most likely to hit the border before November 6th (which I suppose is probably tomorrow, if these posts go up as planned), and how it’s handled is going to be the biggest determinant of—well, everything really. Not just how we deal with all of these caravans, but more generally, whether America has the fortitude to stand by its beliefs, rather than following the same dark path that Germany followed out of a surplus of thorough naiveté. Many Americans right now are banking on the fact that Trump is not Angela Merkel. We have a chance, at least.

But as those following the issue closely are aware, there are actually several migrant caravans that we’ve essentially been ignoring for simplicity. Knowing what kind of an extended study I made of the first, I’ll reassure you that I’m not going to belabor the others as thoroughly. But hopefully, by the end of this, we will have discussed each group in enough detail to have some idea of their composition and size, to the extent that they vary or are known. More broadly, who are the migrants? What is their aggregate view on America, and on the countries they are fleeing? What kind of people are they?

Because it is of interest to the topic, I’d like to briefly touch on the argument for why these people are properly defined as “migrants”, and not “refugees”. I’ve explained at some length why this is mostly of interest on the Right, so I’ll keep it brief. But it’s worth discussing up front, because today is all about getting to know the nature of the horde.

The UN-approved definition of a refugee is given in the 1951 Convention related to the Status of Refugees, Article I-A, which states that a refugee is a person who: “…owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” (The original convention constrains this to results of events prior to 1951, but the 1967 Protocol removed that restriction. We are a party on the 1967 protocol. The other instrument it might help to be aware of is the 1980 refugee act, which incorporated that definition formally into our own law.).

It so happens that this convention, specifically, and the modifying protocol and act noted above, are still the basis of our definition for a refugee. And neither of the latter substantially changes the parameters regarding who we let in, as defined above. Moreover, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, people must be of “special humanitarian concern to the United States”. So, let’s run down the list. Are these people being persecuted for reasons of race? Nope—they’re all, or, well, mostly Latin, anyway. Religion? Not that any of them have said. Quotes suggest they’re mostly Catholic, or at least Christian of some denomination. Nationality? Hardly—especially after we talk about some other attributes of the horde. If they’re having a tiff with their home countries, it’s surely a lover’s tiff. Membership of a particular social group or political opinion? Well, lord knows the Left will try that one on for size if they’ll try anything. The nucleus of the first group is hard left, and the frontman of said group is hard left, so if I had to guess I’d say the group probably leans left. They had their preferred candidate deposed for trying to change the constitution of Honduras— but though Democrats seem to struggle with this concept, unchallenged leftist leadership is not a basic human right. “We didn’t get our way over everyone” is not persecution. And in any case, when we add in the other caravans, even that unifying distinction may become blurry. “Social group” could mean anything, up to and including the fact that a lot of them are poor. But again, they’re not being persecuted for being poor—being poor in Latin America is just tragically common.

Moreover, systematic persecution is not what they’re laying claim to. What they’re laying claim to as the cause for their leaving is relatively unambiguous and repeated with drumbeat uniformity:

-“fleeing a toxic mix of violence, poverty and corruption” (Reuters).

-“fleeing widespread poverty and violence” (Fox).

-“there are only two forces driving them: hunger and death“(AP).

-“fleeing widespread violence, poverty and corruption” (AP)

-“widespread poverty and gang violence in Honduras” (CBS)

-“fleeing violence and murderous gangs” (ABC).

Well, I’m very sorry to tell you, but though that sounds genuinely unpleasant, none of that is anywhere in our qualifying definition for refugee. Nor, even if we set all that aside for the sake of argument, are they of any special humanitarian concern to the United States—or I should say, to the extent there is humanitarian concern in this case, it is less for them, and more because of them.

Some people will try to throw ink in the water by referring to the UN Refugee Agency definition, which includes people who are “outside their country of origin because of feared persecution, conflict, violence, or other circumstances that have seriously disturbed public order”. One small problem. That definition is one we never agreed to be bound by. While there are international conventions that do contain wording similar to this—Such as The OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, and the Cartagena Declaration handling Latin America, from my research, the US is not a signatory on any of these instruments, nor any that I could find which allow people to claim refugee status solely on the basis of conflict, violence, or a breakdown of public order.

Bottom line, these people are not refugees. And by the way, Newsweek, that means they’re also not asylum seekers. Homeland Security will be happy to explain why: “An asylee is a person who meets the definition of refugee and is already present in the United States or is seeking admission at a port of entry” (emphasis mine). Well, I should say: you can seek asylum all you want. If you don’t meet the criteria for a refugee, by definition you are not going to be an asylee, either. And while there seems to be no really good, reliable definition of migrant, in practice the way the term is being used—non-refugee traveling outside their own country—is apt. Really, they uniformly sound like economic migrants, given they note they’re fleeing poverty. For that matter, as Breitbart pointed out, and as was noted by CBS in passing, some of them just outright admit they want jobs— preferably in the US. Which might explain why when Mexico offered them ” shelter, medical attention, schooling and jobs” in Mexico under the “You are at home” plan, their response, as NBC details it, was to shout “Thank You! No, we’re heading North!”. That’s a verbatim quote, apparently. So make that picky economic migrants. To whom, legally, I can find nothing whatsoever indicating we owe anything.

Now let’s talk about the ethnicities each caravan is composed of, as well as recent size and location. We know that the meat of the group started with Hondurans as previously discussed. Salvadorans have been interviewed as part of that group. The way the group swelled as it passed through Guatemala strongly suggests there are Guatemalans mixed in. There are also likely a fair number of Mexicans who added themselves to the group around about the 20th/21st of October. Recall that 2,000-odd people made it across the bridge, but their overall numbers nevertheless swelled “to about 5,000 overnight”, per CBS.

But frankly, who knows who else. Continuing on our theme that the Spanish language media seems to be picking up a lot of stuff lost on American reporters— a Unavision reporter named Francisco Santa Anna reported that he met people from Bangladesh who had “infiltrated” the crowd and were first noticed while the group was crossing Guatemala. The Daily Caller noted they were later detained at an immigration facility. Just a reminder that Guatemala reported that they’ve caught almost 100 people associated with ISIS in their territory and deported them— so infiltration by this group has been an ongoing problem for them. Oh, and Bengladesh’s official religion is islam, to which over 90% of the population are adherents. DHS lays claim to an even broader group of people, stating that they see individuals from “over 20 countries”, including “Somalia, India, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh”.

Is that an overestimate, or on the other hand, is that even comprehensive? Ah, that’s the trouble, really. The people who added themselves to the caravan, obviously, weren’t being tabulated or vetted as they added themselves, so it’s impossible to know how big a security risk this is or isn’t. It sounds distinctly non-zero, though. People crossing rivers instead of getting processed isn’t helping the case, either. It’s almost like there’s a reason we don’t take immigrants this way. Sizewise, recent reports show that the first caravan has fluctuated up and down. It reached a peak of around 7,000 around the 21st (here reported at The Insider, but easy enough to confirm). Most recently it has an estimated size of around 3-4,000 people per CBS news.

May I also add, from this same article—I missed this as I was catching up on business—that it was also reported that the ever-flip-flopping Mexican government formally acquiesced to providing buses to the horde. I offer a quote from governor Miguel Angel Yunes—”For that reason, we also offered them transportation so that, if possible, tomorrow … they may be able to go to Mexico City or to the place they wish.”. Then he reneged on it, per AP. But only sort of—  per MSNBC he offered to take them to another city in Veracruz because Mexico City’s water supply is undergoing maintenance. It’s not really clear whether they took the offer or not, but I will say that they’ve continued moving in Veracruz. And interestingly the group continues to move at a respectable clip—they hit Isla, Veracruz, on the 3rd, and they were in Juchitan de Zaragoza, Oaxaca, 160 miles away, on the 1st.

The second caravan seems to have likewise started in Honduras and headed to Mexico through Guatemala. The CBS report above, and this AP article, report that there also Salvadorans in that caravan, and estimate its current size as around 1,000-1,500. Most recently they hit Mapastepec, Chiapas, following in the footsteps of the first group as they advance up the coast.

The third caravan, for variety, seems to have originated in El Salvador, so by default the group had to go through Guatemala. It’s most recent size as of Saturday was about 1,000-1,500 people per the AP. Last I can find, they waded the Suchiate River on Friday, after the Mexican authorities “told those traveling in it they would have to show passports and visas and enter in groups of 50 for processing.”.

