Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
January 8, 2024
SURELY YOU CAN’T BE SERIOUS: How Airplane! Crashed onto Movie Screens in 1980.
My latest, over at EdDriscoll.com.
LIVE LOOK FROM DR. EVIL’S UNDERGROUND LAIR: Dem Rep. Steve Cohen Shares the Dumbest J6 Pic-Tweet of ‘Em All and the (Copypasta) Backfire is Delicious.
So is Cohen going for Dr. Evil-levels of irony here, or the full original Dr. No supervillain from Sean Connery’s first James Bond movie?
A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE: Shore To Please. Review: The Once Upon a Time World: The Dark and Sparkling Story of the French Riviera.
If Hieronymus Bosch ran a holiday resort, it would look like St. Tropez in the summer. It’s the same all the way along the coast from Marseilles to Menton. The rocky hillsides are swathed in concrete. The roads are jammed with preposterous sports cars and Germans in camper vans. The harbors are slick with oil and other fragrant discharges from the yachts in the bay. The harborside restaurants are extortionate and smell of drains. In Nice and Monaco, the surviving Belle Époque mansions are dwarfed by glass towers. This is the Côte d’Azur, the French Riviera: a sweaty panorama of organized crime, municipal corruption, tax-dodging, drug-smuggling, money-laundering, compulsive gambling, and gratuitous thong-wearing. I went last summer and had a great time.
The locals joke that Nice gets its name from “Ni ici, ni là“: “Neither here nor there,” neither French nor Italian, a living city and a stage set for a dream. That is what the visitors want, a break from reality on a cosmopolitan shore between the mountains and the sea. They come to escape life, as once, when the Riviera was an al fresco hospital for tuberculosis patients, they came to escape death. The English invented the French Riviera as a home away from home in the 19th century. The Americans reinvented it in the early 20th as a sophisticated alternative to home. The Germans only knocked it about a bit. The French destroyed it as the Venetians destroyed Venice, by catering to the world’s dreams and desires.
Jonathan Miles’s The Once Upon a Time World is the story of the making and remaking of the Riviera. It would be tidy to speak of its “unmaking,” but that has not yet happened and probably never will. A coast of malarial fishing villages and busy ports became an exclusive resort for the rich, then a glamorous gambler’s paradise with artist colonies on its fringes, then the world’s beach in the Jet Age when being a movie star was worth the trouble, and latterly a money laundry for oligarchs. But the view remains unchanged, and so the Riviera will go on forever, like a Disney cruise that has slipped into the Bermuda Triangle.
And:
The last artwork of any significance to be created on the Riviera was made in 1971, when the Rolling Stones, having come south to dodge British taxation, recorded Exile on Main Street in the basement of Nellcote, Keith Richards’s rented mansion on the headland by Villefranche. Jean Cocteau lived on the same headland and filmed his Orpheus in Villefranche’s backstreets. Somerset Maugham lived there too and knew what he was talking about when he called the Riviera a “sunny place for shady people.” Perhaps the only detail missing in Miles’s encyclopedic account is that when the future Andrew Loog Oldham stopped in Villefranche as a teenage backpacker, he was advised not to go near Maugham’s villa, as young boys were known to have disappeared there.
Read the whole thing.
OLD AND BUSTED: When Worlds Collide!
The New Hotness? When Worlds Experience “A Giant Galactic Hug!” The Thrill Of Word-Policing.
Come, dear reader. Let us visit the publication now laughingly referred to as Scientific American. In particular, an “analysis” piece by Juan P Madrid, in which we’re told,
The language of astronomy is needlessly violent and inaccurate.
Dr Madrid, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, begins his attempt to persuade with a tale of poetic drama:
This summer, a team of students and I were enjoying breathtaking views of the night sky while we collected data using telescopes at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. One night, when we were outside on a telescope catwalk… one of my students amazed me with her interpretation of the fate of Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our Milky Way. In describing how these two galaxies will merge a few billion years from now, she said they will experience “a giant galactic hug.”
I know. The very stuff of amazement. Brings a tear to the eye.
The kindness, but also the accuracy, of the language my student used was in sharp contrast to the standard description we use in astronomy to explain the final destiny of Andromeda and the Milky Way: “a collision.”
