Pun Salad

Another shining moment for “the adults in the room.” At the end of last week, reports from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times declared that the Biden Administration was considering a plan to pay up to $450,000 per child to illegal immigrant families who were detained at the border and separated from their children during the previous administration, with some families with multiple children receiving as much as one million dollars. Naturally, Republicans responded with utter dismay (Oops! I guess the word I am supposed to use is “pounced”). Luckily for the President, he had by then jetted off to Rome (4,500 mile trip) on Air Force One where he made use of an 85-vehicle motorcade en route to The Vatican to share a laugh with the Pope before then swinging up to Glasgow (1,560 mile trip) to join with 30,000 other attendees who had traveled (mostly via airplane) to Scotland to watch the U.S. President nap through a series of speeches demanding that we peons who don’t work for the almighty government drastically reduce our carbon footprint, and thus did not have to immediately answer questions about the proposed payouts to illegal immigrants scheme.

At least, that is, until he returned home yesterday (3425 mile trip). In his first press conference back, Fox News (naturally) reporter Peter Doocey asked the President if the proposed payouts might incentivize more foreigners to attempt an illegal border crossing, and was met with this reply: “If you guys keep sending that garbage out, yeah. But it’s not true.”

When Mr. Doocey followed-up by asking the President if he does believe this is a “garbage report,” the President replied, “Yeah. Four-hundred and fifty thousand dollars per person, is that what you are saying?” When Mr. Doocey responded in the affirmative, the President retorted emphatically, “That’s not gonna happen.”

The report is “garbage”? Well, not according to the ACLU who has apparently been working with members of the administration on this very issue. The original article in the WSJ quoted Lee Gelernt from the ACLU’s immigrant-rights division saying, “President Biden has agreed that the family separation policy is a historic moral stain on our nation that must be fully remedied. That remedy must include not only meaningful monetary compensation, but a pathway to remain in the country.”

By now, most Americans know that critical race theory is real and that it’s being taught widely in public schools.

This isn’t a semantics debate. Students are being taught racial hierarchies, along with the idea that the United States was founded on white supremacy, and that the U.S. Constitution, our legal system, and American ideals like freedom and equality all work to perpetuate and sustain systemic racism.

There are mountains of evidence of this. The work of Christopher Rufo and others has exposed critical race theory’s many manifestations, not just in public schools but inside major corporations and even the U.S. military.

Yet the left has refused to debate critical race theory on the merits. Instead, the corporate press, Hollywood, and woke Twitter bluechecks keep insisting that it doesn’t even exist, it’s just a fantasy conjured up by racist Trumpers trying to scare white voters into electing Republicans.

I agree entirely with defenders of critical race theory that most people have, at best, a vague understanding of it. Where I part company is on the question of how relevant that is. What a lot of the people object to is the general approach to talking about race today. If you want to call it anti-racism, or woke-ism, or some other label, it has no bearing on the thing people object to, because words aren’t things. And the things people object to can’t be fixed by changing the labels we use for them. The progressive response to anti-CRT rhetoric is one of the great examples of motte-and-bailey argumentation in public life in my lifetime. In front of friendly audiences, it’s all systemic racism, white supremacy, and the like. When people push back, it’s because “they don’t want to talk about slavery and Jim Crow!”

I’m getting tired of saying this, but schools have been teaching about slavery a lot for the last 60 years at least. If progressives were just saying, “Schools need to teach about slavery and Jim Crow,” it would be no different than saying, “Schools need to teach math!” because that’s already happening. But most normal people understand that there is something new going on, and that’s the thing they’re objecting to.

Baby's first "mobile" phone is now an actual mobile phone. The iconic Fisher-Price Chatter Telephone pull toy has been made into a working Bluetooth-connected handset for grownups. It still has a rainbow-colored rotary dial. It's got eyes that wobble when the wheels roll. But now, 60 years since it first was introduced, you can take your business calls through the big, red plastic handset.