And now we’re hearing that a group of “central Americans”, about 300 strong, is walking in the state of Veracruz, as reported by MSNBC. Just to clarify, this group actually appears to be further ahead of everyone. That I can tell, nobody knows where they actually started. Mexico itself seems a likely source if it’s a fourth caravan. It could also be the leading vanguard of the first caravan, if they made more distance than everyone else. There’s some circumstantial evidence for that, as Fox news reports: “But other migrants, mainly men and the younger members of the group, kept on walking or hitching rides toward Puebla and Mexico City.” Those also sound like demographics that might jump freight trains, as was discussed by my addendum to the first article.

By the way, if you’re curious as to why I’m not doing as deep a dive on the origins of all the groups—besides not wanting to bore you to death— it’s mostly because of inherent uncertainty in covering these groups. As you can gather from the above, the numbers and modes of travel are mercurial even when reported day over day. And the caravans are not all covered to the same depth.

At present, to the best of my knowledge, the first caravan’s organization is the only one that has been significantly elucidated. The others are anybody’s best guess. The second could conceivably also be the handiwork of LIBRE, since it also started in Honduras. The third I’m totally in the dark on. Bartolo Fuentes ran to El Salvador in his most recent self-imposed exile. Does he also have contacts on the ground there who could have started it? Perhaps. Also, we still don’t know who was handing out money to migrants in the first caravan in Guatemala, but presumably they had some relationship to the organization of the caravan. DHS‘s sources say they were handing money to women to move to the front of the caravan, which they frame as strategic, to form a human shield— but could be an ultimately failed public relations move, and in either case suggests higher-level organization with ready cash (or, I suppose, they could have just been some of your friendly neighborhood gratuitous-money-providers, as one so often encounters these days). Could the people who provided the money have reach into El Salvador? Or did we just reach a tipping point and embolden serial migrant groups, of the kind that bombarded Germany? Unfortunately, I was unable to find definitive answers, so at the present moment I can only speculate. As for the fourth caravan— well, current reporting makes it hard to tell if it’s new, or simply the result in a schism of the first caravan, over two consecutive on-again-off-again offers of buses.

From the above we can tell this much—from available information it doesn’t seem that anybody involved comes anywhere near the definition of refugees—which, of course, we knew. Their goal seems to be to come to the US—and they mean to come to the US specifically— because it’s more stable and less poor than their home countries. Those aren’t among the recognized reasons we would admit people, and this is wise policy, since we’re more stable and less poor than most countries within two continents.

The groups probably do derive most of their members from Latin America. But the first added significant numbers of members in Guatemala, and the second and third are presumed to have picked up people there as well. A touch disturbing, since Guatemala has had significant problems with ISIS insinuating itself into the local population and people from an overwhelmingly Islamic country have been seen in the crowd. FrontPageMag provides a handy reference on prior times terrorists have been caught trying to cross the Southern border, for further context on the subject. How the extra caravans are being organized, we’re not sure, but all the groups are sizeable, with two out of three in the low thousands. It sounds like even this is just the start, which is probably not a surprise given how quickly numerous groups have suddenly appeared, arguing that this may have inspired several spontaneous groups with more spontaneous origins. “Everybody wants to form another caravan,” says Tony David Gálvez, a Honduran farmworker, to the NYT. How reassuring. All of which, I think, makes it overridingly important that we demonstrate resolute firmness with the first horde.

But what kind of people are they? Of course, every news source is reporting individual cases. This group seems even less likely to respond to a poll than Republican voters are right now.  At all events, we know they’re looking for heartbreaking stories for their liberal readership, so that’s most of what we’ll get. How much those stories are being filtered from the crowd at large is hard to say.

What might say more about the group as a whole is things they’ve done together. Things like march under the Honduran Flag, which they are seen doing in the pictures at the Daily Caller here, and separately by NBC news here (slides 13, 24, 29 and 35), and again by Bloomberg here. And by the body text in the LA Times here: “Most of the migrants are citizens of Honduras, and many waved its blue-and-white national flag”. And lately you can find pictures of the Mexican flag being added to the first group, by a local news outlet in NY here. Moreover you can add what the first group did when they got to the Suchiate river: “…hundreds had walked to the river’s edge where they sang the national anthems of Honduras and Guatemala,” (AP).

May I also note parenthetically that the leaders wearing their soccer jerseys put me in mind of the Football war, where Honduras and El Salvador fought over a World Cup qualifier? Wiki notes this rather amusing detail in their report on it: “The roots were issues over land reform in Honduras and immigration and demographic problems in El Salvador.” Apparently Honduras had gotten rather fed up with, get this, illegal immigration from El Salvador, and taken away land Salvadorans were occupying illegally. More seriously, I would mind you that, while we Americans tend to think of soccer as a harmless game of chance (at least look at the link before you grab a pitchfork), representation of your country in soccer is taken seriously enough in our Southern neighbors that a soccer match can trigger a war. When you see people leading the group kitted out in soccer apparel, to me, at least, that re-contextualizes things slightly. The point of all this being that, considering these people are represented to us as universally agreeing their home country is the pits, they’re quite excited about said home country. And referring back to my article, “Not Just Any Huddled Masses”, as a gesture from a group asking the US to admit them, I can imagine almost nothing less ingratiating.

Oh, wait. Yes, I can. I can imagine the groups forcing their way through the border —twice. Once when the first group knocked down the fence as shown by CBS, and once when the second group pushed their way through it, as noted by NBC news. I can imagine them throwing rocks at the police—twice. Once by the first group as noted by BBC here on October 20th, and once by the second group as reported by the Daily Caller on the 29th, with what I would call my very favorite picture from this mess so far. Quoth the Daily Caller, “Navarrate Pida said the migrants attacked officers with rocks, glass bottles and fireworks and that some of the migrants were carrying firearms,”. Or I could imagine the second group throwing Molotov cocktails at the police, per the LA Times. (President Trump has at least responded to this appropriately, saying: “They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them to consider it a rifle.” Well, it is a primitive missile, after all. And those who consider this overkill are not, I think, overly familiar with the dynamics of crowds. If you let them get emboldened by throwing rocks, you’re going to be dealing with an outright riot within a minute or two, and then you either get to kill them all as they advance, or fight in a nasty scrum.).

What kind of people would act this way? Well, what a good question. Fox has an answer for you. “Criminals are everywhere,” one migrant told Fox News. “It’s criminals in here. It is. But it is not that many. It is good people here trying to get through Mexico and then get to the United States. It doesn’t mean that everybody is a criminal.”. Not that anyone said everyone was. We’ll talk about that.

“We aren’t killers,” said Stephany Lopez, a 21-year-old Salvadoran with the first caravan.” per CBS news. She’s right. Well, not successful killers, anyway, as noted by Fox’s interview with a man named Jose who admits to a criminal record including attempted murder (mirrored here at The Daily Caller). Then there are Carlos “N” and Jerson “N” of Honduras, who opened fire on Mexican federal police as reported by, of course, Spanish-language media at gob.mx, and picked up by Breitbart. The original story says this (translated) “the two foreign subjects…when noticing themselves of the presence of the federals (sic), began to shoot them of direct way (sic) in their attempt to flee,”. That kind of sounds like they were known criminals, to me. Funny the MSM missed ’em, eh?

Actually, I take it back. Maybe they do have a killer. A 26 year old man was noted to die of a head wound after being shot with a rubber bullet when the second group met the border police, as noted here by Newsweek. That’s curious, given that “Mexican officers had not been carrying any guns or revolvers that would have fired rubber bullets”. While rubber bullets certainly can kill, especially when aimed at the head, usually the whole point of them is not to. Is this a  stage rehearsal for Maria De La Cruz? I suppose we’ll see.

Meanwhile, note this tweet from Tyler Q. Houlton, DHS Press Secretary: “@DHSgov can confirm that there are individuals within the caravan who are gang members or have significant criminal histories.”. More specifically, as noted in the report released on November 1st from DHS, “over 270 individuals along the caravan route have criminal histories, including known gang membership”. Furthermore, ” Mexican officials have also publicly stated that criminal groups have infiltrated the caravan”. How they determined this is unclear, although there are enough pictures of the caravan that criminologists could, perhaps, have determined it from examining publically available images. In all cases, Mexico doesn’t have the strongest incentive to lie about this, since the worse the composition of the caravan, the more it makes their somewhat limp response look bad.

Wait. Hang on a moment. 270? Taking upper estimates of the four caravans presently known, that’s one group of 4,000, two groups of 1,500, and one of about 300, or 7,300 in all. So, about 3.7% of the caravan members have a known criminal history, by the most conservative estimates. If we take the lower estimates on size, there are about 5,300 people, at which point over 5% — or to put it another way, more than 1 in 20 people in the aggregate group— are criminals. I would call that a, ah, significant consideration.

