Why the media is having a meltdown over DACA

For three days now, the MSM has been screaming bloody murder about an alleged (and denied) vulgarity spoken by President Trump in a closed-door meeting about immigration reform and DACA.  We have covered this media meltdown extensively in pieces you can link to here and here.  But now, let’s have a look into what the REAL news about DACA is, and we might even understand why the MSM is having such a meltdown. 

On January 12th, the American radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh noted during his program that although there was not any detail about this known yet, the apparent issue was that President Trump was outraged over the Democrats trying to hand him a total nothing-burger deal about immigration.  We have to remember that one of President Trump’s wishes is to get the United States to adopt a “merit based” immigration position, where the US screens people who want to come to live in the USA in regards to what they can and will contribute to the well-being of this nation. 

This is not a strange or barbarous position to take on immigration.  Canada does it.  Australia does it, Germany, Hong Kong, Denmark, New Zealand and other nations in the world probably do it as well.  In fact, the United States itself ran with such a system up until the year 1952.  Such a vetting process may go far in reducing the chance that elements who get in to a given nation will then attack it and its people. 

What was proposed by the Congressional representatives that started this? 

From a January 11 piece run on Vox.com, this was the basic outline of the proposal.  Please note that it is a framework, and not extremely specific (though it may appear so on first reading:)

Allowing young unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children to get legal status — and eventually citizenship:The deal would allow hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants who came to the US as children, and meet other requirements (which aren’t yet clear), to apply for provisional legal status in the US.  After a certain number of years, they’d be eligible to apply for green cards — and after another three or five years, like other green card holders, they would be able to apply for US citizenship. 

Legalization wouldn’t just be open to the 690,000 immigrants who were protected under the DACA program when Trump started winding it down in September; it would also include immigrants who qualified for DACA and never applied (or whose protections expired without renewal), or who meet the requirements set forward in the bill, as well as immigrants under 15 who weren’t able to apply for DACA.  And unlike DACA, it would be permanent. 

Preventing “chain migration” by preventing parents of DREAMers from becoming US citizens:In order to make it impossible for people legalized under this bill to sponsor their parents for citizenship, the bill would make parents of DREAMers ineligible to get green cards, making it impossible for them to naturalize.  It would instead provide them with a form of legal status that could be renewed every three years. 

By putting the restriction on parents of DREAMers, rather than directly restricting DREAMers’ ability to sponsor relatives after becoming citizens, the bill could avoid a constitutional pitfall.  But it could end up locking out immigrant parents who have both a DREAMer and a native-born US citizen in the family — who would currently be eligible for green cards when their citizen children turned 21. 

Eliminating the diversity visa lottery and reallocating the 50,000 visas currently used for it:As first reported by Politico’s Seung Min Kim, the proposed DACA deal would kill two birds with one stone.  It would eliminate the visa lottery.  But instead of just allowing 50,000 fewer immigrants into the US legally each year, it would reallocate those visas.  Some of them would go to immigrants from underrepresented countries, just on some non-lottery basis; other visas would go to immigrants whose Temporary Protected Status is about to expire due to the Trump administration’s aggressive moves to end the program. ( Right now, people with TPS can’t get green cards; under this deal, they could.) 

A few billion dollars for the border:NBC’s Leigh Ann Caldwell reported that the deal as presented to Trump would have included $1.6 billion for physical barriers (which Caldwell called a fence but the White House would probably call a wall), surveillance tech, and agent training — and another $1.2 billion for “other priorities” on border security.  Those numbers are roughly in line with what the White House asked for for a single year on the border in its 2017 supplemental funding requests. 

But these sound like good proposals.  Why is President Trump so angry about them? 

If we take each of these points at face value it is easy to see why President Trump would strenuously object to them. 

The first proposal shows zero movement towards merit-based vetting.  In fact is at the very least, DACA repeated and with possibly more liberality as there are “unknown” criteria used.  The fact that it extends DACA provisions to people who have never applied for citizenship since the order was made in 2014, more than three years ago.  In other words, people who did not care enough about getting legal to even file are getting a chance they ought not have. 

