Author’s Note: I know many of you have expressed concern about Juanita. I got in touch with her yesterday. She is experiencing some health problems that she would not get into. They are not life threatening but she is taking a break from writing for awhile. I and the others will do the best we can to give you something to chew on until she feels up to giving us the same great content she has always given us.

I don’t know much. I studied political science in college, but as I am fond of saying, I have slept since then. However, I remember the concept of political parties and how they are supposed to work. Every party polices themselves and I suppose that’s the main problem. Politics works in fairly simple and predictable ways. Parties have platforms and they use those platforms to govern their solutions to our problems. At least, those are the problems they identify as our problems. Conservatives have identified border security as a problem. Obviously, we can get into any number of discussions as to how true that actually is, but let’s keep things simple.

James Lankford (R-OK) helped broker a deal on immigration reform in the senate. It is about as conservative as any deal anyone could imagine, Remember, the senate is Democratic. There was no reason for the deal to be as conservative as it was except for the fact that Democrats want to make a deal. It included aide of Israel, Ukraine, and Gaza, but otherwise there was very little most Democrats would want. Obviously, the House is more conservative in the Senate. It is where the so-called Freedom Caucus lives. They could take the bill and delete things they don’t like and add things they would like, but they have chosen to kill it instead. Why? Their fearless leader has told them to do so. We can’t solve our nation’s problems because if we solve those problems then we can’t campaign on them.

It is what happened next that kills me. The Oklahoma GOP voted to censure Lankford On the one hand, that means virtually nothing. A censure has all the weight of Barney Fife yelling stop in downtown Mayberry. It is the story it tells to all of us and their party members. He helped negotiate a deal and it was a favorable one to them. He is essentially being punished for governing. You may not like the deal he made. I get that. In that case you either simply vote no or you get involved and make the changes you think you need to be made. We don’t punish and scold people for governing. At least we don’t if we are a functional political party.

This is a good news and bad news kind of thing. We won’t have a deal on immigration. From the Democratic side, we can say at least we won’t have a bad deal. On the bad side, it means we will hear all kinds of crap about open borders, catch and release, fentanyl, and terrorists flooding over the board. It is all Brandon’s fault. We know better and we hopefully can get most voters to know that. Even if they believe the malarkey about the border being the wild west, they can at least get the idea that the Republicans killed their own bill. They would rather have a problem to point to than solve it. This is not how things are supposed to work, but then again I have slept since my political science classes.

 

Iowa in particular is an anomaly. They use an old caucus system that seems a lot more exclusive than newer primary systems. As others have pointed out, about ten percent of the voting public participated in the caucus. So, if Donald Trump got about 50 percent of the Republican vote then he really got somewhere between two and three percent of the state. So, we should hold off before we write off the state of some kind of group of backwards hicks.

To be perfect fair, every state has those folks and it isn’t limited to just two or three percent of the population. Life would be a whole lot better if it was. As teachers, we see this on the front lines. We have a lot of students that are interested in the world around them and finding out more about it works. We also have students that just couldn’t care less.

However, there is a phenomenon that is beginning to cripple our politics. Iowa and New Hampshire are perfect examples. Ask them the issues that are most important to them and they will immediately point out immigration. Why? Is there a flood of immigrants moving into Iowa from anywhere? It’s in the middle of the damn country.  New Hampshire is closer to Canada, so I suppose it is possible they will literally have a higher percentage of immigrants move there, but I am reasonably sure those aren’t the immigrants we are fighting over.

The concept of concentric circles is a pretty easy one. The center circle represents the portion of the population that is directly affected by an issue. They themselves are immigrants. So, immigration policy definitely matters to them. As we keep drawing circles we keep moving further and further away in effect. So, the second circle might by a close family member and close friends. Then, we move further and further away from those directly effected.

You will notice that almost universally the people that complain the loudest are the people in that last circle. That also happens to be the majority of the population. On some level it makes sense. If I don’t care about anyone in that population then I also don’t care if we take care of them. I could be convinced that they are a drain on society and if I can’t put a human face on it then it is more difficult for me to push back against that negativity. Yet, there is a logical breakdown. If I live in Iowa or New Hampshire that what immigrant to sucking up my resources or taking my job?

We’ve had hysterical periods where this has reared its ugly head. We use hysterical in both versions of the word. There is a hysteria here that doesn’t make sense and it is certainly more than hysterical to the rest of us. Towns in Montana and other northern states banned refugees. How many refugees are traipsing up to Montana or Wyoming anyway?

We could certainly find other issues with this phenomenon. The LGTBQ+ community certainly faces this issue front and center. People that don’t have any LGTBQ+ amongst their close family or friends suddenly care deeply about the subject and make all kinds of assumptions about how many it represents. It is spreading like wildfire and yet they still don’t know anyone personally effected. It’s a breakdown of logic and reason.

The key is thinking of politics in terms of concentric circles. I need to vote for those issues where I or someone I care about is in the center circle. If I don’t know anyone impacted by that particular issue then why I am basing my vote on it. The secret is in letting go of the hysteria and using our brain. Am I impacted by this? Even if a politician did everything they promised would it make a positive impact on my life?