Not that this demonstrates anything vis a vis the above, but even the people who aren’t criminals are—well— may I introduce to you Maria Irias Rodriguez, who is a walking math problem. “If they stop us now, we’ll just come back a second time,” the 17 year old, traveling with her husband and 2 children, told The Insider. How old are the kids, you say? She has an “8-month-old daughter, [and] 2-year-old son” (NYTimes). Joining the caravan, it seems, was not the first of her poor life decisions. [To be fair, she might not have had any choice in any of it- SAH]

I offer also, for flavor, this lady calling Donald Trump the antichrist on an interview with CNN (mirrored on The Political Insider). Perhaps the job she’s coming over here for is DNC spokesperson. Interestingly, the much publicized flag burning is not on this list. It doesn’t seem to have been done by people in the caravan, though it was a protest in favor of those people as reported on Breitbart, and these muffins were also caught on camera burning tires in front of the US Embassy as noted in The Daily Mail.

What does all this leave us with? Well, given the uniform participation in flag carrying and anthem singing, it seems that “foreign nationalists” would be a fair characterization of the average crowd member. I can’t tell you in precise detail how likely any one person is to commit violence, but I can say from the above they have a pretty alarming number of people with criminal histories in the group, if the published numbers are to be believed. And, of course, actions speak louder than words—we’ve seen at least two caravans get violent with border police, throwing rocks at them, and forcing their way through the border fence. As for the reports of shooting at federal police, and throwing Molotov cocktails— well, your mileage may vary, but I consider the first instance of that kind of behavior a generous excess. And in the context of  Islamic terrorism being a constant problem and threat, Univision has independently reported Bangladeshis in the crowd. DHS, meanwhile, says that’s only the beginning.

In the end, not only are we not obligated to take these people, we have ample reason to be every bit as brisk as President Trump has been. It’s my hope that he continues to stand firm.  They’re transparently disinterested in becoming Americans. They see America as a kind of prize to be taken, and never mind the opposition. They are already massing in disturbing numbers. If there was ever a time for America to demonstrate her exceptionalism, and handle this better than Europe handled the same challenge, now is that time. They say they’re fleeing violence and lawlessness. But they’re casually disregarding our laws, if not simply expressing contempt for them. And they’re getting violent with people who oppose them. They are demonstrating, in fact, that they are not just beholden to their home countries, but to the very behaviors that have made them intolerable.

These are not people casting off their old lands. On the contrary, they are taking their screwed-up homes on tour, and showing the world just how bad they are firsthand. But I will say that increasingly, nobody can look at their home countries and suppose the way things are is an accident. For people trying to flee lawlessness and violence, it’s curious how insistent they seem on bringing them along for the journey.

Examining the Migrant Horde- Pt 2—The Power Behind the Horde by Bill Reader

            Today, we dive headfirst into the logistics of the migrant horde. If you missed my prior article on examining the improbable reporting on the speed of this group, you can find it here. On today’s docket, a discussion of how this group is organized, who is supporting it including what specific organizations and individuals have been named so far, and other logistical errata. Still to be discussed in a future article, the surprisingly tricky question of how many people, and what kind of people, make up the migrant horde.

I’m going to focus most of this article on examining certain key players. Barolo Fuentes, a Honduran socialist who was one of the frontmen for  this caravan, and his friends in the LIBRE party; Pueblo sin Fronteras, a project of the Chicago-Based 501c La Familia Latina Unida; and a brief look at Venezuela, recently highlighted by Vice President Pence and currently in the spotlight as a possible funding source for all this.

We’ll begin with the man purported to have started it all— Bartolo Fuentes. First, the official story. My first introduction to him was an article published by The Daily Beast. It’s a characteristically ideologically stilted article. They report caravan #1 as being touched off by a false report that Fuentes would pay all expenses of people traveling North. I quote: “The anchors interviewed a woman who was supposedly part of the caravan. The woman talked about safety in numbers, called Fuentes the organizer and mentioned foreign assistance. The anchors, without any supporting evidence, then said that Fuentes would pay for the migrants’ food and transportation.” Fuentes himself took to the media to counter this false report. The theory runs that the safety in numbers alone, however, still offered an attractive alternative for long-standing holdouts, as Coyotes are very expensive.

Fuentes is described as a “Honduran Lawmaker” by Reuters and a “Social Activist” by NBC. I would call that an intentional mischaracterization. Let me add a couple of things from the Daily Beast article that explain that in more detail. First, his involvement in prior “caravans”: “When Fuentes first became aware of small groups dispersed throughout Honduras that were organizing among themselves to make the trek north, he decided to help out, just as he had done with a previous migrant caravan last April—and indeed throughout his life”. So, this wasn’t just nondescript social activism, but someone who has deliberately and repeatedly assisted specifically with illegal immigration. Now, let me sweeten the deal with the other interesting fact— ” … Bartolo sought refuge in Mexico himself after receiving threats. Central America’s right-wing death squads were notorious and his earlier participation in protests against the U.S.-backed Contras, who used his country as a staging ground in their CIA-backed war on Nicaragua’s Sandinistas, made him a potential target.”. I find that fascinating. Those “death squads” were often as not “revenge squads”. That he had a target on his back makes it likely a more apt description for Mr. Fuentes would be “Honduran Socialist”.

Initially, that was only a suspicion, as the English News media has been strangely incurious about him. So I did some further digging, armed with Google Translate. I first began to get a better idea of his early life in BBC Mundo, which states (translated): “In his youth he was a student leader and since the 1980s he has been known as a militant of the Honduran left . He is currently editor of Vida Laboral magazine and the Honduras Labor web site, which focuses on labor and human rights, in general.”. Vida Laboral means, roughly, Labor Life. All of that tessellates well with what we explored above.

La Tribuna picks up the story above in more detail, and describes him as having organized caravans since 1999. They note also that he is an “ex-deputy” in the National Congress of Honduras, for a group called Libertad y Refundación (Freedom and Refoundation) AKA LIBRE for short. The Honduran government is unicameral, but he was essentially the local equivalent of a senator/representative. Who is LIBRE? Why, they’re a Leftist Political Party in Honduras. They were founded in 2011 by the National Popular Resistance Front/ National People’s Resistance Front (FNRP). LIBRE was christened by Manuel Zelaya, the Honduran president who was deposed in a coup in 2009 (without much success, insofar as his wife ran for president in Honduras in 2013). This coup probably had to do with him running on a conservative platform, and then turning hard Left. Among other things he temporarily brought Honduras into ALBA—the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America. Wiki summarizes the group thus: “Founded initially by Cuba and Venezuela in 2004, it is associated with socialist and social democratic governments wishing to consolidate regional economic integration based on a vision of social welfare, bartering and mutual economic aid.”  That was in 2008. Then, in 2009, per the WSJ, Zelaya “tried to override the Honduran constitution to remain in office despite a term limit.”. Consequently, he was deposed by the military in 2009. The point of this digression being, the more apt short biography is that he’s an ex-representative of a hard left party of a would-be dictator, in the Honduran national legislature. An interesting note on the same subject—he was elected first in 2013, implying that he had come back to the country in the meanwhile, since his self-imposed exile in Mexico.

If you’ve been following the story closely, you can tell me the rest. On October 16th, as the group entered Guatamala, Fuentes was arrested and sent home. The La Tribuna article above notes that since then he has fled Honduras again, out of fear of persecution by the government. He’s hiding in El Salvador at the moment.

While undeniably Hard Leftist, past and present, and a Leftist with considerable status, at that, I couldn’t find evidence that he had done more in organizing the caravan than literally providing general organizational advice to the caravan. For his part, he continues to maintain the heavy lifting was done by a group of “compañeros”— best translated as comrades, in case you doubted, who were members of LIBRE from El Progresso.

This is consistent with what he told La Tribuna on October 16th, 2018, where he said originally 20 organizers from Tegucigalpa and Le Ceiba were involved. He said another 20 joined in Cofradía, and a lady was chosen as a coordinator there. He noted that he did know the original organizers personally—they were ” compañeros” from LIBRE, who he described as “fighters”.

All of this suggests that the original organization of the caravan was indeed put together in Honduras—specifically, by people from LIBRE. The question is, did it stay that way?