The second proposal does indeed prevent parents of “Dreamers” from receiving US citizenship, but it does provide them with a renewable permit to stay in the US, presumably with no change.  This comes down to a formality-based amnesty.  No one gets deported from breaking the law in this scenario. 

The third proposal again starts with the right words “eliminating the visa lottery”, but then offers it in a different way with “reallocate the 50,000 visas in some other way, to ‘underrepresented countries'” – well, so what are we saying?  Is it a lottery or a random giveaway? –  in other words, there is NO difference here.  The move to merit based naturalization cannot involve free giveaways of American visas.  Believe it or not, there are plenty of people who would come here to take advantage the opportunity to do so and game the government who gave these out, but if we asked the question of “do you want to go to America to succeed, to build a good life and support your new land” in the process, most of these people would rather stay home.  This is still a freebie and utterly unchanged in the nature of the policy. 

Finally for the fourth proposal, “a few billion dollars for the border.”  While this would seem to be what President Trump wants, so he can complete the wall / fence along the Mexican border, the combined weight of the first three proposals makes the wall’s existence all but pointless.  It is an expensive equivalent perhaps, of telling a grown man that he may go ahead and play with his blocks as long as everyone else gets what they want. 

The net loser in this is the United States.  Her sovereignty is not supported in any possible way by these proposals. 

And in that context, it would seem that even if Mr Trump did use a vulgarity, it was probably absolutely correct in context with what he was presented.  The Congressional salesmen and women tried to treat the President, an extremely astute businessman, like a chump, and he wasn’t having it and he let them know it.  Since it was a closed-door meeting, it would seem that it would have not been unseemly for plenty MORE expletive language to occur.  By the President’s own admission, there was indeed tough language. 

CNN tries to stir up opposition to Trump by broadcasting illegal immigration protests… from Mexico! 

Media and Trump opponents spin and spin…

The media has tried to portray this as racism and prejudice.  But it really is not.  It is a nothing-burger proposal that met a very blunt end, hopefully, and Trump’s call probably aggravated some bleeding hearts.  That is what this is.  When it comes down to it, probably 90% of adult Americans use this alleged language and far worse.  CNN made sure the whole world knew that they say things like this!  As happened with Judge Roy Moore, the media has attempted a “moral” play, but hopefully the American people are wise to this nonsense and will reject it for the hypocrisy that it is.  However, for those who dislike everything Trump, they will, and have, eagerly eaten the junk food the press has offered them these last three days.  And, in classic fashion, attention has been deflected from the immigration issue itself. 

So, let’s take this a little farther. 

What are the actual issues at hand?. 

The liberal hold on American domestic policy has been very strong over the last several decades, most significantly so in the time of Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, with Obama in the clear lead in terms of liberalized policies that all “family based” immigration, which leads to the phenomenon of “chain migration,” where once a family sets up some foothold in the US in which to live and work, the other relatives come too, to try to find the same experience.  This sometimes has a very bad side effect, in that it allows criminal elements in just because “they’re family” and sometimes those criminals commit crimes in their new home, like this one.  The story goes that after this point in the early 1950’s, the government authorities began to shift the policy on immigration toward “family” based ideology, which came to mean that if one member of a family emigrated to the USA the rest could more easily come, too.  However, this became “rigged” as a tool by the political party that supported it, because it could be used to manipulate the group of incoming immigrants to support that party which supported their own family migration into the country.  In recent years this has been held to be a Democrat mechanism for securing their own power whilst not really helping the American nation as a whole.  Further breakdowns in American society and governance, for very interesting and subtle reasons, have led to an immigration policy that appears to be largely powerless to stop waves of illegal immigration, because people who get deported manage to get back in the country and live here while easily avoiding of the authorities.  This has led to sad stories such as this one, and there are far worse ones as well. 

The State of Arizona fully supports California’s sanctuary state status. 

