Foolishness

Kate Cronin-Furman, Assistant Professor of Human Rights at University College London—that’s London, Great Britain, mind you, not London, KY—thinks our Border Patrol agents should be doxed and then shamed for doing their jobs in trying to keep our borders secure and detaining illegal aliens.

Of course, she denies that her demand is doxing.

The identities of the individual Customs and Border Protection agents who are physically separating children from their families and staffing the detention centers are not undiscoverable. Immigration lawyers have agent names; journalists reporting at the border have names, photos and even videos.

Yet here she is, demanding they be doxed. With her doxing demand, too, she’s demanding that immigration lawyers violate client-lawyer privilege.

She went on to insist that the agents and others associated with detaining illegal aliens should not be allowed to have lawyers to defend them.

…the American Bar Association should signal that anyone who defends the border patrol’s mistreatment of children will not be considered a member in good standing of the legal profession.

Her definition of mistreatment, mind you, not a jury’s.  Never mind the causes of the border situation.  Never mind that all defendants, no matter how despicable-seeming, are entitled to legal representation, are presumed innocent until proven otherwise in a jury trial—even in Great Britain.  Or, maybe it’s that she Knows Better than us ignorant colonials; our juries are not to be trusted.

Atrocity-doers, she calls them, saying the conditions in the detention centers amount to torture chambers.

Deplorable those conditions certainly are, but that’s not the agents’ fault.  What Cronin-Furman carefully elides (deliberately, I say; she is a professor at a prestigious British school, so she knows better) are the reasons for those conditions.

Reasons like the wholly unprecedented flood of illegal aliens across our border.

Reasons like their claiming asylum falsely, having already rejected the asylum—and work opportunities—that Mexico offered them on their way up from the Caravan Triangle.

Reasons like Congress’ Progressive-Democrats blocking all efforts to reform our immigration laws to make it harder to enter illegally and much easier to enter legally while at the same time refusing to correct our asylum laws so that the combination of immigration and asylum law could remove incentives to try to enter our nation illegally.

Reasons like Congress’ Progressive-Democrats blocking all efforts actually to secure our southern border with increased and improved security measures, including walls in key sections of our border.  Indeed, many of the Progressive-Democratic Party’s current Presidential candidates have openly called for open borders, decriminalizing illegal entry.

Immediately proximate reasons like Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives refusing—for far too long; it took an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote in the Senate to force the question to the House floor—to fund DHS so that Department could expand the detention facilities to meet the “demand” created by that flood of illegal aliens.

Immediately proximate reasons like Progressive-Democrats in the House of Representatives refusing—until that Senate vote—even to allow money to be appropriated for beds and hygiene supplies for those children unless they also could get existing detention facilities disbanded.  “Let those children suffer,” the Progressive-Democrats demanded, “until we get our way.”

If there are atrocities going on on our southern border, they’re in those House Progressive-Democrats’ cynical, despicable dehumanizing of those children, using them as machinations for imposing Progressive-Democrat policies regarding our borders and immigration.  Those children are not human beings in the eyes of those Progressive-Democrats; those children are seen merely as tools to be used for a purpose.

The august personage of Cronin-Furman hasn’t been to our border; she just phoned her piece in (emailed it?) from the safety and comfort of her London school’s office.

Her behavior would be shameful were it not so foolish, or had this professor the grace to know shame.

Trade and the Rule of Law

Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has asked for President Donald Trump’s help, at the G-20 meeting in Japan, to get the People’s Republic of China to release the Canadian hostages that the PRC kidnapped in retaliation for Canada’s detaining a PRC company executive for criminal investigation.  Trump has agreed.

Gerard Gayou suggested in his piece at the link,

Mr Trump may worry that challenging Mr Xi on political prisoners would jeopardize a trade deal, but pressing China on the rule of law should be a priority.

Indeed. Rule of law—as opposed to the PRC’s rule by law—is critical to many of the sorts of things Trump is looking for in a trade deal with the PRC: things like intellectual property protection, an end to the extortion the PRC applies to obtain proprietary technologies from foreign companies wishing to do business in the PRC, an end to the PRC’s demands for back doors into companies’ software, etc.

Absent rule of law, as the PRC demonstrated as recently as some few weeks ago when it walked away from commitments it had made during the then-trade negotiations, the PRC’s word on any trade deal will be largely worthless.

In Which I Agree with the ACLU

The National Security Agency illegally spied on American citizens, again.  This time occurred, last October, when the NSA

collected records about U.S. calls and text messages that it wasn’t authorized to obtain last year….

This

occurred several months after the NSA said it had purged hundreds of millions of metadata records it had amassed since 2015 due to a separate overcollection episode.

This flouting of law and of its instructions was no accident, not the second time.  It was deliberate.

An ACLU staff attorney, Patrick Toomey, said in part,

this surveillance program is beyond redemption and should be shut down for good.  The NSA’s collection of Americans’ call records is too sweeping, the compliance problems too many….

It appears that the NSA didn’t explicitly call for the data when it asked a (sadly name-redacted) telecommunications firm for legitimately collectable data; that firm “overprovided.”  The data, though, were “overprovided” for nine days before the NSA asked the company to…investigate…its delivery.  Nor is there evidence the NSA purged those overcollections.

Especially that last bit about compliance: the NSA, with this latest collection, has demonstrated that it considers laws, rules, constraints to be solely for the small people; they don’t apply to august entities like themselves.

Toomey is right, and I’ll go a ways further: the NSA should be shut down, the agency disbanded and withdrawn from the government’s books, and the personnel all returned to the private sector.

Censorship

James O’Keefe’s Veritas did some undercover work, produced a video of that work, and ran it on YouTube.  However, the exposé was of…Alphabet’s Google (which in turn owns YouTube), so YouTube took it down—Alphabet’s censors couldn’t stand the criticism.

The video seems to be back up a few hours later as I write this on the late afternoon of Tuesday.

However.

Alphabet’s attempt to censor, regardless of its (temporary?) failure, is wholly unacceptable, and it demonstrates Alphabet’s (as the owner of Google and YouTube) dishonesty and cowardice.

How is it possible to trust an organization so precious, so self-important, that it can’t even handle criticism of itself?

Trump and the New York Times

In one of a series of Letters to the Editor in Sunday’s Wall Street Journal, one letter writer decried both President Donald Trump’s and the NYT‘s words.  It’s a false comparison, though.  The letter writer wrote in the Trump part of his comparison

President Trump’s use of the word “treason” to characterize the Times, and his attempts to misuse government authority to retaliate against journalists must end, full stop.

This is a cynically misleading claim. Trump did not use the word “treason” to characterize the NYT; he used the phrase “virtual treason” to characterize the NYT‘s behavior.

Trump is well-known for disdaining euphemisms, for preferring plain, blunt speech.  If he had meant to say the NYT was a treasonous institution, he would have said so.  Beyond that, “virtual” treason is not treason; it describes behavior that might look like treason in a purely metaphorical way.  Full stop.

Regarding retaliation, Trump has never had his surveillance apparatus spy on journalists’ emails, nor has he ever thrown a journalist in jail or harassed a journalist’s mother. Again, full stop.

Nor has Trump ever tried to bar an entire news organization from its news collection duties at the White House. A third time, full stop.