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Good evening. It's Thursday, October 5.
Tonight, Joe Biden and his Department of Homeland Security are building a wall on the border, the very same border wall that they and their media allies spent all of the Trump years denouncing as a tribute to white supremacy and redolent of what both the Nazis and Stalinists built.
When it comes to the question of undocumented migrants, everything changed for American liberals. As soon as those immigrants stopped being an abstraction that Democrats could coddle and hug like a plastic toy or a distant mascot, and instead began arriving in large numbers, or sometimes even just small numbers, in the communities, cities and states that Democrats govern and where liberals reside. Indeed, several of the most prominent Democratic governors and mayors this year went from maligning everyone who favored border restrictions as an evil white nationalist who hates brown people – that was when lowly border communities in Texas and Arizona were the ones receiving most of the immigrants and bearing the burden of integrating them – to shrilly complaining about the surge of immigrants and demanding that Biden do more to stop them as soon as they began arriving in New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, and those states and cities became responsible for housing and taking care of those immigrants. It really is that craven and disgusting, the way they just switched from hugging immigrants from a distance to demanding they be stopped as soon as they became their neighbors. Our budgets are being strained by these immigrants, they shouted. We have no room for these people! Keep them away from us!
Biden heard all of those pleas and listened this time because it's now Democrats and the Democratic Party base being affected by immigration affluent residents of cities and suburbs in the north rather than just the deplorables in the red states. And so, Biden's Homeland Security last night announced the following in an official decree in the Federal Register:
The United States Border Patrol's (Border Patrol) Rio Grande Valley Sector is an area of 'high illegal entry. As of early August 2023, Border Patrol had encountered over 245,000 such entrants attempting to enter the United States between ports of entry in the Rio Grande Valley Sector in Fiscal Year 2023. […] Therefore, I must use my authority under section 102 of IIRIRA to install additional physical barriers and roads in the Rio Grande Valley Sector. Therefore, DHS will take immediate action to construct barriers and roads. (U.S. Federal Register. October 5, 2023)
With the 2024 election approaching, Democrats need to assuage concerns over immigration, especially now that it's affecting their own voters or the voters they want to attract. At the same time, they can't afford to alienate immigration groups and other liberal activists by admitting what they're doing, namely, building the wall that American liberals spent years denouncing as a Nazi landmark. So, the White House is simultaneously announcing the building of Trump's racist wall while insisting that they're not really doing it and demanding that the media defend them. We’ll look at this duplicity to bring clarity about what is really going on, but also to demonstrate the defining hallmark of American liberals: they love righteously condemning other people and demanding that other people, the lesser people, make sacrifices and endure burdens, but then scream bloody murder the minute they are the ones who are affected.
Then: One of the nation's leading experts on Big Tech and antitrust law is a friend of the show, Matt Stoller, who, among other things, is a fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project. He's the author of a highly popular Substack called Big, about monopoly abuses of big Tech and he wrote one of the best books of the 21st century on antitrust law and Big Tech that's entitled “Goliath: The 100 Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.” We'll talk to Stoller tonight about a variety of very newsworthy topics not getting enough attention, including the ongoing lawsuit in a federal court right now between the Department of Justice against Google, claiming that Google is violating antitrust laws, as well as a recent lawsuit that is quite sweeping in its scope filed by the Justice Department against Amazon, claiming that Amazon is also violating monopoly laws. Since he worked inside Congress for several years, we’ll hear his analysis about the recent success of Rep. Matt Gaetz making McCarthy the first-ever speaker of the House, to be removed from that position by a vote of the Congress.
For now, welcome to a new as some sort of system update, starting right now.