What the United States has now appears to be a situation of near anarchy with regards to immigration.  California declared itself a “sanctuary state” and there are many US “sanctuary cities” where federal immigration law enforcement is disregarded.  There are many good people caught up in this because it has been drilled into the minds and hearts of many Americans that we must never turn away anyone who wants to come to this country, because to do so is not compassionate, or it is racist, or cruel in some other way; it’s not fair, after all, our ancestors or ourselves came in… and so on. 

As the reader can see, this is truly an emotionally-charged political debate.  Sometimes it invites the desire to talk about issues that seem parallel, but are not (as printed in Russia Today here), but if we look at the situation without all the stormy emotions, it comes down to one or two real issues. 

One issue is the concept of national sovereignty – that assumed right of any nation or state to define its own boundaries, and to make and enforce its own policies within those established boundaries.  The second issue is security – the execution of policies needed to keep said nation or state safe from intrusion, invasion or otherwise subversion.  Both of these concepts are the true center of the debate. 

But the emotional center is the matter titled “fairness and compassion.”  The alleged vulgarity by the president certainly would be seen as a terrible affront to the idea of being compassionate.  But it has gone much farther.  For decades now, the running narrative about immigrants coming into the United States was the repetition of “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free / the wretched refuse of your teeming shore…”, from Emma Lazarus’ historically important sonnet.  This is truly a noble sentiment.  Further, though, the incredible luxury of American life has also been turned into a tool used to provoke a sense of guilt – and a sense that America does not have the right to enforce its own sovereignty over its borders because we have it so good that we owe the rest of the world something.  We also get such heart-rending photos as this one:

Mexican-American mother and child, as caught on camera. 

While no one who is sensible wants to be cruel, the notion that by enforcing the law we are being cruel is is a classic liberal trope, and it is based purely in emotionalism and not in logic.  It leads to very misleading comments like this one, taken from the New York Times’ recent piece on this matter (emphasis mine):

And lawmakers are already facing a difficult fight over the politically volatile subject of immigration, with the fates of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants hanging in the balance.  Adding to the uncertain picture for those immigrants, the Trump administration resumed accepting renewals for the program over the weekend, under orders from a federal judge who is hearing a legal challenge to Mr. Trump’s dismantling of the program. 

The emphasized line is a lie.  It would be accurately presented if it said, “with the fates of hundreds of thousands of illegal alien immigrants hanging in the balance…” Because these are not people that are going through the naturalization process.  They are people that have not done this, and may not be doing it now.  However, if they were in process of becoming citizens, or at least legal visiting workers, then this does not apply to them.  This is a prime example of misleading writing pulling heartstrings of people who are not being intellectually honest about this topic. 

Now, there IS a place where these ideas must necessarily meet, and that meeting place is precisely what President Trump has been working towards achieving.  The televised meeting with the Congressional representatives showed this in an enormously successful way.  However, the next meeting featured the liberal elements giving Trump a proposal for how to deal with immigration and Trump was outraged because the offered idea was no kind of a solution at all.  Apparently it was a free-for all for simply continuing things as they were before, which has been the problem in the first place.  Now, President Trump took fire for three days with reporters blasting him for the alleged vulgarity, only for him to make a statement simply saying he never said anything of the sort in the meeting.  But he also said this:

DACA is probably dead because the Democrats don’t really want it, they just want to talk and take desperately needed money away from our Military. 

As this piece draws to a close, the reader is invited to compare three ideas regarding immigration. 

For most of us, when we think about allowing immigrants or refugees into our nation, we feel compassion and pity for the people who are fleeing some really bad place (any words come to mind?)  and to come to our land which is a really lovely, prosperous nation.  It sounds great and right, we say; they should be able to come. 

Then we start investigating where we will put them.  It still remains a kind and pleasant thought when we hear or read about the same refugees being located in Texas, or California, or New York, or Arkansas, or Wyoming.  It’s a great idea especially in the minds of people who do not live in these places. 