To begin to answer that question, we turn our attention to Pueblo Sin Fronteras. To understand that group, first we need to get to know another group— La Familia Latina Unida, an extension of the pro-illegal immigration advocacy 501c out of Chicago, Centro Sin Fronteras. La Familia Latina Unida, in turn, is the organization that runs Pueblo Sin Fronteras. So, to be clear, Centro Sin Fronteras begat La Familia Latina Unida, which begat Pueblo Sin Fronteras. Pueblos Sin Fronteras may not be familiar to you, but their handiwork is—they organized the last caravan which came to the US in April, though that caravan mostly dissolved before it actually reached the border. According to Influence Watch, Centro Sin Fronteras was founded by Emma Lozano, a Chicago pastor and sister of left-wing community organizer Rudy Lozano, in 1987. As to their mission, Centro Sin Fronteras describes themselves thus: “Sin Fronteras led the struggle to end school overcrowding, for adequate housing and health but soon found itself in the middle of the fight for legalization”. The last of these has been an ongoing focus of the group, or really, the cluster of groups. And boiling it down as simply as possible, this group of left-wing 501cs have been involved in prior caravans, and have experience at organizing them.

By the way, I’d like to spotlight one other person some of you with a long memory may remember—the current president and founder of La Familia Latina Unida, Elvira Arellano. Herself an illegal immigrant, she was deported once in 1997, came back, and evaded arrest until 2002, when she was picked up again. She stalled for time in serial appeals, got three stays of deportation, and when all else failed eventually “took refuge in a Chicago Church”, per NBC. Which church? Why Adalberto United Methodist Church, described by the Chicago Tribune as the “sister church” of Lincoln United Methodist Church, where Lozano is/was pastor. They note “Though churches can’t guarantee protection, they are generally off limits to law enforcement raids”. Interesting and fortuitous, then, for an immigration group to be run by a politically minded pastor. Arellano lived there for about a year, to the acclaim of left-wing media, but was deported again in 2007 when she left to be part of a protest. She came back in 2014 with “a group of asylum seekers” (as the Chicago Tribune puts it), and was caught by ICE. Since then she seems to have been running on serial reprieves from deportation, backed up by Saul, her now 18-year-old anchor “baby”. More or less the person you’d expect to be running this group, really.

Centro Sin Fronteras is currently running on the back of grants from the Public Welfare Foundation, and the Wieboldt Foundation—certainly Left-Wing funding organizations, though surprisingly, not directly tied to George Soros. That said, Centro Sin Fronteras, you will perhaps be interested to hear, has been a beneficiary of the National Immigration Forum, which in turn receives donations from the Open Society Foundation, which of course is George Soros’ baby. The last donation was modest and back in 2010, though. I mention it to highlight what Trump has highlighted, and what a lot of those on the Right who have paid attention have known forever— in liberal charitable donation wankery, all roads eventually lead to Soros. The group apparently hasn’t been amazingly good about regularity in tax filings recently, so it’s hard to say how they’re doing of late.

That said, so far three Pueblo sin Fronteras activists have been publicized in connection with the caravan. It’s worth spending a moment to get acquainted with each, from both a funding and organizational perspective. One is Denis Omar Contreras. He’s described by The Washington Post as a Honduran-born “caravan leader”, and representative of Pueblo Sin Fronteras. In the Spanish language press at Nomada and Instituto Humanitas Unisinos you get a touch more detail. He (translated)” wears a green vest to identify himself as a leader and member of the organization Pueblo sin Fronteras”. PSF doesn’t list that as an official costume, so I’m not sure if they mean it indicates both, or just that he’s a leader. Green vests aren’t notable on leaders in recent shots, but one is seen on a person herding people into a truck in a video from my last post. This person doesn’t match the description of Denis Omar Contreras—who is noted in Spanish language media sources above to be wearing sandals for the trip. They note also that he’s currently based out of Tijuana and has been deported from the US seven times in three years, with rumors circulating that he’s a Cayote. He’s seen at times passing down the orders of the “people in charge of the caravan” (La Jornada, translated), and is noted to have been urging people onward to the town of Huixtla, by Nomada. Overall he seems to have a leading role, though not quite the top of the hierarchy. Those would likely be people called “coordinators”, the first of which we saw picked when the caravan was just 40 strong. La Journada intentionally hangs a question mark over who is at the top, referring to the people speaking at a presser for the migrants as (translated) “representatives of the unidentified group”. If I had to put down money, I’d say “comrades” from LIBRE. When the group arrived in Huixtla, Mexico, the “coordinator” terminology was still being used for the higher ups, according to this article from WaPo, implying the basic structure has stayed the same.

Another is Irineo Mujica. He helped organize the April caravan. According to AZCentral, he was also part of this caravan, until he became famous—and incidentally got arrested— over slashing tires on an immigration agency vehicle. The English language press once again downplays his role. Per Nomada, Irineo “spoke in a megaphone and begged the Mexican people to keep helping them./ ‘This exodus was not organized by anyone. It is an answer to the situation. The culprits of this movement are hunger and death.’ “. Apparently hunger and death lurked in the guise of 40-odd Hondurans and an ex-government representative. Actually, given their uniform socialist leanings, there’s some truth to that.

Meanwhile, Alex Mensing, also from Pueblo Sin Fronteras, has this—er—defense of Irineo’s presence: “He was there to help coordinate humanitarian assistance in the city of Tapachula after the caravan ballooned in size and approached Mexico, Mensing said”. Which is to say, they don’t take credit for setting the fire, but they’re adding wood to keep it burning it at this point. And you’d be forgiven for thinking that typically the person shouting into a megaphone at a crowd is one of its leaders. Especially since the WaPo describes megaphones being a pretty typical part of the caravan leader outfit. Between the two, it sounds like Pueblo Sin Fronteras has a more substantial hand in things now, even if (and it’s an unproven “if”, barring a more complete evaluation of the “comrades” initially responsible for this) they didn’t initially. The WaPo report above even describes them as having “taken on a coordinating role” (emphasis mine) at present. Whether that means they now have some hand in the overall direction of the group, though, I can’t say.

By the way, Alex Mensing turns out to be another person with a bit of a history. As reported by The Daily Caller, he was working on behalf of CARA to support April’s caravan. CARA itself contains two groups funded by—you guessed it—Open Society Foundations. His current role is, shall we say, unclear (The cited article, at American Thinker, incidentally, is an excellent exploration of the network of funding and connections that supports illegal immigration advocacy, though I would say it lacks any smoking guns for this caravan).

From this we gather that PSF is probably lending some degree of expertise to the group, and has a spokesperson who seems to have helped arrange funding through NGOs for prior caravans, though he has no proven role in funding at present. That stated—note that PSF has started a CrowdRaise account, currently at $5,000, to provide things for the caravan. These include money for shelter for caravan members, organizers, and volunteers; gear and “logistics”; “know-your-rights and legal process orientation”; “limited emergency food”; “struggles against detention and deportation”, and—well—”materials for banners, paint, canvas, etc.”. From which we can, I assume, expect the group to show up at the border with signs, because lord knows, there’s nothing like a few square feet of cardboard to make me question my own national sovereignty.

Curious, given the involvement of the group, about what they might have contributed to the structure, I hunted for information on how caravans are organized. I will say at the outset that I’m still not sure, but there are hints. Protocol Magazine describes how these groups have previously been set up. “Groups are created by Pueblo Sin Fronteras; each composed of about 15 individuals under one leader. Five groups are then organized into a sector. This is how the caravan is structured and maintains order as the group moves northward.” Sectors would likely be under the jurisdiction of coordinators or the equivalent— the upper ranks of the caravan. It’s a flexible structure, and it would be unsurprising to find that something similar is being used at present, considering the group has added up to 3,000 people at a stroke, and here I’m thinking back to the crossing from Guatemala to Mexico. Note that Fuentes, by his own admission to La Tribuna, was involved in the April caravan and would have seen PSF’s organization firsthand, so it’s plausible that he’d copy it even if PSF wasn’t involved at the start. Supposing that’s the case, it’s interesting that the 40 original organizers were massive overkill for the supposed original group of 160, especially when you consider that the first two groups to meet up sound to be nothing but organizers. In theory they started with organizational capacity for about 600 people, plus the 40 organizers themselves. That suggests they expected at least some growth. At their peak of 7,000 in a single group, they’d have needed a theoretical 460 odd leaders. The Nomada article, however, makes me suspect it’s far fewer in practice. The river crossing purportedly interrupted the organization of the caravan, causing just five young men to step up to organize what was, at minimum, estimated to be 2,000. How many were—and now are—the original organizers is unknown. Contreras is confirmed to be one of the leaders who made it across to the Mexican side. WaPo suggests experienced illegal immigrants—like Pablo Flores of Tela, Honduras—are filling out a lot of the other leadership roles.

