Franco was an unauthorized immigrant who had been working in this country for over a decade. His wife, Anne, is from a Pennsylvania Dutch family that has been in this country for generations. They were married in 2013 and have three American children, Max, Javier and Valentina.
In the spring of 2017, Franco got in a minor traffic accident near his Pennsylvania home. A few weeks later as he was leaving for work, agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement swarmed him, took him away and deported him to Guatemala.
.. This is an example of ICE going after a perfectly productive member of society. I got the anecdote from a series of reports that Deborah Sontag and Dale Russakoff did for ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer. They found that 64 percent of the immigrants arrested by ICE in the agency’s Philadelphia region had no prior criminal conviction.
.. There are 11 million unauthorized immigrants in this country. Every past administration has used some discretion in targeting whom to deport. They targeted those who were destroying society, not building it. They tried to take account of particular contexts, and they tried to show some sense of basic humanity.
.. today, discretion and humanity are being stamped out. The Trump administration has embraced a “zero tolerance” policy. In practice that means that all complexity has to be reduced to uniformity. Compassion is replaced by a blind obedience to regulations. Context is irrelevant. Arrests are indiscriminate. All that matters is that the arrest numbers go up, so human beings in the system are reduced to numbers.
.. The Trump administration immigration officials have become exactly the kind of monsters that conservatism has always warned against.
For centuries, conservatives have repeated a specific critique against state power. Statism, conservatives have argued, has a tendency to become brutalist and inhumane because a bureaucracy can’t see or account for the complexity of reality.
.. Statist social engineering projects cause horrific suffering because in the mind of statists, the abstract rule is more important than the human being in front of them. The person must be crushed for the sake of the abstraction.
.. People like Stephen Miller are not steeped in conservative thinking and do not operate with a conservative disposition. They were formed by their rebellion against the stifling conformity they found at liberal universities. Their primary orientation is not to conservative governance but to owning the libs. In power they take the worst excesses of statism and flip them for anti-liberal ends.. Here’s how you can detect the anti-liberal trolls in the immigration debate: Watch how they use the word “amnesty.”.. Any serious reform has to grapple with tangled realities, and any real conservative has an appreciation for that complexity. But if you try to account for that complexity before an anti-immigration troll, he or she will shout one word: Amnesty!.. This is what George Orwell noticed about the authoritarian brutalists: They don’t use words to illuminate the complexity of reality; they use words to eradicate the complexity of reality... Look at how the Republican candidates for the G.O.P. Senate nomination in Arizona answered questions about a provision to keep families together at the border. They responded with inhumane abstractions: “I try not to get swayed by what the emotions are or the pressure.. “Compromising on the rule of law to grant amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants is the wrong path to take,”.. “Amnesty” has become a club the trolls use in their attempt to stamp a rigid steel boot on the neck of the immigration debate. It’s the sign of a party slowly losing its humanity.
A Google employee inflames a debate about sexism and free speech
James Damore said personality may explain the gender gap in tech
James Damore, the young Harvard-educated software engineer later revealed to be the memo’s author, but biological factors. Women are more interested in people and emotions, he wrote, and tend towards “neuroticism”, meaning they are more anxious than men and worse at handling high-stress jobs.
.. In the end, Google decided it was better to be labelled intolerant than complicit. “This isn’t a question of legality or policy. This is a question of virtue-signalling,” says the boss of a prominent tech startup, reflecting the view of many in the Valley.
.. The company may become more of a target for those who accuse Silicon Valley’s firms and bosses of being intolerant of politically conservative opinions. American universities, which are supposed to encourage diversity of thought, are also criticised for catering to identity politics by, for example, excluding conservative thinkers.
Anthony Scaramucci’s Mistake: Wanting Journalists to Like Him
White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci can be forgiven for succumbing to the same illusion that enchants almost every conservative with a moment in the media spotlight: that journalists might really like you.
Whatever agreement he may have had with Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, there was no way a liberal reporter was going to sit on an explosive story like the new communications director trashing the president’s top aides. Lizza told CNN on Thursday night that he would not have published the interview if Scaramucci had told him explicitly that it was off the record. Perhaps not, but he would have found another way to release the same information.
.. There is no reason to trust any reporter, and especially a mainstream media reporter, and particularly a mainstream media reporter from a left-wing publication that has compared your boss to Hitler.
.. How many on the right — President Donald Trump included — have been done in by the big interview with the New York Times, the hope of favorable treatment by CNN, the flattery of BuzzFeed? It always ends the same way — with Lucy swiping the football away from Charlie Brown. And for some reason, Charlie Brown is always surprised.
.. Jake Tapper is a case in point. A left-wing journalist who once wrote for Salon, he ingratiated himself with the right while he was at ABC News because he was the only reporter who dared to ask the Obama administration remotely challenging questions. Breitbart News, of all sites, cheered for Tapper when he moved to CNN and was given his own shows — first The Lead, then the State of the Union gig. And then he turned on us, viciously and emotionally.
.. It is generally good to be cordial to mainstream media journalists. It is almost impossible to be friends with them. They live to destroy conservatives, and they hate this president with a bloodthirsty passion. They obey no rules. There is no quarter asked and none given.
Scaramucci said it best: “What I don’t like about Washington is people do not let you know how they feel. They’re very nice to your face, and then they take a shiv or a machete and they stab it in your back.”