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.