Apparently, the word collision is, for Dr Madrid, much too brutal and masculine when referring to the convergence of two galaxies, and the subsequent merging of the supermassive black holes at their centres – an event that will entail the sling-shotting of countless stars and their orbiting planets, and which may release energy equivalent to around 100 million supernova explosions, and subsequently be detectable halfway across the universe.
It’s David Thompson, so allow your Internet connection to warmly embrace his with a soft, serene cybernetic hug, and gently read the whole thing.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY BRASS BECOMING INCREASINGLY ANGRY AT OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES: Biden campaign brings top journalists to Wilmington.
Two people with knowledge of the situation told Semafor that during meetings with reporters from outlets like The New York Times, the Washington Post, and others, campaign officials have invoked a coverage spreadsheet laying out areas where the team believes their reporting has fallen short.
In particular, campaign officials have chafed at some of the coverage of former President Donald Trump, feeling that outlets are too focused on his legal troubles and haven’t paid enough attention to some of his incendiary recent statements on the campaign trail. A source familiar told Semafor that with the exception of its recent meeting with the Times, the campaign meetings had been “substantive” and “productive,” and that Biden staffers were scheduled to meet in the coming days with political reporting teams from ABC, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, Fox, NPR, Reuters, Bloomberg, and others in Wilmington.
And of course, it’s worth nothing: If Donald Trump Did This, the Establishment Media’s Heads Would’ve Exploded.
This team knows that every aspect of the narrative must be controlled for them to have a shot at re-election. It’s creepy and un-American. If they’re this worried about bad press concerning Joe Biden, maybe Democrats shouldn’t have doubled down on this bad bet. The man is being led off by his wife at events, unable to comprehend his surroundings. If he can’t handle two events in one day without falling, bumbling, drooling, or looking lost, this endeavor isn’t worth entertaining. I don’t see Biden surviving a campaign season that isn’t handicapped by COVID procedures. Those are long over, and voters expect the president to have the stamina to do multiple events in various states for days on end until we all vote in November.
On that issue, no meeting could smooth over Biden falling or suffering a blown mental fuse a la Mitch McConnell on the stump.
This is the inevitable twilight years of a politician who at the peak of his power (and faculties) loved nothing more than insulting journalists and locking them in closets.
Exit quote:
Same energy https://t.co/QLlDO2EX7S pic.twitter.com/SVtFluReJg
— Matthew Foldi (@MatthewFoldi) January 8, 2024
WHEN BLACK FRIDAY MONDAY COMES, I’LL STAND DOWN BY THE DOOR, AND CATCH THE GRAY MEN WHEN THEY DIVE FROM THE FOURTEENTH FLOOR: NFL Black Monday live updates: Ron Rivera, Arthur Smith fired; Bill Belichick next?
Related: Is the Cowboys’ Mike McCarthy also on the hotseat, despite a 12-5 record and winning the NFC East? NBC speculates, “Some believe Patriots coach Bill Belichick is on the radar screen, if the Cowboys decide to try to take a potential championship roster to the next level. It would require both Jones and Belichick to bend a little (or a lot). But it could give Belichick his best chance to chase a Super Bowl championship.”
Kremlinologists are reading much into Jerry Jones’ statement last night after the Cowboys beat the Washington Commanders: “‘I just think his record speaks for itself,’ Jones said Sunday. ‘I think what he’s done, the fact that we’ve put ourselves in this position over these last three years. I think that does speak for itself. We’ve got a lot of football left, no small part thanks to Mike and thanks to his staff, and thanks to some really outstanding football players around here. We’ll see how each game goes.’”
January 6, 2024
PHOTOGRAPHER WAITS THREE YEARS TO CAPTURE STEALTH BOMBER FLYING OVER COLLEGE FOOTBALL GAME:
A photographer captured an epic shot of a B-2 stealth bomber flying over a college football game which he says is the most special shot of his career so far.https://t.co/zMP0Gg0PBc
— PetaPixel (@petapixel) January 4, 2024
MOVE ALONG, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, CITIZENS: Obama, worried about Trump, urges Biden circle to bolster campaign.
Former president Barack Obama has raised questions about the structure of President Biden’s reelection campaign, discussing the matter directly with Biden and telling the president’s aides and allies the campaign needs to be empowered to make decisions without clearing them with the White House, according to three people familiar with the conversations.