The larger, and thornier issue, and one that is still rather ill-explained, to be frank, is where the money and provisions for the migrant caravan are coming from. The above information begins to peel that back. As the CrowdRaise page more or less acknowledges, moving several thousand people by any means, thousands of miles, is no trivial task. It’s a logistical nightmare, really. Armies, tasked with the same problem, have multiple support units, in multiple configurations, to supply and distribute the food, water, and other basic necessities to people in the field. The MSM is mostly portraying people as leaving spontaneously, on a shoestring budget. Fox talks of “many people joining spontaneously while carrying just a few belongings”. AP has a concrete but slightly comical example: “Carlos Leonidas Garcia Urbina, a 28-year-old from Tocoa, Honduras, said he was cutting the grass in his father’s yard when he heard about the caravan, dropped the shears on the ground and ran to join with just 500 lempiras ($20) in his pocket”. [Let me interject as someone who grew up in a Latin country…. cutting the grass?  Yeah, doesn’t happen, unless it’s a vast public building. Well, it might in Portugal now the EU has emulsified it.  BUT culturally?  Ah, no.- SAH]

Initially, the MSM was also trying to sell us on the idea that they weren’t getting any kind of support. Some sources are still acting as if that’s the case. That’s obviously impossible. You can’t not provision and not be supported on the road as you cross the better part of a continent. Of the remainder, most have switched to saying they’re getting spontaneous support, from people noted by CBS to be handing out sandals, or people noted by WaPo to be handing out sandwiches and bags of water. USA Today includes a couple of other groups, though, reporting that “local residents, church groups, and municipal officials in towns where the caravan stops are feeding the migrants”. Which hints that this is a little more than just “spontaneous” support. Even so, that’s a pretty unreliable supply method. Admittedly, that would explain why people are reportedly getting severely dehydrated.

But let’s explore this for a moment. How much support is actually from random Mexican people, and how much is from larger organizations? Well, a different WaPo article makes things that were murky a little clearer, and removes some of the magic much of the MSM is trying to inject into this: ” The coordinators have not mapped an exact route all the way to the border, Flores explains. The stops will be determined by what towns agree to help when they call ahead to ask. At times, they poll the travelers, who decide with a show of hands what path to take. They know their next two stops — Pijijiapan and Tonala — where officials and churches have pledged to set up medical stations and provide food and shelter.”. This would make sense, essentially charting a path from oasis to oasis. The organization of “humanitarian assistance” PSF referred to above probably also explains how Red Cross got on site so fast. Some of this is also coming from Mexican towns, as USA Today said. Says the WaPo: ” Emmanuel Noriega Molina, who runs Mapastepec’s finances, says the municipality and the state of Chiapas are paying for the supplies,” with the help of the churches and Red Cross. Which adds an interesting wrinkle—this isn’t even just a decision on the part of local mayors. Some of this funding is actually coming from Mexico at the state level. Spontaneous assistance, indeed.

That’s not the only issue. We haven’t covered everything. For one thing, there’s the aforementioned fundraising drive. For another thing, there’s this video from Representative Matt Gaetz showing migrants being given cash. He described it as being in Honduras because it was referred to him by a Honduran official, though it’s now been confirmed it happened in Guatemala. The WaPo claims to have debunked it, but only someone extremely sympathetic to the Left would actually buy their debunking as a true debunking. For a start, they don’t actually contest that someone was indeed distributing cash to the horde. Actually, they confirm it. “Through a little digital detective work, we found that the video was shot when the caravan was passing through Chiquimula, Guatemala”. Their big triumphant claim is that there’s no evidence that it’s secretly being funded by the Dems or Dem interests. Or, then again, any evidence of where the money is from at all. Which, to be honest with you, essentially means WaPo and the NYTimes, (which also is claiming this is debunked because “the origin [of the video] is unknown”) are calling this debunked because, well, they won’t do their jobs and figure out where the money is coming from.

Hot on the heels of the above, there’s was the following statement from Mike Pence that “the president of Honduras told me this was organized by leftist groups in Honduras and financed by Venezuela”. Initially, I was taken aback by that, and a little skeptical. After doing the above research? I’m more inclined to credit it. For a start, I know that it was started by leftist groups. LIBRE were the people who touched all this off and the organizational structure still reflects what they initially set up. LIBRE is the party formed by a man who was cozying Honduras up to other socialist governments in the area, including Venezuela, before he was forcibly deposed. Could he have called in a favor? It’s not out of the question. Venezuela has an interest in it, because it gives them an angle—”See what American imperialism did to Honduras? Everybody is leaving.”. Really, the biggest down-check at this point is that Venezuela is in the process of collapsing, but funding for this caravan would probably “only” run into the thousands or low millions, especially with them adding the profoundly infuriating largess of Mexico to supplement that.

And most recently, there’s Beto O’Rourke, as reported by project Veritas and discussed here by PJ Media. I must admit, I enjoy in my partisan heart that this simultaneously reveals a Democratic organization providing support for the caravan—which you’ll recall, a few paragraphs ago, we were strongly assured they weren’t doing—and that it’s happening the context of doing outright illegal things with campaign funds. Unclear here is whether they were just buying things to send down there—which is what they discuss—or whether some actual hard cash made it down that way. It also raises the question: Are other Democrat campaigns besides Beto’s putting cash into it on the sly?

In the end, this group certainly is not as random or as disorganized as it seems. To summarize the above: We know for sure it was started by a group of far left “comrades” in Honduras. Lately, whether any of them were involved in it at the start, the far left group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, subsidiary of a 501c headquartered in Chicago, and currently headed by a radical illegal immigrant, has become involved in the logistics for the caravan. They have had at least two group leaders involved in the caravan, and of those at least one, so far as we know, is still with it. One report from an MSM source suggests they may have members among the current coordinators, who are in charge of the ultimate direction of the caravan. The group structure continues to reflect the leaders/coordinators hierarchy established by LIBRE early on more than PSF’s cadre-style approach, however, with leaders acting more like sheepdogs, lending credence to the idea that PSF didn’t set it up initially. Whether or not inspiration was taken from them early on, though—it could, after all, simply have fallen apart later at the river crossing— there were an awful lot of leaders and relatively few followers in the initial composition, implying that there was an expectation even then that the horde would grow.

On the money side, it seems likely that the group is taking all the free support from Mexico it can get. That support is, unfortunately, substantial, and seems to extend up to the state level. Which tells you something about how Mexicans think of the US—and Americans ought to bear that in mind when discussing issues surrounding illegals. Experienced organizers like PSF are probably also helping get organizations like Red Cross involved. Also, the Catholic church, which it seems to me has clearly lost its way between this and Pope Marx I, is providing aid. But given the fact that the migrants were seen being handed money, and no MSM source I could find was able to either refute that (and in fact seemed to confirm it), nor explain where the money was coming from, there’s more to it than that, and multiple hypotheses for where it’s coming from are very much on the table. We can add that the group got provided with buses chartered by… *collective media crickets*, and we still don’t know, well, first and foremost, if any of them are using them right now. It seems that some money and provisioning is coming both from crowdfunding and, apparently, misuse of campaign contributions by Beto O’Rourke’s campaign. It will be interesting to see whether other Democrats have been similarly bad with their money. Project Veritas has shown a great deal of capacity to surprise. Funding from Venezuela is as yet unproven, but given who organized the march and the person who founded LIBRE—as well as the fact that they had a prominent party member traveling with them, greatly increasing the chances the senior members thereof knew about it—I wouldn’t discount it at this point. Remember that the person initially interviewed, who said Fuentes would be funding the operation, also ” mentioned foreign assistance”. Other organizations, both NGOs like CARA and government-funded organizations, like USAID (as suggested by Gateway Pundit) have been suggested as funding sources. Regarding the latter, apart from one picture of a person with a bag—which in fairness, hasn’t really been shown to be provided for this march, and hasn’t been matched with photos of any other migrants holding one—I couldn’t find anything else linking them. This starts to get into territory where nobody knows anything—there’s not really any evidence, even circumstantial evidence, to go on.

Let me say in closing, regarding the above—this is the fundamental problem with investigative reporters not doing their damned jobs. The Left has learned that being incurious about a subject fails to provide inconvenient counter-evidence that they’d then have to hide—something they weren’t above doing with exonerating information regarding Kavanaugh. Moreover, it leads people to speculate, which invariably means there will be one or two misfires they can “debunk”. They do less work and get more effective propaganda. Easy as that. That may be why I was noticing a night-and-day difference between the level of biographical depth provided for key figures in the caravan between English and Spanish-language media. Put it this way, when Instapundit posted the story that the LA Times Spanish language section endorsed the latin candidates, rather than their Caucasian rivals who were endorsed in the English section? I can’t say I was really surprised. English and Spanish-speakers are getting two very different views of the same story, and the English language one is, ah, curated, shall we say. That places like NBC and the Daily Beast would prefer you not know these people are radical leftists is plainly evident, and small wonder given their political leanings. Even after all this, while we can certainly put paid to the spontaneity and non-ideological claims about the caravan organizers, and to the claims that US money isn’t helping fund this, the MSM continues to weave an unrealistic vision of the logistical complexity of the caravan. And some questions that journalists could be pursuing in that area, simply aren’t being answered.