 

I’m obviously late to the party with this one. As everyone knows, Governor Greg Abbott sent his own version of a Christmas gift to Kamala Harris when he sent upwards of 50 migrants in a bus to her Washington D.C. residence. I can easily go in any number of directions here and most of them are visceral emotional reactions to the story. Most of these visceral responses are the kind of responses that MAGA folks want us to say. It’s almost like a Pavlovian response. They do something outrageous and we respond with outrage, Mission accomplished.

So, where I choose to go from here is to a place where I am going to assume that one or more of them might stumble to this place and actually read these words. The regular readers already know this stuff, so you can treat this as more of a tutorial for other people. However, it is something I feel I need to say because I’ve seen the responses from both sides. Progressives respond with outrage as I suppose they should. Conservatives usually say something to the effect that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden need to solve the problem.

Let’s start with the outrage. All of us know about trolls. Essentially, mainstream conservatives are becoming an endangered species. In their place are what I lovingly call performance artists. If you think back to the scandals concerning the National Endowment for the Arts you will remember the different exhibits that caused so much consternation. There were sculptures of Jesus made out of dung or Jesus being submerged in human urine. These were all designed to create a visceral reaction. All forms of art are created to elicit a reaction. So, these maneuvers by Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis are created to elicit an emotional response. Again, mission accomplished.

Performance artists aren’t interested in solving any problems. Problems exist to be exploited. They exist for fund raising. They exist for sound bytes. They exist so that you can frighten your base by expanding and distorting the truth. Greg Abbott has no issue in solving immigration. He has no interest in helping migrants. He has no interest in adjusting policies so that the strain on our institutions and budget are alleviated. Of course, it could be credibly claimed that many progressive politicians aren’t interested in solving the problem either. They can fundraise against Abbott and DeSantis as easily as those two can fundraise themselves.

This brings us to the second point. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can’t solve this issue on their own. It’s a problem with the low information voters. This is an issue that must be addressed in Congress. So, you can send these people to the White House or to Kamala Harris’ private residence, but the stunt doesn’t provide them any additional incentive to solve the problem. Harris literally has very little real power to do anything beyond helping those exact people. This is where you call or write letters to your elected representative asking them to work with other members of Congress to actually pass comprehensive changes to our immigration policy.

Whether one considers this just performance art or an act of cruelty, the end result is just the same. Someone decided that jerking these people around was better than actually helping them. At this point, I’m not going to judge if someone decides they can’t help them. I understand. We can’t help literally everyone that needs help and it can be hard to decide where that cut off should be. They are human beings. They deserve better than this. If we can’t help them then the least we can do is not hurt them. It’s one thing to have a sculpture made out of dung to enrage the masses. It is something else entirely to use actual living and breathing human beings for your performance art.

Sometimes it pays to pay attention to what is going on around the world. Many people that think of Haiti probably consider in the same category our ex-president considers them in. When we get wrapped up in our daily lives we often don’t give places like Haiti a second thought.

We probably remember the earthquake that rocked Haiti back in 2010. Twelve years later and I don’t give it a second thought. At least I can say that was true before watching a video in the World Geography class I support. Haiti shares an island with the Dominican Republic and those countries couldn’t be more different.

The obvious result was droves of Haitians leaving Haiti searching for somewhere to go. A number of them came here and in the United States. So, few if any of us thought to consider the Dominican Republic. We probably just assumed they would do the neighborly thing. In some cases they did, but their reaction also showed the dark side of these events.

It’s hard to view their collective reaction as anything other than racism. Of course, we are only viewing it from the Haitian perspective. The Dominican Republic had been a relatively well run country and they didn’t want a human tragedy to take them down with them. Of course, there were a number of horrible events that led up to that moment.

A bunch of 9th graders probably can’t appreciate all of the implications of such a video. They may think of Haiti as one of those places where you can sponsor a child like Sally Struthers used to do. Just 72 cents a day can feed and educate a Haitian child. However, the deeper you look, one cannot possibly avoid seeing parallels to our situation here.

Those huddled masses yearn to breath free. Haitians wanted a better life. On an individual basis it wasn’t their fault that life was so brutally tough in their home country. Collectively things are never that simple. They were victims of things out of their control, but they also did plenty to create their own problems.

The Dominican Republic’s collective response was to render some aid but ultimately to block as many people from coming as possible. That by itself has some justification. If we allow your crappy country to export all of its citizens to our country then our country becomes the crappy country. At least, that’s the thinking behind it.

Xenophobia has rarely been so fully on display. The ties that bind is the notion of “not in my backyard.” That was a phrase coined by George Carlin years ago in his comedy act. The general idea is that we want what’s best for people and we don’t want anyone to suffer. We see the constant barrage on television of the plight of abused animals, polar bears without ice to stand on, or children with cancer. We see the plight of poor children on the other side of the world.

We will give anything to erase those images from our brains. 72 cents a day (or whatever it really is) doesn’t seem like a lot. Maybe if we all chip in we can really make a difference. That line of thinking stops when the problem comes closer to home. I’m really sorry you are going through so much, but if you could go through it somewhere else that would be great.

