I knew what I took upon myself and I was prepared to lose my life by so doing.
Hans Scholl’s explanation of his and his sister Sophie’s opposition to Germany regime. He and his sister were beheaded by the German government on February 22, 1943, having been found guilty of high treason for writing, producing and distributing political pamphlets.
On Feb. 18, 1943, Hans and Sophie Scholl, a brother and sister, were arrested at the University of Munich for secretly (or not so secretly) putting out leaflets calling on Germans to revolt against Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.
In the previous year Hans had founded a group of students, who called themselves “The White Rose.” The group wrote and distributed six leaflets aimed at educated Germans. The leaflets made their way across Germany and to several other occupied countries. The Allies later dropped them all over the Third Reich.
In Thursday’s Common Sense, “Paid Invaders,” Paul Jacob discussed the U.S. taxpayers’ subsidies going to the ongoing illegal immigrants crossing the southern border. But the sheer size of the subsidies and handouts is hard to grasp. So consider just one state of the union, on the border with Canada, not Mexico, but which found a way to find the funds to help migrants who came up from the South.
“Washington State diverted over $400 million of federal relief funds to illegal aliens in 2023,” reports Anthony Brian Logan. “The money was taken from a COVID-19 fund and was not meant to shore up migrants’ inability to make ends meet. Under this program, migrants who were not entitled to stimulus money due to their illegal status were given checks of up to $3,000 each. An estimated 300,000 illegal aliens may have been given cash through this method in Washington State alone.”
An article in The New York Post, linked to by Mr. Logan, places the 2023 total of hijacked funds at $60 million less:
A new report is highlighting how federal COVID funds were used in Washington state to give $1,000 checks to illegal immigrants who were ineligible to receive federal economic impact payments during the pandemic due to their immigration status.
The report, by the Economic Policy Innovation Center (EPIC), points to money administered by the Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Fund (SLFRF), which was created by the American Rescue Plan Act and was intended to help state and local governments with their response and recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Washington state received $4.4 billion in funding overall from that program.
The report from the group, which calls for a smaller federal government, highlighted how $340 million in funding went to a program that sent $1,000 checks to illegal immigrants in the state.
Adam Shaw, “Washington state diverted $340M in federal COVID funds to migrants,” New York Post, February 3, 2024.
The program was announced in 2022, by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, expressing the usual press-release pride:
“The DSHS Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance has been honored and humbled to work with our community partners over the past two years to support the WA COVID-19 Immigrant Relief Fund,” said Sarah Peterson, who heads the Office of Refugee and Immigrant Assistance. “This is a tremendous opportunity for DSHS to help people who may have been left out of other federal and state resources to address the economic impact of the pandemic.”
The agency’s goal is to get these resources into the hands of community members in a timely and thoughtful manner and has partnered with many different immigrant-led organizations to implement this fund effectively and safely.
“Washington COVID-19 Immigrant Relief Fund launches new application period Sept. 19-Nov. 14,” Medium, September 19, 2022.
In his discussion of the program, Anthony Brian Logan notes that the federal source of the hand-outs to migrants was, by law, disallowed for that purpose.
No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.
Anthony Trollope, The Bertrams (1859), Ch. 27.
On Feb. 17, 1801, Thomas Jefferson was elected by the U.S. House of Representatives to be the third president of the United States, after an arduous election process that ended only 15 days prior to inauguration.
The fracas included a tie vote in the Electoral College followed by 35 indecisive ballots in the House. At that time, votes were cast for president, with the second place candidate becoming Vice-President. But in the Electoral College, Jefferson tied with his vice-presidential running mate, Aaron Burr. When that sent the balloting to the House of Representatives, the Federalists opposing Jefferson initially threw their support to Burr.
On Feb. 17, 1933, a constitutional amendment to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which had established the national prohibition of alcohol, was passed by the U.S. Senate. Known as the Blaine Act, the prime author was Wisconsin Senator John J. Blaine. By the end of 1933, the repeal of prohibition was adopted as the 21st Amendment to the Constitution.
In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, the California Civil Rights Initiative, which prohibits the state government from imposing race-based, ethnicity-based, or sex-based preferences.
Prop 209 added a section to the California Constitution stating that the government “shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”
In 2020, friends of racial discrimination tried to revive racial preferences through a referendum. But voters shot it down, even though proponents outspent opponents 14 to one.
Now California Assemblyman Corey Jackson wants to revive racial preferences another way. His bill, ACA7, would not touch the language of Proposition 209. But it would empower the governor to make exceptions. What exceptions? Any he wishes, as long as he spews the right rationalizations when he does so.
Law professor Gail Heriot, who has launched a change.org petition to oppose the measure, says that “ACA7’s proponents are hoping that voters will be fooled into thinking that it is just a small exception. In fact, it gives the governor enormous power to nullify Proposition 209.”
ACA7 has passed the House and now goes to the state senate, awaiting the magic of legislative action. Heriot says Californians should let their senators know where they stand on the bill. I don’t disagree.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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On ne découvre pas de terre nouvelle sans consentir
à perdre de vue, d’abord et longtemps, tout rivage.
One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight, for a very long time, of the shore.
André Gide, Les faux-monnayeurs [The Counterfeiters] (1925).
On February 16, 1878, the Bland-Allison Act, which provided for a return to the minting of silver coins, became U.S. law.
Though it’s called “cash in envelopes” in the biz, actual payments to these immigrants on the road north from Ecuador usually take the form of debit cards, to the tune of $800 per month. This is funded partially from U.S. taxpayers through the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nation’s mass migration arm. Last year, courtesy of Biden Administration enthusiasm, the U.S. threw $1.3 billion at the IOM.
It doesn’t stop there. “The U.N.-orchestrated Regional Refugee and Migrant Response Plan update for 2024 calls for distributing $1.6 billion in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries with the help of 248 partner agencies, which are also receiving U.S. grants.”
And it is not just the generous payments to individual trekkers northward. NGOs and foreign governments, in addition to the U.S. taxpayers, have organized help through every step of the long march. There is a break in the road, in Panama, where one must navigate a jungle, or else go by sea. Quite a few organizations are making this leg of the journey doable for many.
And some wonder if the Chinese government isn’t supporting the massive surge — more than 50 times as many Chinese illegally crossing into the U.S. last year than just two years earlier.
Which is where the whole issue becomes scary.
Anthropologist Brett Weinstein — discussed here before for his ordeal at Evergreen University a few years ago — recently went down to Panama to see for himself what was going on. He calls the migrant hordes an invasion. He observed that the Chinese émigrés have separate housing, and exhibit radically different attitudes — and more wealth — than your standard economic migrant worker.
If the obvious danger doesn’t bother Americans . . . perhaps the fact that they are paying for it might?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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La liberté n’est pas un échange, c’est la liberté.
Freedom is not an exchange — it is freedom.
André Malraux, La condition humaine [Man’s Fate] (1933).