April 26, 2025

BRIAN KRASSENSTEIN: Are We Going to Start Arresting Farmers Now Who Help Illegals Evade Arrest?

I hope so!

Such actions would be very much approved by leftist icon Cesar Chavez, a staunch foe of illegal immigration.

[H]is views on border control would be a perfect fit in the Trump administration.

As a child working with his family in the California fields, Cesar quickly learned the reason farmworkers were paid so little and treated so poorly: As his biographer Miriam Pawel writes, “a surplus of labor enabled growers to treat workers as little more that interchangeable parts, cheaper and easier to replace than machines.”

Chavez acolytes today try to explain away his hawkish pro-border views as coming from a different historical context, applicable only to specific strikes and the strike-breakers that farmers tried to import. But this is false.

In fact, even before he started the union and fought against illegal immigration, he was opposed to the bracero program, which legallyimported cheap, disposable labor from Mexico at the expense of American citizens (of Mexican and other origins) who had been working in the fields. Pawel quotes Chavez as saying, “It looks almost impossible to start some effective program to get these people their jobs back from the braceros.”

Congress ended the bracero program in 1964, and the next 15 years were the salad days, as it were, for farmworkers — until illegal immigration became so pervasive (despite Chavez’s efforts) that workers lost all bargaining power.

But during those 15 years, Chavez fought illegal immigration tenaciously. In 1969, he marched to the Mexican border to protest farmers’ use of illegal aliens as strikebreakers. He was joined by Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Senator Walter Mondale.

It’s time topple some statues, and rename many, many streets: The 21st-century left would view all of the above as quite fascist-y, Cesar, Ralph and Walter.

Posted at 6:55 pm by Ed Driscoll

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? ‘Sun-Dimming’ Aerosol Injections Into Atmosphere For Climate Change.

“Experiments to dim sunlight to fight global warming will be given the green light by the Government within weeks,” British outlet The Telegraph reports. “Outdoor field trials which could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere, or brightening clouds to reflect sunshine, are being considered by scientists as a way to prevent runaway climate change.”

Don’t worry about the potential devastating and irreversible effects of blocking out the literal singular object that provides the basis for all life on Earth; the agency launching the project — the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria) — assures the public its project will be “rigorously assessed.”

Related:

UPDATE (From Ed): That excess of sunlight could be put to great use in England. But to paraphrase the Gipper, sometimes the left hand doesn’t know what the far left hand is doing:

Posted at 6:20 pm by Stephen Green

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: The Bay Area and Detroit rank similarly on a very unfortunate list.

Particle pollution, which includes dust, dirt, soot and smoke, “gets into your lungs because it’s so fine,” said Ruacho, adding that it can also end up in your bloodstream. The impact of particle pollution translates to asthma attacks, heart attacks and strokes, with prolonged exposure increasing people’s likelihood of developing lung cancer.

In terms of ozone, the San Francisco Bay Area ranked 14 on the list of worst places in the country this year. “That’s an improvement,” said Ruacho, “because last year it was 12.” In the 2024 report, the Bay Area ranked fifth worst for particle pollution. This year, it improved slightly and ranks sixth, a spot it shares with the Detroit metro area.

The Frisco-Detroit singularity is proceeding apace.

Posted at 4:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY:

Heh, indeed. Here’s the underlying article by the Bee: 

The young man had previously had his sights set on earning a degree from a prestigious educational institution before coming to the realization that he could save a fortune by teaching himself how to hate Israel at home.

“I was all set to go to university, but I realized I could just learn all about hating Jews from people on the Internet,” Doulton said. “It’s really saved me a lot of time and let me start hating Jews faster than all my friends.”

For those who followed Candace Owens’ many zigs and zags through conspiracy theory land, the last sentence of the Bee’s article is a hoot.

Posted at 2:45 pm by Ed Driscoll

PURE HOSS: Theodore Roosevelt Championed Individual Virtue And Adventure.