Then we get to cities.  With a few exceptions, perhaps, this is where the resistance truly begins.  The idea of creating government housing in Chicago for a new set of 10,000 Syrian refugees is something that will not appeal to Chicago residents, for example.  And this disapproval will happen at street level even in Sanctuary Cities. 

Although this is an improbable situation, it still begs thought: Now, what about hosting these refugees in your own home.  After all, they need help, and we said we should be compassionate.  So, how can we show it? 

Most of us do not want our lives interfered with by the influx of total strangers who may or may not be responsible for themselves, who may or may not be law-abiding people, who may or may not be safe for our wives and children to be around…

It is not to say that all immigrants are bad.  It IS to say that immigration should be conducted in such a way as to protect the nation they are immigrating to.  That means vetting, interviews and that great question: “What will you do for your new nation to make it worth the while for us to adopt you?” 

While this question may be repugnant to a liberal, I would ask that same liberal how many illegal aliens they support in their own home.  Probably not too many. 

The saying is “liberals have great ideas about how to spend someone else’s money.”  This seems to be true here. 

It is absolutely fascinating how people can be ‘convinced’ to go all out to destroy their own country and put themselves and their neighbours in dire peril…but there is no ‘premium’ on stupidity now is there???  Way things appear to be going our descendants across the globe will be living the Afghani experience …or worse.  We are ‘bulling’ ahead in full reverse…. 

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January 16, 2018 00:32

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franz kafka

The ‘come on in’ model never applied to the USA, except perhaps to the “Free Soviet Jew” hoax which saw highly undesireable people get access to US citizenship by simply lying and saying: “we were persecuted in the USSR.  In reality, the jews ‘made’ the USSR what it was.  Read this banned book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn about it as it appears (partly translated into English) on Nouveau Samizdat.  PDF Two Hundred Years Together (Solzhenitsyn) – Mailstar http://www.mailstar.net/Solzhenitsyn-200YT.pdf The only other large group brought in en masse to The USA and Canada, with no positive qualites selected for and no negative… Read more »

Silicon Valley used to be technology companies.  But it has become the “morality police,” controlling free speech on its platforms. 

What could go wrong? 

In a speech Monday, Apple CEO Tim Cook said:

“Hate tries to make its headquarters in the digital world.  At Apple, we believe that technology needs to have a clear point of view on this challenge.  There is no time to get tied up in knots.  That’s why we only have one message for those who seek to push hate, division and violence: You have no place on our platforms.” 

Here’s the goliath problem:

Who gets to define what words and phrases protected under the First Amendment constitute hate — a catchall word that is often ascribed to any offensive speech someone simply doesn’t like? 

Will Christians who don’t support abortion rights or having their tax dollars go toward Planned Parenthood be considered purveyors of hate for denying women the right to choose?  Will millions of Americans who support legal immigration, as opposed to illegal immigration, be labeled xenophobes or racists and be banned from the digital world? 

Yes and yes.  How do we know?  It’s already happening, as scores of conservatives nationwide are being shadow banned and/or censored on social media, YouTube, Google and beyond. 

Their crime? 

Running afoul of leftist Silicon Valley executives who demand conformity of thought and simply won’t tolerate any viewpoint that strays from their rigid political orthodoxy. 

For context, consider that in oppressive Islamist regimes throughout the Middle East, the “morality police” take it upon themselves to judge women’s appearance, and if a woman doesn’t conform with their mandatory and highly restrictive dress code — e.g., wearing an identity-cloaking burqa — she could be publicly shamed, arrested or even stoned in the town square. 

In modern-day America, powerful technology companies are actively taking the role of the de facto morality police — not when it comes to dress but when it comes to speech — affecting millions.  Yes, to date, those affected are not getting stoned, but they are being blocked in the digital town square, where billions around the globe do their business, cultivate their livelihoods, connect with others and get news. 

That is a powerful cudgel to levy against individuals and groups of people.  Wouldn’t you say? 

Right now, unelected tech billionaires living in a bubble in Palo Alto — when they’re not flying private to cushy climate summits in Davos — are deciding who gets to enjoy the freedom of speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and who does not based on whether they agree with people’s political views and opinions or not. 