We know it’s not Biden, but this is yet another reminder of who is behind the scenes in the (P)resident’s administration, pulling the strings, “serving as a third-term president in all but name.”
MASCOT OF THE ANOINTED REACHES EXPIRATION DATE: The tyrannical cult of Greta Thunberg.
This week Greta Thunberg turned 21. Yes, the diminutive doom-monger is a full-on grown-up now. The pint-sized predictor of End Times has passed the final threshold of adulthood. Once the world’s best-known petulant teen, never knowingly appearing in public without wearing the scowl of the self-righteous youth, Ms Thunberg has reached the full age of majority. She’s so old she could legally get pissed in America if she wants. Though that seems unlikely, given she once said she ‘would never go out drinking’: ‘I would never do anything… stupid.’ Her birthday party must have been a riot.
* * * * * * * *
What they loved about Greta is that she was so black and white. All teens are. It’s in their nature to be blind to shades of grey. To love their parents one minute, hate them the next. To flit between thinking everything is fine to fretting that MY LIFE IS OVER. Who can forget when the gold-collared superclass of Davos lapped up Greta’s stern rebuke of the old-fashioned adult belief that life is complicated. ‘You say nothing is black or white. But that is a lie. A very dangerous lie’, she said. Climate change is ‘as black or white as it gets’, she continued. ‘There are no grey areas when it comes to survival.’
No grey areas. This wasn’t just your typical climate-change hysteria, where we’re meant to believe our only choice is between a violent reduction in fossil-fuel use and the literal heat death of the planet. It was also a teenage reprimand to the entire premise of adult life, to the foundations of public life itself. Which is the understanding that things are complex. That competing interests exist. That binary moralism benefits no one. That democratic contest is preferable to autocratic, religious or, indeed, teenage diktat. I, for one, am delighted that in the years since Greta thrilled the anti-democrats of Davos with her childish moralism we have seen farmers, truckers and other workers in Europe drive a juggernaut of grey through these fantasies of black and white. These people are furious at the impact the cult of emissions cuts will have on their ability to earn a living, make food, deliver stuff. They represent the complexity that Greta and her powerful cheerleaders wish to chase from public life. A revolt of the adults, if you like, against the juvenile hectoring of the elites.
Last year, as she approached the ripe old age of 21, saw Greta exchange one apocalyptic religion for another:
Shot: Greta Thunberg deletes 2018 tweet saying world will end in 2023 after world does not end.
—The Post Millennial, March 11th.
Chaser: Greta Thunberg, milkshake duck.
It seems in Greta’s zeal to show her support for Palestinians, she accidentally included an antisemitic stuffed animal. Don’t you hate it when that happens to you? Cockburn is always embarrassed when he inadvertently includes antisemitic imagery laying around his house and it somehow finds its way into tweets supporting groups dedicated to wiping out a Jewish state. Happens to the best of us!
—Spectator World, October 20th.
(Classical reference in headline.)
My latest, on how ubiquitous digital film and audio effects are already warping how we perceive the 20th century, over at Ed Driscoll.com.
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY, PART DEUX:
California Bill Prohibits Stores From Selling Toys That Don’t Actively Confuse Children’s Sexuality https://t.co/21sof5L7K3
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 29, 2020
Note the date above; about two weeks before everything went pear-shaped around the world.
Flash-forward to Monday:
California to fine stores that don't have a 'gender neutral' kids toy section—The new law will target retailers that sell childcare items and toys for children 12 and underhttps://t.co/uksreSohay
— Larry Elder (@larryelder) January 1, 2024
IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE PROPHECY, PART ONE: Amazing! Biden’s J6 Speech Was ‘Another Babylon Bee Prophecy Fulfilled.’
The Babylon Bee is more accurate in reporting than the “MSM”
— Deepa𝕏 (@realdeepakterra) January 6, 2024
January 5, 2024
GREGOR SAMSA SMILES: How Severed Cockroach Legs Could Help Us ‘Fully Rebuild’ Human Bodies.