So, at the end of the day we really can’t shame the Dominican Republic. They did what we do. They just put an official stamp on it and called it a name. Sometimes, other people far away provide us with a window into our own soul. Looking at life through that window hopefully evokes at least some level of shame. That is the case if we have any ounce of humanity left.

Greg Abbott released another ad where he regaled us with Joe Biden’s supposedly open border policy and how Abbott was protecting Texans from the big, bad Mexican cartels bringing over drugs from south of the border. These ads are littered all over sports talk radio these days.

When the show returned to its regularly scheduled content, the deejays were talking about the theory of sunken cost. In this case, it referred to whether a team should let go of a player they had invested heavily in. The organizations that do the best are the ones that realize their mistakes early on and pivot effectively.

The fallacy of sunken costs is basically our tendency to double down on a belief, strategy, or endeavor because pivoting would be an admission that we were wrong and that we’d wasted time, money, and/or energy on a bad idea. The concept is really a two-pronged concept. First, there is the reluctance to give up because of the previous time, money, and energy wasted. Second, there is a reluctance to give up because we would have to admit that we made an error in judgment.

So, let’s take a look at the ads being played on the radio as an example. The ad focuses on three belief structures that are more or less untrue. The first is that illegal immigration is on the rise. We can see when we look at the numbers that it has been in steady decline in recent years.

The second portion of that fallacy is that undocumented immigrants are somehow inherently dangerous. The ads focus on law enforcement and how Abbott is protecting us from the big, bad immigrants. Yet, when we look at numbers from the same source as above, we notice that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than legal immigrants and natural born citizens.

So, that obviously plays into the third fallacy of the commercial. Violent crime rates are on the rise nationwide. There is an assumption that this means that the borders have become more dangerous. Yet, they seem to be in decline on the southern border. Multiple reports and studies demonstrate that a border wall would not effectively reduce crime at the border or in the country at large.

The question is how we free a subset of the population that seems to be wrapped in fear and free them from the clutches of red herrings and misinformation? Pundits have long known that when you can sell the country on daddy issues (defense, crime, safety) then conservatives usually win. When mommy issues are the most dominant (education, health care, human rights) then the progressives usually win.

However, this goes beyond that. It goes to a group of people that have obviously backed the wrong horse. They’ve watched that horse come in last in nearly every race at the track. He talks about protecting them and he clearly doesn’t do that. He talks about how corrupt his opponents were and he is clearly the most corrupt politician in the history of the country.

It’s clearly not about stopping the steal or draining the swamp anymore. Those excuses died a long time ago. It is very simple. The longer people hold on to their love and adulation of a thoroughly evil man the harder it becomes to give up on that love and adulation. They would then have to admit that the love and adulation was misplaced. That’s admitting that they’ve wasted time, money, and brain power. That’s admitting they were duped. The greatest con anyone can pull is the con of getting you to accept being conned because it’s just too painful to admit you were conned.

A jackass at my daughter’s school has decided to call in bomb threats on two consecutive days. The local police are on the case. The sheriff’s office is on the case. The FBI is on the case. I’m sure every teacher and principal are studying the voice on the other line to see if they can identify him. There are all kinds of silly rumors as to why this kid is doing this. The answer is simple. He wants others to feel afraid because that somehow gives him power.

Calling in terroristic threats is a felony. This kid will be found and it won’t be pretty when they do. However, that knowledge in the background hit me when I heard an Eva Guzman ad again this morning. She is running for attorney general in Texas. She will presumably have to go through Ken Paxton and the infamous Louie Gohmert. You have to try really hard to out-slime those two.

Guzman’s ads tell us that she will tackle the immigration problem as attorney general. The only thing is that she doesn’t call it a problem. She calls it an invasion. As you might suspect, she also goes into the other stereotypes and misconceptions about them stealing our resources, committing crimes, and coming after you and your grandchildren. Democratic policies are making it worse and we are at a crossroads.

Except we aren’t. Illegal immigration is not a growing problem. Illegal immigrants are not committing crimes at the same rate. It is illegal for them to collect social security. It is illegal for them to get welfare. Hell, it is illegal for them to work at all. So, what exactly are we doing here? These ads are long on emotion. They want you to feel afraid. They want you to feel angry. They want you to hate. They just aren’t all that long on facts. Facts don’t help them. Facts just get in the way of a good story.

The 64,000 pound elephant in the room hits you squarely across the chest when you realize that Eva Guzman (and those like her) are using the exact same tactics as that kid calling in a bomb threat. The reality of Guzman’s threats are about as valid as the boy’s threats. There’s no bomb. There’s no invasion. The world isn’t going to hell in a ham basket because someone came across the border or because a boy decided to become a girl or vice versa. Oh, it might be going to hell alright, but it won’t be because of any of those things.

The hell we fear is a hell of our own creation. It was one that spins out of our fear. It is one that comes from the notion of life as a zero sum game where everything someone else gets is something that we don’t. It’s a fear where we point at people that aren’t like us and turn their desire just to exist into an existential threat to our humanity and culture. Be afraid. Be very afraid and while you’re at it why don’t you try on this hate for size. It fits you well.