You see how dangerous this can get — real fast — as partisan liberal elites running Twitter, Facebook, Google (including YouTube), Apple and the like are now dictating to Americans what they can and cannot say online. 

In communist regimes, these types of folks are known as central planners. 

The election of Donald Trump was supposed to safeguard our freedoms, especially regarding speech — a foundational pillar of a democracy.  It’s disappointing that hasn’t happened, as the censorship of conservative thought online has gotten so extreme and out of control many are simply logging off for good. 

A failure to address this mammoth issue could cost Trump in 2020.  If his supporters are blocked online — where most voters get their news — he’ll be a one-term president. 

It’s time for Congress to act before the morality police use political correctness as a Trojan horse to decide our next election. 

Paul Craig Roberts: The Disintegration of Western Society

Radical feminists are now being banned by Twitter not because they hate men, which is perfectly OK as far as Twitter is concerned, but because they object to “transwomen.” 

What is a “transwoman?”  As far as I can understand, a “transwoman” is a male with a penis who declares himself to be a women and demands his right to use women’s toilette facilities along with the women who are using them. 

The feminist, Meghan Murphy, twittered a statement and a question:

“Men are not women.” 

“How are transwomen not men?  What is the difference between men and transwomen?” 

There you have it.  Yesterday it was feminists who were exercising their special society-bestowed privileges to censor.  Today it is the feminists who are being censored.  As this insanity of “Western Civilization” continues, tomorrow it will be the transwomen who are censored and banned. 

What precisely is afoot? 

My readers, who have partially and some wholly escaped from The Matrix, understand that this is the further fragmentation of American society.  Identity Politics has set men, women, blacks, Jews, Asians, Hispanics, and white people against one another.  Identity Politics is the essence of the Democratic Party and the American liberal/progressive/left.  Now, with the creation of “new” but otherwise nonexistent “genders,” although they are honored as real by the controlled whores who masquerade as a “Western media,” we witness radical feminists being silenced by men pretending to be women. 

I sympathize with Meghan Murphy, but she brought this on herself and on the rest of us by accepting Identity Politics.  Identity Politics gave Meghan a justification for hating men even, as she failed to realize, it provided the basis for moving her into the exploitative class that must be censored. 

Where does this end? 

It has already gone far enough that the American population is so divided and mutually hostile that there is no restraint by “the American people” on government and the elite oligarchs that rule. “ The American people” are no longer a reality but a mythical creature like the unicorn. 

The film, The Matrix, is the greatest film of out lifetime.  Why?  Because it shows that there are two realities.  A real one of which only a few people are aware, and a virtual one in which eveyone else lives. 

In the United States today, and throughout “Western Brainwashed Civilization,” only a handful of people exist who are capable of differentiating the real from the created reality in which all explanations are controlled and kept as far away from the truth as possible.  Everything that every Western government and “news” organization says is a lie to control the explanations that we are fed in order to keep us locked in The Matrix. 

The ability to control people’s understandings is so extraordinary that, despite massive evidence to the contrary, Americans believe that Oswald, acting alone, was the best shot in human history and using magic bullets killed President John F. Kenndy; that a handful of Saudi Arabians who demonstratively could not fly airplanes outwitted the American national security state and brought down 3 World Trade Center skyscrapers and part of the Pentagon; that Saddam Hussein had and was going to use on the US “weapons of mass destruction;” that Assad “used chemical weapons” against “his own people;” that Libya’s Gaddifi gave his soldiers Viagra so they could better rape Libyan women; that Russia “invaded Ukraine;” that Trump and Putin stole the presidential election from Hillary. 

The construction of a make-believe reality guarantees the US military/security complex’s annual budget of $1,000 billion dollars of taxpayers’ money even as Congress debates cutting Social Security in order to divert more largess to the pockets of the corrupt military/security complex. 

Readers ask me what they can do about it.  Nothing, except revolt and cleanse the system, precisely as Founding Father Thomas Jefferson said. 