*Normally I don’t like to do more than one guest post in a row — as you know — but I’m running this series for several reasons.  Some of them are mundane.  I’m on the final push at refinishing the library system, and frankly ready to be done with it.  Also so tired, I fall asleep when I sit down.  My house hasn’t been cleaned in a month and looks like a construction zone (I’m cleaning today) and we have practice grandchildren visiting tonight.  But more importantly, now Bill is done with the editorial part of his articles, and does a deep dive into what I call “the data of the horde.”  I think someone should do that and it should be out in the public, before the inevitable confrontation at the border and the hasty attempts at out-pallywooding Pallywood by our media.  And so, I’m running this and another tomorrow.  After that I’ll be back. – SAH*

Examining the Migrant Horde- Pt 1—Planes, Trains or Automobiles? by Bill Reader

There’s a lot of discussion going on about the logistics of the migrant horde on its way up from Latin America. There are tons of unanswered questions about this group, and hopefully by the end of this series of articles I can at least begin to provide some answers. This is not intended as a be-all, end-all set of articles. This is intended as a good starting point. It is my fervent hope that this inspires continuing efforts by diligent journalists on the ground.

There are several things that are worth discussing with this group. First, how are they traveling? Is it really all by foot?

Second, what kind of logistical support do they have? How are they organized, and who by? Are they funded externally, and if so, by what organizations? Recall that feeding this many people is a non-trivial task.

Third, how big is the group, and who is it composed of? We’re hearing a lot of competing stories on this subject. For the people purporting to know, one way or another, how do they know? What is their intent—are they trying to immigrate, are they refugees, or what?

In this series of articles, I hope to examine all these questions.

Let’s start with how they’re traveling. While it’s undeniable that the group is spending some period of time walking, an examination of their travel itinerary reveals that almost by definition, they haven’t been walking all the time. And now that some major news sources are actually reporting the speed the caravan is supposed to be going, incidentally, things are only getting more implausible.

Some people in the NYT are dumb enough to write the following in the Article “Debunking 5 Viral Images of the Migrant Caravan”—”Claim: Caravan members are boarding buses and trains instead of walking” which they follow with “Verdict: Mislabeled/unproven”. Technically speaking, that is true for the specific images they chose. These images are mislabeled. Note that they rather specifically dodge around the question of whether these people are taking vehicles of any kind. But their definition of the claim is not only not unproven, it is acknowledged in multiple MSM news sources, and further demonstrated in photographs on MSM sources. And lest we forget, buses aren’t the only vehicle people can ride on, as I will also highlight.

I will quote the following articles. Emphasis is mine:

-“Many hitched rides from hundreds of cars, trucks and public transportation.” –Reuters

-“The caravan, fairly compact in recent days, has dispersed a bit, with different bands of people seen walking together in a line, some boarding buses or trying to hitch rides” – CBS

-“A caravan estimated at more than 7,000 Central Americans, on foot and in vehicles, has been making its way north, intending to travel through Mexico to the U.S. border.” – Murcury News

-“Motorists in pickups and other vehicles have been offering the migrants rides, often in overloaded truck beds”— USNews

-“Thousands of Central American migrants are walking, taking buses and wading through rivers”—PBS

Moreover, here is a photoessay published on NBC. I draw your attention to the following images and their associated captions:

-Image 2/36- Shows a woman sleeping on a bus. Caption: “A woman sleeps with her baby as they travel on a bus toward the United States. The migrant caravan moves in groups either on foot or by vehicle.”

-Image 7/36- People on the back of a truck. Caption “Locals drove Hondurans part of the way.”

-Image 8/36- People getting off a truck. Caption: “A Honduran child cries as he gets off a truck during a new leg of the journey.”

-Image 9/36- Hands sticking through a truck’s side. Caption: “Migrants sit in a truck”

-Image 14/36- People getting on a truck. Caption: “Honduran migrants get on a truck to Guatemala City.”

I draw your attention further to this Daily Mail article showing 7 more images of migrants sitting on trucks. And this video from an independent journalist of people getting into the back of a truck.

This isn’t “unverified”, NYT. This is demonstrable fact. Some of the migrants have been riding on busses, and in addition to that, they’re also hitching rides on passing vehicles as noted in multiple articles and photos.

But there’s more to this. “Okay”, you may say, “So they’re spending some time on vehicles. But that doesn’t make that big a difference to the overall speed of the group.” Well, that can’t actually be the case. See, I decided to examine how fast this group has been moving. Now, while I appreciate that this caravan is sizeable, and people are playing fast and loose with when they actually technically arrive and leave at various cities, per the following news sources, enough people were in each given place at each given time to say that the caravan had arrived there. We can even get an estimate of how far ahead the fastest groups were.

Sources for the bona-fides of the dates of arrival are provided, though at this point it’s more or less a matter of record. First things first. The caravan started in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Sources vary slightly on the exact day they set off, with Fox and USA Today saying the 12th, and Daily Mail saying the 13th. By October 23rd, according to USA Today, they were interviewing people passing through Huixtla, Mexico. We also know that the caravan didn’t take the very shortest route per GoogleMaps, because some of the places noted in the NBC photo-essay—Quezaltepeque, Guatamala, and Chiquimula, Guatemala—are on a slightly more southern route. All told the distance traveled in 12 days—and that’s being generous, counting from the 12th, counting the full day of both the 12th and the 23rd as travel days, and ignoring that the caravan seems to have stalled out for almost a full day when it hit the border starting on the 18th— was 471 miles. That’s a pace of nearly 40 miles a day.

For comparison, I decided to research about how fast a trained infantry unit—notable for not carrying 5 year olds—can go in a day. This discussion on Quora puts a foot march at a 12-20 miles a day on the low end for infantry, with some elite units being able to move about 50 miles a day in full combat gear on good roads. This correlates well with a separate discussion here, which states: “The average soldier should be able to walk at a speed of 6.5kph for 20km carrying 32kg (LBE, pack & rifle)…”. 20 km is about 12 miles, and the same source states that “Humans can easily walk over 20 miles per day without tiring, even when carrying moderate loads and without much conditioning.” Remember, that’s half the speed this group is going by even the most conservative estimates. This simple estimate is consistent with the average speed worked out by the Daily Mail. That essentially random, lower-class Latin Americans, including women and children, would march about the double the distance that humans can easily accommodate, and indeed faster than the average trained infantry unit day-over-day, is suspicious as is, and points to the influence of vehicles being significant. However, it’s not absolute proof.

Still, I can point out one leg of the journey in particular which would have been, in all probability, impossible without assistance from vehicles. For this, let’s consider a few of the well documented stops on that road—specifically, the point where the caravan traveled through the closely-approximated cities of Quezaltepeque, Guatemala, and Chiquimula, Guatemala, through Guatemala city, and on to border town of Tecun Uman. There’s good documentation of migrants being in Quezaltepeque on the 16th. It can be found here: “Honduran migrants, part of a caravan trying to reach the U.S., are pictured inside a pick up in Quezaltepeque, Guatemala October 16, 2018.” Also here: “Honduran immigrants travel north near Quezaltepeque, Guatemala, on 16 October.” These appeared to be some of the people at the front. Photos of the most substantial part of the group going through nearby Chiquimula appear on the 17th, per CBS (image 3/56), and here is a different picture of it from NBC (image 13/36). And also at both links, note separate pictures of people departing Guatemala city on the 18th, both on foot, and by vehicle. Meanwhile, on the 18th, the first people had arrived at the Suchiate River in Tecun Uman, according to PBS: ” On Thursday, hundreds had walked to the river’s edge where they sang the national anthems of Honduras and Guatemala,”. Remember that, readers. I’ll come back to that. But spoiler alert, these aren’t exactly poor Ellis Island arrivals looking to become good Americans. And of course, on the 19th, enough had made it to Tecun Uman as noted by the WSJ, as noted by Time, and so on— to push down the fence by force.

From this we can infer a couple of things—the leading edge of the caravan was maybe a day ahead—that is, both between the 16th and the 17th in the nearby towns of Quezaltepeque and Chiquimula (the two are about 19 miles apart), we can find early photos of small groups about a day before the main group came through. The pattern is repeated again with small groups arriving at Tecun Uman on the border on the 18th, and a critical mass capable of knocking down the border fence being present on the 19th.