Hugh Herr, Ph.D., co-founder of MIT’s Center for Bionics, is one of them. The first prostheses he designed were his own, after doctors told him he’d never rock climb again following a double amputation below the knees. Today, he researches ways to make replacement limbs more cyborg-like and integrated with their human hosts. His ultimate goal is what he calls embodiment, where “the electromechanics are so married to human physiology you can’t remove them.” This means a prosthetic limb would no longer be a tool you can take off, like a pair of glasses, but another part of your body that responds without you having to even think about it, more like a pacemaker. “In the future,” Herr tells Popular Mechanics, “when a person has cancer, we will be able to fully rebuild their body.”
That may sound like a lofty goal, but we’re rapidly getting closer to realizing it. When it comes to getting human physiology and mechanical parts to play nicely together, there are three main interfaces, Herr says:
- The mechanical, or how seamlessly the external limb attaches to biological components while remaining effective;
- The neural, or how to connect the prosthetic part to the brain and both give and receive feedback from it; and
- Cutaneous feedback, which largely focuses on proprioception, or the sense of knowing where in space a limb is.
Right now, most commercial prosthetics are controlled by electric signals transmitted via sensors to the muscles and nerves adjacent to the amputation site. While capable of somewhat sophisticated movements, these devices often lack a lot in terms of control and natural sensation, e.g., being able to feel that your foot is on level ground.
Reading between the lines, Kremlinology style, this sort of article, appearing at the beginning of an election year, can only mean one thing: leftist scientists are once again hoping to advance exoskeleton technology sufficiently quickly, to allow Hillary Clinton yet another shot at campaigning this year, if Biden’s adrenochrome dosages aren’t sufficiently powerful enough to get him through the campaign season. Wake up, sheeple!
MIKE’S MIDWEST MULLIGAN: Ohio Gov. DeWine Signs ‘Emergency’ Executive Order Banning Transgender Surgeries for Minors After Vetoing Similar Bill.
UPDATE: “The bill DeWine vetoed would prohibit gender-affirming care, such as hormone blockers, hormone replacement therapy and surgery for transgender youth. It would also require K-12 schools, state colleges and universities and private colleges and universities to have separate single-sex teams for each sex. It also creates legal remedies for violations. Republicans in the House and Senate have enough control in each chamber to override DeWine’s veto. They have until the session ends at the end of this year to do it.”
MR. PRESIDENT, WE MUST NOT ALLOW A COLLEGE PLAGIARISM GAP!
To be fair, Rufo is in excellent company here. As Tom Wolfe told Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo in 1980:
I believe it was in the New Republic that Mitch Tuchman wrote that the reason you turned against liberals is that you were rejected by the white-shoe crowd at Yale.
Wait a minute! Is that one by Tuchman? Yeah, oh, that was great.
He talked about your doctoral dissertation.
Yeah, he wrote that after The Painted Word. It went further than that. It was called “The Manchurian Candidate,” and it said in all seriousness that I had some-how been prepared by the establishment, which he obviously thought existed at Yale, to be this kind of kamikaze like Laurence Harvey – I think that’s who was in The Manchurian Candidate, wasn’t it? – to go out and assassinate liberal culture. I loved that. And he’s talking about Yale. When I was at Yale, William Buckley was writing God and Man at Yale, saying that it had been taken over by the Left and that the Left was pouring all this poison into the innocent vessels of the young. Tuchman’s saying I turned on liberalism is amusing in itself, because it would indicate that I had either been or pretended to be a liberal and then had turned on my comrades for some devious reason. All I ever did was write about the world we inhabit, the world of culture, with a capital C, and journalism and the arts and so on, with exactly the same tone that I wrote about everything else. With exactly the same reverence that the people who screamed the most would have written about life in a small American town or in the business world or in professional sports, which is to say with no reverence at all, which is as it should be. And these days, if you mock the prevailing fashion in the world of the arts or journalism, you’re called a conservative. Which is just another term for a heretic. I would much rather be called a conservative in that case than its opposite, I assure you.
I’m so old, I can remember when The Manchurian Candidate was meant to be a satire of those who imagined Russians under every floorboard; I’m pretty sure that John Frankenheimer didn’t intend his film to be a how-to guide for routing them out.
(Classical allusion in headline.)
HAMMER HITS NAIL ON HEAD: The Real Scandal of Claudine Gay Affair.
Bates College Professor Tyler Austin Harper hit the nail on the head in his essay on the Claudine Gay affair in The Atlantic.