“This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Google engineer Scott Byer wrote in a Nov. 9, 2016, post reviewed by TheDCNF. 

Byer falsely labeled The Daily Caller and Breitbart as “opinion blogs” and urged his coworkers to reduce their visibility in search results. 

“How many times did you see the Election now card with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations?  That’s something that can and should be fixed,” Byer wrote. 

“I think we have a responsibility to expose the quality and truthfulness of sources – because not doing so hides real information under loud noises,” he continued. 

“Beyond that, let’s concentrate on teaching critical thinking.  A little bit of that would go a long way.  Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years – demographics will be on our side.” 

Some of Byer’s colleagues expressed concern that manipulating search results could backfire and suggested alternative measures

One Google engineer, Uri Dekel, identified himself as a Clinton supporter but argued that manipulating search results was the wrong route to take. 

“Thinking that Breitbart, Drudge, etc.  are not ‘legitimate news sources’ is contrary to the beliefs of a major portion of our user base is partially what got us to this mess.  MSNBC is not more legit than Drudge just because Rachel Maddow may be more educated / less deplorable / closer to our views, than, say Sean Hannity,” Dekel wrote in a reply to Byer. 

“I follow a lot of right wing folks on social networks you could tell something was brewing.  We laughed off Drudge’s Instant Polls and all that stuff, but in the end, people go to those sources because they believe that the media doesn’t do it’s job.  I’m a Hillary supporter and let’s admit it, the media avoided dealing with the hard questions and issues, which didn’t pay off.  By ranking ‘legitimacy’ you’ll just introduce more conspiracy theories,” Dekel added. 

“Too many times, Breitbart is just echoing a demonstrably made up story,” Byer wrote in a reply to his original post.  He did not cite any examples. 

“That happens at MSNBC, too.  I don’t want a political judgement.  The desire is to break the myth feedback loop, the false equivalency, instead of the current amplification of it,” Byer added. 

“What I believe we can do, technically, that avoids the accusations of conspiracy or bias from people who ultimately have a right and obligation to decide what they want to believe, is to get better at displaying the ‘ripples’ and copy-pasta, to trace information to its source, to link to critiques of those sources, and let people decide what sources they believe,” another Google engineer, Mike Brauwerman, suggested. 

“Give people a comprehensive but effectively summarized view of the information, not context-free rage-inducing sound-bytes,” he added. 

“We’re working on providing users with context around stories so that they can know the bigger picture,” chimed in David Besbris, vice president of engineering at Google. 

“We can play a role in providing the full story and educate them about all sides.  This doesn’t have to be filtering and can be useful to everyone,” he wrote. 

Other employees similarly advocated providing contextual information about media sources in search results, and the company later did so with a short-lived fact check at the end of 2017. 

A Google spokeswoman said that the conversation did not lead to manipulation of search results for political purposes. 

“This post shows that far from suppressing Breitbart and Daily Caller, we surfaced these sites regularly in our products.  Furthermore, it shows that we value providing people with the full view on stories from a variety of sources,” the spokeswoman told TheDCNF in an email. 

“Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology.  Our processes and policies do not allow for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies.” 

The discussion about whether to bury conservative media outlets isn’t the first evidence that some Google employees have sought to manipulate search results for political ends. 

“I mean the true interference in the last election was that — if you look at all, virtually all of those companies are super liberal companies in favor of Hillary Clinton,” he added. 

“Maybe I did a better job because I’m good with the Twitter and I’m good at social media, but the truth is they were all on Hillary Clinton’s side, and if you look at what was going on with Facebook and with Google and all of it, they were very much on her side,” Trump continued. 

Google cited Wikipedia for the disparaging description, though a similar change made to Wikipedia’s page for the women’s group was corrected almost immediately.  Google left up the digital vandalism for three weeks. 

Google apologized in May after search results for the California Republican Party falsely listed “Nazism” as one of the state party’s ideologies. 

Then, too, Google blamed manipulation of the party’s Wikipedia page for the inaccurate and disparaging description.