Who Are the Knuckleheads Charged in the Alvaredo ICE Attack? How Were They Radicalized?

Eleven young people were arrested in connection with a July 4th attack at the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvaredo, Texas. A twelfth person, Benjamin Hanil Song, is charged with attempted murder for allegedly shooting at ICE officers. Mr. Song is still at large.

The Alvaredo assault was a terrorist attack. The arrested suspects were dressed in black, military-style clothing and equipped with radios and body armor. Multiple gunshots were fired, and one police officer was wounded in the neck. If convicted on federal charges, all the defendants will serve long prison sentences.

What were these knuckleheads thinking? According to news reports, the group shot off fireworks to lure ICE agents into the open, and one or more of the suspects shot at the officers. Some of the assailants are said to have vandalized government vehicles and spray-painted anti-ICE epithets on them.

This doesn't make sense to me. If their purpose was to murder federal agents, why did this ragtag gang waste time by spray-painting cars?  

I found myself wondering whether all twelve suspects were on the same page. Did they all really plan to murder federal agents, or were some of them intent solely on vandalism?

I would like to know more about these individuals. How were these sad sacks radicalized? Did they attend college? If so, where? 

How have these young people supported themselves over the years? Did they have jobs?

Who procured the body armor, firearms, and radios for this project? Who paid for all this stuff?

If my ruminations suggest that I feel sorry for these clowns, it is because I do. If these miscreants did what they are charged with doing, then, like Charlie Manson's followers, they've thrown their lives away. 

Someone apparently talked these nitwits into embarking on a fool's errand. I hope the people who egged these alleged amateur terrorists on and bankrolled the Alvaredo escapade are found out and go to prison for a very long time.

"People Will Die" is Not a Principled Response to the Big, Beautiful Bill

 President Trump signed the Big, Beautiful Bill, which had something in it for nearly everybody. Democrats didn't gripe about the expanded SALT tax exemption because rich people in the blue states were the primary beneficiaries. Instead, they focused their complaints on the modest cuts to Medicare, the supplemental food program, and other governmental services.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, who cadged her way into Harvard by claiming to be a Cherokee Indian, is leading the histrionic charge, saying, "People will die" as a result of the bill's passage. 

Other Democrats have joined her in waving the bloody shirt to stir partisan rancor. Senator Bernie Sanders, a doddering old fool, claimed the bill would kill 51,000 people a year. The leftist media slyly hints that we can blame the recent Texas flood fatalities on Trump's budget cuts, a contemptible bit of propaganda worthy of Joseph Goebbels, and sleazy Senator Chuck Schumer wants a federal investigation of that outrageous allegation.

The day is fast approaching when the nation's debt--$36 trillion and growing by the hour--will pull down America's economy. The Trump administration's efforts to trim the cost of government can be legitimately criticized, but shrieking "People will die" is not a principled response. 

The Democratic Party and its co-conspirators in academia and the media are no longer interested in civil debate on national policy issues. Their aim is to sow chaos, and chaos they will likely get. 

They will be surprised, however, by Flyover Country's reaction when the Heartland has had enough. The forces that long for chaos won't like it when that chaos shows up in Silicon Valley, Martha's Vineyard, the Hamptons, and Harvard Yard.

Senator Elizabeth Warren: "People will die!"

Trump is Playing Musical Chairs With the Democrats, and He's Already Lost

Say what you like about Elon Musk; he's right about the Big, Beautiful Bill. This legislation, which was approved by Congress on a party-line vote, will increase the national debt and lead to recession.

Ignoring the nation's mountainous national debt that grows larger by the day, Trump and the Republicans approved a 1000-page bill that does nothing to balance the national budget.

Democrats unanimously opposed the bill, putting them in a position to say "We told you so" when the American economy collapses. Nevertheless, they shrilly denounced the bill's modest cuts to Medicare and the food stamp program. Senator Elizabeth Warren, growing more deranged as she ages,  repeatedly yelled "People will die" as a result of the bill's passage. 

The United States, like Ernest Hemingway, is going bankrupt, slowly at first, "then suddenly." We're in the slow stage now, and no one knows when our economy will suddenly collapse under unmanageable debt. 