Harper states what should have been obvious to the meanest intelligence: the biggest and most revealing part of the scandal is the lengths to which Gay’s defenders chose to go in order to defend a person manifestly guilty of the charges of which she had been accused. And her defenders did so not because of any particular allegiance to Gay, but because her accusors were conservatives whom the defenders despised.
The true scandal of the Claudine Gay affair is not a Harvard president and her plagiarism. The true scandal is that so many journalists and academics were willing, are still willing, to redefine plagiarism to suit their politics. Gay’s boosters have consistently resorted to Orwellian doublespeak—“duplicative language” and academic “sloppiness” and “technical attribution issues”—in a desperate effort to insist that lifting entire paragraphs of another scholar’s work, nearly word for word, without quotation or citation, isn’t plagiarism. Or that if it is plagiarism, it’s merely a technicality. Or that we all do it. (Soon after Rufo and Brunet made their initial accusations last month, Gay issued a statement saying, “I stand by the integrity of my scholarship.” She did not address those or subsequent plagiarism allegations in her resignation letter.)
Rufo won this round of the academic culture war because he exposed so many progressive scholars and journalists to be hypocrites and political actors who were willing to throw their ideals overboard. I suspect that, not the tenure of a Harvard president, was the prize he sought all along. The tragedy is that we didn’t have to give it to him.
Harper is not a conservative nor a fan of Rufo, but he recognizes that all these media and academic defenders of Gay essentially proved Rufo’s key point: academia and the media are politicized and corrupt.
Or as Rufo tweeted on Tuesday:
To all of my critics who snidely dismissed me as a "bad-faith actor" and a "cartoon villain": I was right. You were wrong. Gay is gone.
The world of politics cannot be divided neatly between "good actors" and "bad actors." Reality is not a Marvel movie; politics is not a child's…
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) January 2, 2024
“Bad-faith” in this meaning, not sharing our ideology and cocktail party invitations. When Kevin Williamson was hired and then nearly-immediately fired in 2018 by the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg after his crybully staffers melted down, Williamson reminded Goldberg that the Atlantic had always welcomed controversial authors, and specifically mentioned the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens. To which Goldberg replied, Godfather-style, “Yes. But Hitchens was in the family. You are not.”
Rufo, et al, aren’t in the family, and therefore the DNC-MSM have been doing everything they can to salvage what remains of Gay’s reputation, instead of (okay, don’t laugh) objectively reporting news about her.
Related: From VDH: Harvard — Out the Frying Pan Into the Fire.
Will students who emulate Gay’s habit of copy-and-paste, failure-to-footnote, and misuse-of-data now be exempt from dismissal or suspension?
After Gay’s embarrassing December 5 congressional testimony and her resignation, what now is the Harvard policy toward antisemitism?
If next week, anti-Israel students once again call for the destruction of the Jewish people in Israel all the way “from the river to the sea,” or if they again storm Harvard’s Widener library, screaming support for the October 7 massacre and intimidating Jewish students, what will the new — or old –Harvard do?
Again nothing?
Finally, Harvard insinuated that Gay was fired by racist outside pressure –despite the fact that many of her critics were large donors furious about the diminution of the reputation of their alma mater.
Is Harvard suggesting that its own mega-donors are racists?
What then might come next?
The resignation of the entire board of the Harvard Corporation* that is the ultimate cause of Harvard’s descent into mediocrity.
As Jim Geraghty wrote on Wednesday, “An institution as powerful as Harvard can withstand a certain amount of embarrassing hypocrisy, but not that much. With each day that she remained, Gay further damaged the ‘brand’ of an institution that not only takes great pride in its prestige — some would say insufferable pride in its prestige — but needs to convince families that nearly $80,000 per year in tuition, housing, and food is worthwhile.”
“*Up until about a week ago, everybody called it Harvard University, but if Harvard is going to call itself a corporation despite its tax-exempt status, perhaps the rest of us ought to do the same,” Geraghty adds.
HUTCH HAS LEFT THE BUILDING: Starsky and Hutch actor David Soul dies, aged 80.
VIVEK DOES IT AGAIN, FLIPS SCRIPT ON NBC REPORTER AS SHE HAS MELTDOWN ON CAMERA:
He did it earlier this week when a Washington Post reporter Meryl Kornfield asked if he condemned “white supremacy.” He then proceeded to decimate the media games while also speaking against all racial discrimination. But he predicted exactly what she would do, which is write up what she wanted regardless of what he said. Even though he predicted it during his conversation with her, she did it anyway.