Second, we have separate photos and independent sources confirming the presence of the meat of the migrant horde in Chiquimala on the 17th, Guatamala City on the 18th, and Tecun Uman on the 19th. The distance from Chiquimala to Tecun Uman, passing through Guatamala, is 255-272 miles (depending on whether you ask GoogleMaps for walking or driving directions), meaning the main part of the group went an astonishing distance of almost 90 miles a day over these 3 days, and again, that’s by the most conservative estimates. That’s much faster than an elite military unit, much faster than any group could conceivably walk for such a sustained period. If they did not eat, sleep, or stop for any reason, and traveled midnight to midnight, that puts their average speed at 3.75 miles per hour. That is traveling at just shy of what our source above refers to as “forced march speed”, 4 mph. And again, that’s assuming they did it for 3 days, continuously, midnight to midnight, which we know for a fact they did not. For one thing, that NBC photoessay above shows them bedding down in a gymnasium on the 17th.

So either A) not only are they spending time traveling by vehicle, but vehicles of one form or another have played a substantial role, not for one or two small groups, but for the meat of party. This would explain how they are cover distances that quickly during this period, because the alternative is that B) this group of people, which is always pictured as walking in videos, is breaking into a run when the camera is off and somehow maintaining that pace for distances and times that would challenge army rangers. It is almost double the speed of an elite military unit. And you are supposed to believe, I reiterate, that they did this repeatedly, day in, and day out.

Here’s the bottom line—these people aren’t walking this whole way. It’s not just tenuous, or unlikely, it’s impossible. Among those parts of the MSM that are honest enough to admit they are using some kind of vehicle, the story is that they’re covering these distances by hitching rides between walking. I can’t prove that or disprove it. There are certainly a lot of images of people on the backs of trucks if you go looking for them. But in no image did I see more than maybe one or two hundred people on the back of vehicles. Did most of the portion of the group that used public transit use it during these time periods? Perhaps. Were buses provided for by other means? I can’t demonstrate that, either. But I can tell you that anyone selling you that these are people simply walking up from Latin America is staking claim that doesn’t conform at all to the evidence.

Update:

When I initially sat down to write this, the story was still in its infancy. Since then, well, things have come on a bit. On the 29th of October AP reported that the organizers of the horde, then passing through Tapanatepec, were demanding ” safe and dignified” transport to Mexico city, which demonstrates remarkable chutzpa considering these people are largely in the country of Mexico illegally.  It was broken by Fox (video at the link, reposted on another site), but widely attributed to Daily Caller for picking up, and is now reported by a plurality of sites, that the “migrant” “caravan” was boarding charter buses in Oaxaca state. Two interesting sidebars there, though. First, I used another, essentially randomly selected site, because my search engine couldn’t show me the footage on Fox’s site. Second, geographic searches in Latin America have, over the course of following this story, proven to be a nightmare. When following this, you have to be clear that the group is Oaxaca state, not Oaxaca city. All that was as of the 30th of October.

On the 1st of November Fox reported they were in Juchitan, which based on the map they provide would be the town GoogleMaps refers to as Juchitan de Zaragoza. November 1st was also a day of up and down news for Americans. On the one hand, it seems to mark the date the organizers unexpectedly shifted for a Northern route towards McAllen, TX, though truthfully this seems to be the route many American commentators have expected for some time, as it’s the shortest. On the other hand, from the discussion you can tell that at least some in the crowd seem to have been planning to go to Tijuana. As we’ll discuss tomorrow, one of the prominent leaders of the caravan is based there. Also, given that California is a lot more likely to put up with this BS than Texas, it’s hard to avoid speculating, once again, that the point of this caravan is not to actually get in, but to use the group as pawns in the interest of influencing the midterms. The trip is about 800 miles if they take that route. The good news is that the caravan coordinators are also saying its attempts to appeal to Mexico for Buses “failed“, as of October 31st. It’s worth remembering—and I’ll talk about this in more detail—that the best information I can find suggests these coordinators may include members of Pueblo de Fronteras, which given the group has its headquarters in Chicago and is funded by multiple left-wing funding agencies according to InfluenceWatch, is absolutely under fair suspicion for attempts to influence the timing. Even the other major group that may have control of the caravan has reasons it might want to. The article at the link notes the following two paragraphs, which I cannot improve on:

” In the first week after the leading caravan got into Mexico, federal police sometimes enforced obscure safety rules, forcing them off paid mini-buses, citing insurance regulations, added the Associated Press. They also stopped some overloaded pickup trucks carrying migrants and forced them to get off.

But in recent days, officials from Mexico’s immigrant protection agency have organized rides for straggling women and children as a humanitarian effort. And police have routinely stood by as migrants piled aboard freight trucks.”

To which I will add only two other comments—while the story given here sounds plausible, isn’t it convenient that the women and children, depending on how far they get rides, could also be the first to arrive at the border, to be confronted by several Army divisions? I’m not alone in thinking this is the long game of this caravan. Sarah and I have talked at some length about this, and if it follows the history of communist organized protests everywhere (stay tuned!), we can expect a pregnant woman to be shot. We’re calling her Maria De La Cruz, at present, as a convenient placeholder name until she presents herself. Note also that this entire demand—ridiculous on the face of it—seems calculated to get rejected (lest we forget, people who just waltzed in after attacking Mexican cops are demanding things of Mexico), in order to obscure three things.

1- As demonstrated above, this group has been getting vehicular assistance or their prior rate of speed would be impossible, and this rejection doesn’t change that,

2- Given that we saw groups boarding buses, and we know that the appeal to Mexico is not what rendered them, that strongly implies that there is funding coming from somewhere, because bus drivers don’t get to just do whatever they like with their buses (And just to foreshadow, for all that Mexico and the coordinators play up rejection? It could still be Mexico.) and

3- unless those buses have also been stopped, this statement deliberately misleads about how the group is currently traveling. If they’re on buses, they could be at the border very easily before the elections. The 800 miles from their present position to McAllen is a relative breeze by bus. But this may also be a play to spread US resources, by sending the women and children North to McAllen to be a political setpiece while the military aged men continue onward.

It’s hard to tell because the way the caravan chooses its next location isn’t straightforward. Tune in tomorrow to find out why I say that. And in case you wonder why I would think such a thing at all, Protocol Magazine noted that when the April caravan halted in Mexico city rather than continuing to the American border, “Leaders cited the reason for this as concerns for the high numbers of children within the group, as the next stage would involve dangerous travel by freight train”. Which, indeed, pictures at the links in the update show some groups are already doing. Which begs the question, how do they intend to proceed this time?

I’ve discussed already the liberal perspective on the immigrant horde. Now I’d like to talk about the other side of the equation, and help crystallize my own thoughts—and argue from at least one school of conservative thought—as to the flaws with the migrant horde, the philosophical and practical rationale for keeping them out, and the conservative perspective on immigration in general.

The Left plays up that these people come from desperate conditions, as it does in all scenarios like this. As I mentioned in my prior article, the Left tends to blame the United States first for these impoverished conditions and it does so in part because they’ve got end-stage Marxism. As I noted there, the United States is not responsible for the floundering of countries with a long history of socialism and the typically dysfunctional Latin American culture, which runs heavily to corruption of officialdom at every level and serial revolutions in virtually all places where it’s predominant. [Roman culture really.  Darn those Roman colonialists.  We took their form of Republic, but not their culture, which is why we do well enough. The Latin countries… sigh.- SAH]

More broadly, it helps to actually understand what we ask of our immigrants and why we ask it. And in order to examine that question, I’d like to start with something that should be very familiar to all naturalized immigrants—the Oath of Allegiance. What we ask of our immigrants is not only fairly clear, it’s repeated month after month, year after year, every year, by new Americans.

In the most general sense, immigration is how Americans who were born abroad come home. It is Not, with a capital “N”, how foreign nationals, still loyal to their home countries, acquire the nominal moniker of “American”. There is a reason that it is the very first thing every naturalized American must swear. “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen;”. And this isn’t a symbolic gesture. In fact, it is doubly important that we mean it when we make people say it. The US gives its people unique leeway to redefine what the country is—which we will discuss in a moment—and thereby exists only by the grace of a kind of consensus philosophy. To accept the reward, and burden, of being American, is to explicitly turn your back on divided loyalties, and rededicate yourself to the maintenance and furtherance of that single philosophy and its subordinate guiding principles, to the exclusion of all others. Because we are not a nation of place, of race, of faith or of fealty. We are an idea made manifest, and ideas, while hard to kill, are fragile to maintain. Those principles and that philosophy need not be wondered at. They are explicitly notated in the constitution in the least ambiguous way the people writing knew how (they must have done an okay job, it took statists about 200 years to really pick the semantics apart and start interpreting things never intended in its text). And this is exactly why the Oath of citizenship goes on to say “That I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same”.