However, that day is coming when no one wants to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. We don't know when our house of cards will implode, but I predict it will be during Donald Trump's presidency. 

The Democrats will smugly explain that our coming Great Depression is due entirely to Trump's economic policies, and he will be left holding the bag. Trump will take the blame for our coming economic meltdown, even though this catastrophe was decades in the making. 

Put another way, Trump and the Democrats are playing musical chairs with the economy, but Trump doesn't know that's the game he's playing. The Democrats plan to have a seat when the music stops, leaving Trump outside the circle of inside players.

That being said, I'm glad Congress passed the Big, Beautiful Bill. It does nothing to get the nation's fiscal house in order, but at least it gives some tax relief to the people who need it most--older Americans and the struggling middle class. 

In other words, people like me.

 

Saddle Up Anyway : The Exciting Sequal to The Dixie Apocalypse

 

Saddle Up for the exciting sequel to the cult-favorite dystopian satire, The Dixie Apocalypse.

Willoughby Burns never planned on becoming the Secretary of State for a breakaway Texan republic—but then again, the world ended weirder than he expected.

As the Second Texas Republic braces for war with the swaggering forces of the California People’s Republic, Willoughby finds himself stuck between his past as a wandering outsider and his uneasy future as a national figurehead. The battles aren’t just fought with bullets and bravado—there are deeper skirmishes at play: between loyalty and identity, progress and tradition, truth and spectacle.

When he’s thrown together with a captured Californian officer—Lieutenant Sandy Beech, equal parts soldier, smartass, and accidental philosopher—Willoughby is forced to confront the blurry edges of his own beliefs. Friendship, feral hogs, fried food, and a woman with a killer enchilada recipe all converge as Willoughby searches for courage, purpose... and maybe a second chance at love.

Saddle Up Anyway is a riotous, heartfelt road trip through the fractured politics of a future America— equal parts satire, spaghetti Western, and sincere tribute to all things Texan.

My Window Faces the Middle South: Climate Change is Prompting American Retirees to Relocate to the Middle of the Country

My window faces the south

I'm almost halfway to heaven

Snow is falling, but still I can see

Fields of cotton calling to me

Willie Nelson

For more than a century, older Americans have relocated to balmier climes to live out their golden years. Northern retirees often moved to Florida, attracted by better weather, no state income tax, and the reasonable cost of housing. Arizona and California also looked attractive because of their sunny climates.

However, in recent years, migration patterns for retirees have shifted partly due to climate change. Devastating hurricanes have driven up the cost of homeowner insurance in Florida, and California wildfires have made property insurance prohibitively expensive in the Golden State. In Arizona, water scarcity has made the state less attractive to retirees.

Climate change is causing Americans to rethink where they want to live out their last years. Many Americans are finding the Middle South increasingly attractive. West Virginia and North Carolina have benefited from this trend, as have Georgia and Tennessee.

These demographic shifts have political ramifications. Some commentators predicted that an influx of Californians to Texas and Florida would turn these red states blue because Californian immigrants would bring their progressive Democratic political values with them. 

That hasn't happened. Instead, newcomers to the predominantly red states like what they find: lower tax rates, decent weather, and a more benign and less strident political atmosphere.

In the years to come, the migration of older Americans to the Middle South will turn these states even more reliably red. Soon, radical progressive politics will be confined to urban enclaves as the recent presidential election presaged.

And we should not forget that working Americans are also leaving the blue states. In general, this outflow is driven by a rejection of crazed woke politics and urban violence, particularly in California, New York, and urban Illinois.

Dwight Yoakam's "I Sang Dixie" might be the anthem of this recent wave of emigres.

[W]ay down yonder
In the land of cotton
Old times there
Ain't near as rotten
As they are
On this damned old L.A. street

Most Americans don't define themselves in political terms. They only seek modest prosperity and a safe environment for their families.  For these Americans, I endorse Dwight  Yoakam's lyrical advice:

"Listen to me, son, while you still can,"
"Run back home to that Southern land!"
"Don't you see what life here has done to me?"

Image credit Raul Alonzo/Texas Standard

 

Trump Administration is Leaving Two Brutalist Office Buildings in Washington: Both Should Be Demolished

There's a reason God created dynamite.

Rich Lowry 

It's official. Washington, DC is home to some of the ugliest government buildings on the planet. 

Build World, a global design company, recently analyzed some of the world's worst architectural eyesores and decreed that the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI headquarters in Washington, is the ugliest building in America and the second ugliest in the world. 

J. Edgar Hoover Building

However, the J. Edgar Hoover Building has competition as the nation's top eyesore. Newly appointed HUD Secretary Scott Turner said the Robert C. Weaver Building, HUD's headquarters, is the ugliest in the nation's capital.

HUD Headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Both buildings are Brutalist structures, representing a soulless, depressing architectural style that was fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s. At the theoretical level, Brutalism championed "functionality, honesty, and social purpose," but the structures themselves mostly look like concrete, maximum security prisons.

The Trump administration plans to move government workers out of both buildings and sell them. However, decommissioning these monstrousities is not enough because they will remain a blight on the landscape of our nation's capital.

Rich Lowery, a syndicated columnist, believes both buildings should be blown up. "There's a reason God created dynamite, " he wrote, and I agree.

I worked as a professor for six years in Farish Hall, a forboding concrete building at the University of Houston.  I didn't know at the time that I had been assigned to a Brutalist building, but I knew on a subconscious level that I was spending my days in a dispiriting, oppressive, and prison-like environment.

Farish Hall at the University of Houston

I was pleased to learn that the University plans to demolish Farish Hall this year and will not replace it. That's a good start, but UH has other Brutalist buildings, and all of them should be razed. Agnes Arnold Hall, for example, where three students have leaped to their deaths, is nearly as ugly as Farish Hall.

Brutalist architecture has its defenders.  Indeed, some critics will praise the J. Edgar Hoover Building and the HUD headquarters simply because Trump wants to scrub them. 

In my view, Brutalist architecture is indefensible. Most Brutalist buildings appear indistinguishable from the Cold War bureaucratic structures of the Soviet Union. These eyesores are contrary to the American spirit, and all of them should be razed. Trump should demolish all the Brutalist government buildings in our nation's capital, and the universities should blow up the obscene Brutalist buildings that deface their campuses. 

What is the ugliest university building in America? I vote for the Claire T. Carney Library at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

Claire T. Carney Library at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth

Not to Decide is to Decide: The Mississippi River Bridge That Can't Get Built

Not to decide is to decide.

Harvey Cox

 Interstate 10 is a transcontinental highway running from Jacksonville, Florida, to Santa Monica, California. Thousands of trucks are on this road 24 hours a day, dominating the highway during the nighttime hours. Sometimes the 18-wheelers are packed so tightly that they appear to be a long, endless convoy.

Along this 2,400-mile stretch of road, there is one major bottleneck: the Horace Wilkinson Bridge that spans the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge.  Every day, a traffic jam stretches for two miles or longer. I used to cross the bridge daily, and it often took me half an hour to creep over the Wilkinson bridge.

The need for a new bridge to route transcontinental traffic around downtown Baton Rouge has been apparent for over 30 years. And yet that bridge has never been built. Indeed,  as of this week, the site has not been selected, and state officials estimate that the bridge won't be constructed for another nine years.

Surely, the United States, the wealthiest society in the history of humankind, can get the job done faster. Using nineteenth-century technology, New York City took just 14 years to construct the Brooklyn Bridge. The Russians completed the Kerch Strait Bridge, the longest bridge in Europe, in only two years. 

The Americans are no longer a people who can get things done quickly and efficiently. Planning for the "Big Dig," a project to improve traffic flow in Boston, began in 1982, and the project wasn't finished until 2007. 

California voters approved the construction of a high-speed rail line connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2008, to be completed by 2020. Yet the rail line is still not finished.

Americans have become a people who can't make decisions. We cannot even determine whether boys should compete against girls in varsity sports. The Supreme Court will decide that question for us in the coming months.

To borrow a phrase from the movie Lawrence of Arabia, Americans have become "a little people, a silly people--greedy, barbarous, and cruel." Our adversaries--Russia, China, and radical Islamism--know this about us. If we don't toughen up, our enemies will one day bring us down.

The Kerch Bridge, Photo credit: The Moscow Times