They should just learn their lesson and stop trying to play these games, but then they wouldn’t be the liberal media if they did that, would they? They keep trying to shape reality into the narrative they want, but reality doesn’t comply.
NBC News reporter Dasha Burns tried again on the subject of white supremacy with Ramaswamy, as though anyone would believe that he is a white supremacist or in favor of white supremacy, and it’s more than a little hilarious that it’s a liberal white reporter trying this on a man of Indian descent. What they don’t like is the way he says to stop racism by not being racist, to anyone. He ripped apart how some of these definitions from people on the left of “white supremacy” include things like “punctuality,” which would itself be a racist construct.
Vivek handles Regime Media like a boss.
NBC News reporter Dasha Burns has a meltdown as Vivek shreds her scripted reality. pic.twitter.com/PUuhjZl7Dj
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) January 5, 2024
As Stephen Kruiser writes, “OK — I’ve Got the Perfect Gig for Vivek Ramaswamy:”
Ramaswamy has no bona fides as a conservative, or anything else, for that matter. He thought he was a libertarian for a while, then he just did a peace out on voting for a long time, and now he’s a Republican. His hot takes aren’t rooted in ideology; they tend to seem like something he cobbled together after hours of scrolling social media.
* * * * * * * * *
Republican politicians — aspiring or elected — need to learn how to say, “Wow, you’re an idiot,” to a hostile press. As most of you know, I have been writing about liberal bias in the mainstream media for over 20 years. I have seen waves of Republicans come through Washington who can’t grasp that The New York Times and WaPo will still brutalize them no matter how much you-know-what-kissing they do.
For the 14 people out there who are Ramaswamy fans: he’s not going to be president. I do see that he has a role to play in a future Republican administration, however. If a Republican does win back the White House, toss the press secretary gig to Vivek right away.
I’m already enjoying the thought of him saying, “Stupid question,” with the frequency that Biden’s former Spokesditz Jen Psaki said, “Circle back.”
Faster, please.
January 4, 2024
HOW IT STARTED: Next mayor wants NYC to be even more of a ‘sanctuary’ for illegal immigrants.
Every single one of the eight Democrats running for mayor vowed to protect illegal immigrants from deportation, solidifying the Big Apple’s often infamous status as a “sanctuary city.”
* * * * * * * *
Entrepreneur Andrew Yang, the son of legal Taiwanese immigrants, said, “I appreciate anyone who comes to this country or New York City for a better life.”
And Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams said migrants were his neighbors growing up in Queens.
“My mother worked two jobs to provide for the six of us and we had a group of undocumented residents that lived in our community,” Adams said.
The other candidates — city comptroller Scott Stringer, former Obama housing secretary Shaun Donovan and nonprofit leader Dianne Morales — also voiced their support for the Big Apple as a sanctuary city.
—The New York Post, June 2nd, 2021.
How it’s going: Fed-up Eric Adams sues bus companies for $700M to cover cost for over 33K migrants hauled to NYC.
Mayor Eric Adams’ administration on Thursday sued 17 bus companies that have hauled more than 33,000 migrants from Texas to the Big Apple — claiming they should pony up the $700 million it cost the city to care for the asylum seekers.
The charter bus operators have earned “millions of dollars” from the Lone Star State while acting in “bad faith” to implement Gov. Greg Abbott’s plan to transport migrants coming over the US-Mexico border to Democrat-run cities such as New York, Chicago and Denver, the Manhattan Supreme Court suit claims.
“These companies have violated state law by not paying the cost of caring for these migrants, and that’s why we are suing to recoup approximately $700 million already spent to care for migrants sent here in the last two years by Texas,” Adams said in a statement.
Roughly 33,600 migrants have been bused using these companies since the start of New York City’s migrant crisis in April 2022, according to the suit.
The coach companies were paid roughly $1,650 per person they transported — a bloated price tag that’s more than five times the average rate for one-way tickets from Texas to NYC, the suit claims.
—The NY Post, today.
This isn’t who we are. Adams clearly needs to reread the words on the Statue of Liberty — and his own promise that New York is a sanctuary city.
Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
Saul Alinsky smiles.