Roosevelt’s politics and political thought are bounded by the twin principles of promise and performance. For individual and country alike, promise is bound to an understanding of civilization and virtue. The educated, civilized individual has a duty to engage in public service for the advancement of society toward greater development of its civilized life. This requires individual virtue, or character, as Roosevelt would often refer to it, and the premier virtue was courage. It is courage that inspires the individual to throw his hat in the ring to do his duty, and which supports him through the challenges that such public service presents. Likewise, the country is also to fulfill its duty in the service of civilization or else suffer the justifiable and deserved reprobation of those countries made of sterner stuff. The country, like the individual, brings to its task the fruits of its ancestry. The race characteristics, as Roosevelt termed them, of any country, are of great importance to its effort to fulfill its duty and to shoulder its share of worldly burdens. The dissolute individual and country will both face the prospect of losing ground absolutely as well as in relation to those that strenuously pursue their duty to civilization.

Roosevelt believed that the United States of his time was abundantly endowed with the attributes of promise: an energetic, free, and virtuous citizenry dedicated to noble Anglo-Saxon ideals and principles. Fulfillment of its promise, however, required prudence in selecting the means through which the country could perform at a level commensurate with its promise. Domestically, the country had to maintain, if not improve, its level of virtue, which required opposition to political tendencies toward either utopianism or plutocracy. Roosevelt consistently pursued policies intended to improve education and virtue while at the same time restricting anarchist and socialist pursuit of utopian ideals, and regulating the plutocratic influences of wealth and big business.

Teddy was the definitive Great Man of history. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that the eunuchs of the 2020-era left wanted to cancel him and tear down his statues: Adieu, Teddy Roosevelt.

I think it is a pity that the Traveling Racism Outrage Mob (TROM) has it in for Teddy Roosevelt. I agree with President Trump who, when he heard the news, tweeted “Ridiculous, don’t do it!” Quite right. For one thing, TROM could learn some useful life lessons from Teddy Roosevelt. Although there is much in his progressive politics with which I disagree, I greatly admire him for his character and determination. A sickly boy, plagued by asthma, he nonetheless devoted himself to the “strenuous life” and achieved great things. Above all, he did not whine.

That is one thing our professional anti-racists and identity-politics ideologues — especially feminists — could learn with profit: stop whining about how unfair life is to you and do something to improve your lot. You would thus make everyone around you happier, and you would be happier yourself.

Teddy Roosevelt also had a deep social-political message that our generation, especially paid-up members of TROM, should rediscover. “The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin,’ he wrote in his autobiography, ‘would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities.”

He was thinking of the habit of calling recent immigrants Italian-American or Irish-Americans or German-Americans. He was dead set against this practice of coining “hyphenated Americans.” He would not have been surprised to discover that the lowly hyphen was a potent weapon in the divisive armory of multiculturalism and identity politics. When we speak of an African-American or Mexican-American or Asian-American these days, the aim is not descriptive but deconstructive. There is a polemical edge to it, a provocation. The hyphen does not mean “American, but hailing at some point in the past from someplace else.” It means “only provisionally American: my allegiance is divided at best.”

And of course, no “Progressive” journalist ever confronted Hillary Clinton about her longtime allegiance to the man the Year Zero far left attempted to toss down the memory hole in 202o-2021:

● Shot: “I think that Teddy Roosevelt was a great American.”

—Hillary Clinton in a May 1, 2008 interview with Bill O’Reilly.

● Double-Shot: “It’s time to take a page from Teddy Roosevelt’s book and get our economy working for Americans again. That’s what I’ll do as president.”

—Hillary, as quoted in an October 28, 2015 Dow Jones Marketwatch.com article titled “Hillary Clinton wants to be Teddy Roosevelt.”

● Hangover:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

I’M NO EXPERT BUT THAT SEEMS LIKE BAD POLITICS TO ME:

Posted at 2:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds