I was distracted for a few days, so imagine my surprise when I saw that the lead story was Maryland Senator Van Hollen sitting in a San Salvador restaurant with some deported MS-13 gangster.
That was not on my April bingo card.
The story is about an illegal immigrant resident in Maryland, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to his native El Salvador.
The Left and the media (but I repeat myself) would like you to believe that this is the civil rights crusade of our time, the biggest crisis since George Floyd (more on that in a minute). They claim Abrego Garcia was simply a peaceful Maryland husband and father, wrongfully picked up and deported by an authoritarian Trump administration.
Think I got it wrong? Well, I did, because he “wasn’t picked up and deported (to his home country)” but rather:
“In an authoritarian regime, the opposition needs symbols and stories. Kilmar Abrego Garcia is that symbol. His abduction in front of his autistic son and imprisonment in a foreign concentration camp is that story.”
You can read the rest of the piece if you want. I’m so old, I remember when Jonathan Last was a respectable writer.
You don’t have to be a chess grandmaster to look ahead four plays to see where this is going. To the Left we are all Abrego Garcia. It’s not just those who are brown, black, BIPOC, polka dot who could be picked up by a racist ICE on the suspicion of not “looking American.” Even the women on The View or backbench Democratic nitwits in Congress could be disappeared into the night, carted off to the American Gulag or to a foreign prison on the whim of Orange Man.
We are all Abrego Garcia.
Or are we?
First of all, Abrego Garcia is not an American. Multiple courts determined that he was in the country illegally, and he was subsequently under an order to be deported.
Also, several government agencies determined that Abrego Garcia was either associating with or an actual MS-13 gang member. Tennessee state police attested that Abrego Garcia was engaged in what looked suspiciously like human trafficking. It was entered into official records that Abrgeo Garcia’s wife had several years earlier sought a domestic violence restraining order against him.
I understand we live in a diverse nation and all, but when it comes to being a family man Abrego Garcia seems more like Tony Soprano than Grandpa Walton. The man was under a deportation order. The only question was whether he should have been deported to his home country or somewhere else.
A wife-beating MS-13 gang banger here illegally and under an existing deportation order is hardly the civil rights icon for our time.
He is, however, our new George Floyd.
Remember — George Floyd’s death sparked not just a summer of rioting but was used to supercharge BLM, Woke, DEI, CRT, and all the other racist poison that was injected into our society. The man was made into a martyr. The fact that he was a criminal and abused women wasn’t relevant because his death was useful; his death was used to start a movement and after that movement got enough momentum Floyd could fade into obscurity.
Legally, Abrego Garcia did not belong in this country. However, he is useful to the Left in the same way George Floyd was — as a martyr to be used to whip up their base and attack Donald Trump. Abrego Garcia will be lionized as a hero until he is no longer useful, then he will be forgotten, in much the same way as his personal peccadillos are now ignored.
I could point out that the Left is more interested in preventing the deportation of MS-13 gang members than protecting their victims.
As far as Van Hollen? The man’s conduct is execrable. He will get on a plane and fly thousands of miles to try and bring an illegal alien gang banger back into the US, but I don’t remember him driving a few miles from his house to DC to look after Maryland residents being held in inhumane conditions because of Jan. 6.
I wonder if someone will remind Van Hollen that if he is able to get Abrego Garcia onto a plane it will be illegal to bring him back into this country.
This is a fascinating story.
Apparently the Trump people held back releasing information about Garcia’s criminal history until after Van Hollen had landed in El Salvador, which has put his visit in a bad light for him. The last news I saw was that Van Hollen was claiming that someone placed the margaritas he was sipping on with Garcia in front of him without his knowledge. Sure, buddy.
Once again the left has landed on the wrong side of an 80/20 political split because Orange Man Bad. And I did read the rest of that piece by Jonathan Last, because I’m old enough to remember when I thought he was a conservative. It was hilarious. I hope the democrats take him up on his advice, because I don’t think it will work out the way he thinks it will. I think the public is fed up with the endless love-fest the left has with every sort of criminal, including foreign MS-13 gang members. So yes, I’d love to see an elected Democrat on the ground every day in El Salvador, peppering the government of that sovereign nation with an endless series of demands.
I’ve read that one problem Republicans had during the last campaign was that voters refused to believe how crazy the Democrats actually were. One way for the public to find out how crazy they are would be for them to continue to demand- live on CNN- the return of a foreign gang member who had a deportation order in place that everyone had ignored until now.
Democrats are allowed to ignore every law, every court decision, everything, while Republicans are expected to follow every letter of every law as defined by the whim of any random leftist judge. Jonathan Last is extremely concerned about the treatment of the foreigners in a foreign country by that country’s government- but I’ve never seen any indication from the establishment-aligned media that they had any problem at all about how the J6 prisoners were treated. Quite the opposite- they reveled in their suffering.
Thus I see no reason to take their loudly exclaimed concerns about foreign prisons seriously. I also don’t believe they care about people being grabbed of the street by ICE, either. They care about certain people- those they think will vote for them- but not others.
A bunch of years ago I had someone tell me about about some teenager who had been put on a plane and sent to somewhere in the Balkans. Apparently she was brought to the country illegally as a baby. No years long legal battle, no concern from the usual suspects, just a one way plane ticket to a country with a language she did not speak. Cue the violin. I happened to mention that in a comment thread years after and was asked for a source. I couldn’t find anything about that original story, but I found others. One was about a woman who was married to an American citizen and had US-born children- but the government was still attempting to deport her. Hmmm.
Of course at the time millions of illegal foreigners were coming into the country with no problems at all- yet certain people were hounded and targeted for deportation. Ethnically European people, that is.
Long comment, but I suppose my point is that I don’t take anything people like Van Hollen do at face value. Everything they say is a lie, and everything they do is in support of their lies.
The atlantic (where else) provided the ‘pillow’ calling him a maryland father and other misleads
Remember even when he was at the Standard last was for the Empire i thought he was playing devils advocate
One anticipates many amusing memes featuring Van Hollen and the magical margaritas.
The most disappointing episode of Trump’s first term was his supine acceptance of the Floyd riots. Although it doesn’t make logical sense, I have to believe Trump’s impotence was a factor that suppressed his turn out.
I just saw that New York is going to fight him on the congestion toll. I have trouble seeing why Trump’s even in the fight. Why not stand back and let them have what they want, good and hard?
One more thing. It occurs to me that Trump has quite appropriately made a big show about deporting foreign criminals the prior regime has allowed to freely enter the country.
People friendly to the prior regime have also made a big show, but objecting to the eviction of these foreign criminals from America.
Markers placed.
If you can import millions of people and vast quantities of drugs through a porous border, you can also import a wide assortment of military weaponry.
Should these foreign criminals somehow</i find themselves in possession of military weaponry and somehow use it to attack American targets, it will be quite difficult for the left to finger-point at Trump knowing that his administration has been working to deport them while the left has been suing to keep them here.
Of course, that assumes that the United States will remain intact enough after such an attack to retain something resembling the usual political discourse.
He regards new york specially queens as his home and hochul as their persecutor
Recall he had the atty general the defense secretary and the chairman of the joint chiefs against him
Add to that so called blm was apparently a cuban intelligence op
I gave up on Jonathan Last when I heard him use the word “effort” as a verb.
The Left will continue to believe that this guy is totally innocent and deserving of repatriation to the US, simply because the conservatives and the Demmunists have completely separate information ecosystems.
This is going to get ugly.
Trump showed a photo of Kilmar’s hands with supposed MS13 tattoos. So:
1) Are those really his hands? That’s an easy question to answer if the media want to.
2) If the answer to Question 1 is yes do the tats signify MS13 affiliation? That’s another easy question to answer.
3) If the answer to Question 2 is also yes do we want MS13 affiliated people in this country? That should be another easy question to answer.
Look over there! But don’t worry, the media are on the case.
What make the Abrego Garcia debate dishonest is that the Left and its media adjuncts like to ignore that the basic facts of the case were established years ago::
1) His MS-13 gang affiliation was confirmed by multiple police agencies including confidential sources which gave his gang “nickname” and rank.
2) He was already under a deportation order
The Left would like for everyone to think that these facts were simply drawn from thin air by the current Trump administration, depriving Abrego Garcia of due process. Not true
The one thing that seems in dispute is the ability of the Administration is not the ability to deport Abrego Garcia but rather specifically to his native El Salvador given the court-ordered “withholding of removal”
So in reality if Van Hollen could have brought Abrego Garcia back to Dulles airtport, he simply could have walked off one plane and onto another headed out of the country.
Another example besides Floyd would be Brian Sicknick, the Capitol Hill police officer who died the day after Jan. 6. I didn’t use him in the original post because while he was used in a similar way as a symbol I didn’t want to taint what was all by accounts a good and decent man as well as trusted public servant by an association with a low life like Floyd.
Sicknick died the day after Jan. 6. Pelosi and other Democrats claimed that he was killed by Jan. 6 protesters who used a fire extinguisher to bludgeon him to death. He was given what amounted to a state funeral. His body was displayed in the Capitol Rotunda and his remains interred at Arlington. His death was used as a symbol of the supposed murderous intent and animal behavior of the protesters and went a long way to justify the crackdown and largest manhunt in American history to round them up. Not to mention the travesty of Pelosi’s Star Chamber of a Jan. 6 Committee
However when his autopsy was released we found out he didn’t die from being bludgeoned by a fire extinguisher but rather from a stroke. Nobody has yet to explain to me how somebody can explain to me how you can confuse through simple observation a cause of death of a stroke with a body beaten to death.
However the “Big Lie” worked because by the time the truth came out, the larger process that it helped fuel, the myth of a murderous insurrection had already taken hold.
Pelosi has never been called to account for this, but to me it is one of the most disgusting parts of an already horrendous legacy
One anticipates many amusing memes featuring Van Hollen and the magical margaritas.
I keep picturing Fredo asking Michael why they didn’t spend time together like this before.