Having noted that, I will digress for a moment to take apart a particular Leftist trope, as it is cogent. People properly acquainted with the history of the country’s founding will recognize that the US is not in fact, a “nation of immigrants”, or at least not as the term is understood on the Left. The US is a nation of well circumscribed and elaborated foundational principles, outlined in the constitution and meant to be embodied in its citizenry. By corollary, a person who subscribes to, and is willing to uphold those principles, may be admitted as a citizen at our discretion—and the fact that they are an immigrant is not counted against them if they do so. Put another way, we are a nation that is willing to take those from all around the world who understand and believe in our core philosophy, and promise to commit everything to becoming one of us. We are therefore only “a nation of immigrants” in an incidental sense, because nation of origin matters less than caring about American principles—but we have no philosophical obligation nor reason to simply take immigrants because they are immigrants. That’s a self-defeating idea on the face of it. To argue that being from another nation is a reason in and of itself for admitting a person and making them a citizen, not only implicitly contradicts the first line of the citizenship oath, but is effectively simply an argument against borders of any kind—a far stupider idea that I’ve already separately taken to task in the past. Indeed, it’s perhaps even something more radical if taken to its logical conclusion—an argument for forced emulsification of other nationalities with Americans. And yet strangely, once you peel back the risible accusations of racism, and the historically illiterate accusations that we caused the desolation in countries with an extensive history of Marxism, you’re left, essentially, with nothing more than this: that America has had significant contributions from immigrants, ergo immigrants must be an unsullied good in their own right.

Why must our oath be this way? Why do we have such a high bar? Well, as the US uniquely has as its nucleus only a set of ideas, it is uniquely invested in the ideas of its citizens. However, paradoxically, to embody the freedoms it represents and depends on, the US is expressly set up to minimize its ability to influence, change, and enforce the ideas of its citizenry. This includes ideas antithetical to, or even hostile to the US. Indeed, the US government cannot and should not arrogate to itself the ability to enforce a particular belief, even, unfortunately, the ones necessary for the US to survive— like free speech, freedom of association, and the right to bear arms— the last explicitly in case someone less cognizant of why the government must never stoop to enforcement of one viewpoint comes to power (On which point a sidebar is warranted— this is not the same thing as members of government expressing a viewpoint. Presidents are representatives of a party, parties are partisan affairs. Expressing their own beliefs, acting in accordance with them, is normal and expected. Indeed, it’s what we vote for. Trump is well within his rights to call things like he sees them, as often and as partisan as he likes. So was Obama. So was Bush. But when Obama’s IRS started targeting conservatives, that was enforcement of his viewpoint. That was highly unacceptable, and remains one of the worst marks of ignominy on a presidency marred by a long list of them.). This naturally raises the point that the United States is in constant peril from its own permissive philosophy.

There is, therefore, a countervailing force, and one that must be strenuously maintained. As by definition, the US cannot come to her own defense without ceasing to be what she stands for, her people must. The concepts upon which freedom rests are borne on the shoulders of her citizens. To permit the US to continue existing, it needs a vanguard of people who understand the core philosophy at its foundation, the principles on which it is based, and who will defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic—just as it says in the oath. The domestic enemies are more common than people realize, and they are neither mass shooters nor fake bombers. There is no policy decision that will legislate crazy people out of existence (Although on the other hand, Carter starting the de-institutionalization policies that eventually led to the closing of the insane asylums probably did not make the situation better. However, given the tone of the modern Left, it’s just as well that the bar for institutionalizing people against their will is a very high bar, as the Left has gone firmly crazy, insist nonetheless that they’re sane, and some people—I pray not enough to do real damage— are naive enough to take their word for it. Sooner or later the inmates may get the key to the madhouse.). Rather, domestic enemies are properly understood in this frame of reference to be champions of ideas that—if implemented—would result in the collapse of the American experiment. Our defense against these, within the strictures of our laws, is at the debate table and ballot box, but that it is conceived as non-violent does not make it non-important.

Indeed, one of the strengths of American democracy was that it was conceived in a way that allowed us to resist the proclivities of humans to centralize and plan-from-above, which have been destroying societies at least as far back as ancient Greece.

It is also remarkable in how undramatic it was in its conception, admitting the probability that people with some flawed ideas are not flawed in all ideas—that extreme measures to silence a person because of disagreement, even totally valid disagreement over things that are an existential threat to the nation, would throw many babies out with the bathwater and render the country draconian and uncomfortable in the meanwhile.

Ironically, even this idea, the underpinning of a civil society that is truly a civil society, turns out to be one that domestic enemies can ablate with enough ignorance, which is why Google and Facebook have turned to openly flirting with censorship (And, I note parenthetically for those who would “punch a Nazi”—and who strangely do not proceed to black their own eyes— that the non-violent intention behind this well-functioning system is no invitation to your continuing untrammeled in your antics. Nowhere is it required philosophically to continue non-violently in perpetuity even when violence and extra-legal intimidation and actions against our will are visited upon us. Indeed, that was rather the point of the rebellion. We are not a holy sect; we maintain a right to self-defense. I am very proud of conservatives as a whole for their character in the face of flagrant abuse of our system by the Left, most recently embodied by the smearing of Kavanaugh. I remain extremely hopeful that the Right can push back on the Left long enough for the Left to have some marginally sane, non-socialist leaders emerge, and that the Left does not push things to the point where the Right must either submit against their will or fight. It will not go well for anyone.)

The United States must have the right, given the above, to moderate and decide who comes in. This must be the case because people who maintain ideas of statism, centralization, and other concepts that contradict the foundational principles on which the constitution is based, can pose a serious threat, which I’ll elaborate on in a moment. While the US must suffer these people who arise natively, and count on the aggregate wisdom of the voters to maintain American principles despite them, it is by no means required to suffer the same from those seeking to come in. Immigrants are, first and foremost, supplicants, and whether you like it or not, bear the weight of intrinsic suspicion because their first loyalty, almost by definition, was not to the United States. That they were always Americans, born in another place by misfortune, is an extraordinary claim—we ask they provide extraordinary evidence, and that means jumping through our hoops. Incidentally, compared to the rest of the first world—Hell, compared to Mexico, as many have pointed out—the evidence we ask for is not even that extraordinary. These new Americans, we do not hold to the lax standards of people born here. They are starting anew, so we ask that they demonstrate anew their understanding and commitment to the principles that are at our core, as if they were among the founders themselves, rebelling against their own home.

The threat posed by people who do not understand our principles exists because, to best serve its mission, the US government was also conceived with formalized, strictly constrained methods of changing its structure. The point was that it should not blow with the wind, riding every fad that ran through the country. It was meant to be ponderous, difficult to change, requiring massive consensus among the people’s representatives—a point firmly lost on the 111th congress, incidentally, which used what could at best be called a procedural loophole to pass ObamaCare, and at worst simply did so illegally. As they have sown, so far, so they have reaped. We will see what transpires next week.

At all events, the US is permitted to change, with the intent that it do so along lines that better serve the freedom of the individual and the ability to live with a minimum of governmental interference. That is what makes the decision to free slaves a good one, and what makes propositions like “Medicaid for all” such bad ones. This flexibility, in the hands of a populace overly ignorant of the principles they live under, or at the capricious whim of people who worship at the altar of collectivism, becomes vulnerability. And it is vulnerability, as noted above, the US is by no means obligated to bear. We are not here to be misused and abused as a mere resource for any old huddled masses. We are interested only in those that truly yearn to breathe free—with all the responsibilities that entails.

I will note in closing that the last three generations have increasingly made me wonder if it is not time to consider abandoning birthright citizenship for all people in the United States, not just people from foreign soil. Increasingly I notice that it seems as though key knowledge about why America exists, and what it represents, has either been lost or deliberately manipulated to fit a neo-Marxist, class-struggle worldview more neatly. The assumption of the 14th amendment was that American citizens could, in general, be trusted to raise good American citizens—and while probably there have been like-minded curmudgeons like me in all generations, I will note nonetheless— I see little to persuade me that that is actually happening as intended. The Left is already trying to scare their base by saying Trump is contemplating an executive order to end birthright citizenship for all. That, at least, we’re safely assured he won’t do. He said his legal council endorsed the executive order, and that would simply contradict the 14th.

But since they have come to mention it?—well, what a good idea.