CSotD: A Cold Breeze from Vichy
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Major Strasser: Captain Renault, are you entirely certain which side you are on?
Louis Renault: I have no conviction, if that’s what you mean. I blow with the wind, and the prevailing wind happens to be from Vichy.
Tom Tomorrow unleashes a torrent of nonsense, almost entirely things Donald Trump never said, but much of which echoes things he did say.
For example, he didn’t say Harvard was teaching ducks to be antisemitic, but he said scientists were creating transgender mice rather than transgenic mice, and if he hasn’t said Putin was a lizard person, he did claim that Biden was executed and replaced with a robot. He’s also compared himself to Abraham Lincoln.
As the marginal note at the end of the comic suggests, it’s all the rage to attack Joe Biden’s fitness for office, but Dear Leader’s capacities go unquestioned, which would just be a matter for media criticism if it were only a question of fair coverage.
But we now see law firms, TV networks and universities torn by the question of whether they should resist government intrusion or, to use a term from the Greatest Generation, collaborate, and, like Louis Renault, go with the prevailing winds.
It’s not an entirely theoretical choice. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced visa restrictions based on monitoring social media, denying visas to those who post messages apparently supporting Hamas, which could include criticizing Israel’s Gaza policy without actively endorsing Hamas.
Telnaes wonders how long it will be before this extends to other restrictions, the irony being that the Trump administration claims it is imposing these restrictions in order to preserve free speech. We’re free to express correct opinions, and the Ministry of Truth will determine which opinions are correct.
We started the move towards improving society by deporting violent criminal gang members without trials, which was necessary because, as Dear Leader explained, it would take a long time to give each deportee a trial.
Although, as it turned out, many of the deportees were neither violent nor gang members and some of them weren’t even here illegally.
Alcaraz suggests that, when those who have entered the country legally are being stripped of their protections and rounded up, it does not create much of a motivation to obey the law.
Yet the deporting of non-citizens (and their birth-right citizen children) who are in compliance with regulations is being promoted as punishing them for not obeying that law.
Now the government is moving to strip registered, documented refugees of their legal status in order to make them deportable.
Juxtaposition of the Day
We’ve swiftly gone from demonizing the small percentage of undocumented immigrants who commit crimes to include foreign students, particularly those who engage in peaceful protests or write criticisms of foreign policy, even if it’s only tangentially critical of American policy.
And now we’re extending that demonization to foreign students at universities that have not bent the knee and allowed the federal government to dictate hiring, curriculum and disciplinary policies, regardless of what those students are studying or how they have conducted themselves.
Bennett may be assuming facts not in evidence; there may not be a pattern established of people with certain public stances being singled out for selective enforcement. But we’ve seen legal immigrants lured into immigration appointments so they could be arrested and jailed, not to mention dubious arrests of a judge and a congressional representative.
And we’ve seen bullying in the streets. People may feel “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kamala,” but be reluctant to say so on the bumper of their car.
Certainly, there can be a strong argument made for selective enforcement, when protesting Israel’s foreign policy is condemned as antisemitism by a man who has invited neonazis and militant white separatists to dinner.
Trump’s hardly models best practices. Anderson notes the gulf between his purported championing of the working class and his eagerness to profit from his office and to accept dubious “gifts” that seem to come along with favors, like pardoning the grifter son of a major investor in his crypto program, and selling access to the president.
Plus this note: If his proposal to exempt tipped income from taxation is approved, you’ll want to watch to see if the law is written to avoid executive salaries from dipping and executive perks from rising in the form of purported “tips” rather than outright “pay.”
Clay Bennett notes the return of an issue that arose in the first Trump administration, which is the president’s lack of attention to intelligence briefings.
In the first go-round, Trump’s staff learned the trick of inserting the president’s name in articles, since they found that he was more apt to read things in which he was mentioned. It was also reported that, during oral briefings, he sometimes got up and walked out of the room.
Now National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard is reportedly considering having Dear Leader’s briefings presented to him in the form of TV news, perhaps read by the Fox personalities to whom Trump pays attention. Critics have already pointed out that this would require informing those news readers about top secret material to which they ought not have access
Making Trump better informed might cut down on gaffes like his propaganda-laden attempt to embarrass South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, while Daniel Boris points out another, related matter.
There have been a number of cartoons celebrating Ukraine’s daring, well-planned attack on Russian airfields, but Boris ties in the 18-month planning which went into the program, which means that, while Trump was chewing out and humiliating Zelenskyy in the Oval Office, the Ukrainian president knew of the attack then unfolding deep within Russian territory.
As Gabbard struggles to keep Dear Leader informed, Kari Lake is hard at work attempting to dismantle the US attempts to let the truth spread to nations without a free press.
Her effort has meant trying to fire journalists at the Voice of America and other overseas broadcast centers and replacing their reportage with America-First propaganda.
So far, the courts have tied up much of these efforts, but the prevailing winds still blow from Vichy.
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