"VIC: Expiration dates are gonna make me expirate!!!" (opens in separate window)

immigration gone wild

friday, december 19th, 2025

It is hard now even for Democrats to defend illegal immigration, given that the Biden administration allowed in more than 10 million entrants. Among them were an estimated 500,000 criminals. No one believes that was wise or should ever be repeated.

Worse, the message went out that there would be few, if any, deportations and no real ICE kinetic activity beyond the border.

The world’s poor, sick, both law-abiding and criminal, young and old, understood that anyone could now enter the U.S. at will. Deterrence and legality were lost.

A border abandoned and laws ignored have turned public frustration into a sweeping backlash that now threatens even legal immigration.

In its place, the message went out that if it was permissible to cross the border unlawfully, then, by extension, it would be seen as equally fine to reside illegally as well—and perhaps further to ignore laws, on the theory that the host had sanctioned all such exemptions.

During the lockdown hysteria, some 8,000-8,500 U.S. soldiers were expelled from the military for refusing the experimental mRNA vaccine. State employees nationwide were being fired for refusing the government vaccines. Nevertheless, illegal aliens would have no such mandates or worries. They simply walked in without worries over vaccinations and current COVID status and surmised correctly that illegal aliens were part of a Biden-administration-protected and privileged category.

Indeed, between 2021 and 2025, in one of the most bizarre episodes in U.S. immigration history, the border simply disappeared. There were to be no background checks, no health audits, and no identification of the greatest influx in any four-year period in U.S. history.

No one knew why. All had their explanations.

Was the Biden handlers’ plan for more poor to grow the welfare state and expand liberal government?

Was it misplaced idealism to welcome in millions of the world’s poorest, who would soon make it even more difficult for the nation’s citizen poor to find affordable housing and health care?

Was the agenda to create future dependencies and constituencies for an otherwise ossified Democratic Party?

Or was it an effort to ensure, in DEI terms, that the oppressed and victimized would outgrow the inert white oppressors and victimizers?

Oddest of all has been the attitude of the left toward the past destruction of the border. They went mum about the rampant illegality as the border disappeared and as millions filtered throughout the nation. Americans had no idea who the newcomers were, or even where or why they were here.

Given that it is much easier to destroy the border and allow millions to enter than to restore it and find the millions who entered illegally, the Democrats’ response has been Orwellian. After assuming the law did not apply to illegal alien entrants, they now insist its full force must apply to each of 10 million aliens before they can be sent home.

There were no protests when an errant Biden ICE became dysfunctional due to massive illegality. But there is now outrage when it attempts to restore legality and follow the law.

The result, however, of such a massive nullification of immigration laws has been that the nation’s outrage over illegal immigration has now extended to legal immigration as well. At the current level of frustration, all legal immigration will likely soon be put on hold.

Why?

One, we are currently in a great experiment: never has the U.S. foreign-born resident population approached 50-55 million or 16 percent of the population.

Two, never has the once-time-tried melting-pot creed of assimilation, integration, and acculturation been under greater assault and ridicule—just when it is most needed.

The canon of DEI—the nation is divided between a mostly white oppressor class and the non-white oppressed—has served to amplify the effects of giving up on civic education and melting-pot assimilation.

Somehow, the left advanced the absurd notion that the salad bowl of immigrants, chiefly and permanently identified by tribal ethnicities, races, religions, and nationalities, and only secondly as new Americans, would radically change America for the better. And so ended the ancient notion of assimilation, now to be known as “cultural appropriation.”

Three, if millions of legal immigrants are not asked to assume fully American identities, and further, if they feel that there are exemptions and largesse to be had by emphasizing their tribal and victimized status, then will they also feel they are not subject to any American customs and laws?

Instead, immigrants under these new protocols will seek to carve out their own tribal communities, based both on ethnic chauvinism and a sense of exemption from accountability. And if they insist on identifying as collectives rather than unique individuals, they will become increasingly unpopular not just as ingrates, but as hypocrites whose greater affinity with the nation they abandoned does not extend to returning to it.

Indeed, they will appear to have arrived in America only to craft a cocoon of security, freedom, and prosperity lacking in their homeland, but otherwise not to become fully American or see their former homeland as incidental, not essential, to their new identities.

The logical result of such tribal immigration is now upon us. Somali immigrants, both legal and illegal, have pulled off a likely multi-billion-dollar welfare fraud in Minnesota—perhaps the greatest single heist of welfare funds in the nation’s history. They were empowered by the usual DEI boilerplate rhetoric from their Minnesota champions, Rep. Ilhan Omar (who claimed the U.S. was now “one of the worst countries in the world”), Governor Tim Walz, and Attorney General Keith Ellison.

The more criminality, theft, and fraud were uncovered, the more the Somali leadership screamed “racism,” with the Democrat apparat blaming everyone but the perpetrators themselves.

Meanwhile, California has issued at least 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses to illegal alien truck drivers, the majority of them non-residents with little if any prior trucking expertise or English facility. The result is a sort of road-warrior new atmosphere on the nation’s freeways, as a new generation of truckers ignores the norms of the past and rightly concludes that if they were given exemption to enter the U.S. illegally and further to drive without proper audits, then naturally no authorities would mind if they also violated American traffic laws.

There are roughly one million foreign students in the U.S., the majority from China, India, and the Middle East. After October 7, protests, often violent and in violation of campus rules, spread nationwide.

There was never much pushback from either campus official or law enforcement. Within a few months, our liberal bastions of higher education had become saturated with anti-Semitic rhetoric, protests, and occasional violence against Jews.

Middle-East guest students often openly cheered on Hamas, called for the destruction of Israel, and, despite being non-citizens, often declared campus areas as no-go zones for American Jews. They did so because they could and had fully absorbed the DEI mantras of exemption.

So often they screamed “Islamophobia” when called out on their anti-Semitism, damning their critics with slurs of “nativism,” “racism,” and “xenophobia.” Thousands of foreign students felt contempt for their hosts and rhetorically attacked the U.S. as much as they fought in reality to remain in America.

As for the millions who crossed the southern border, almost daily, a national news story relates that a DUI driver has killed an American family, or a U.S. citizen has been murdered or raped, by an “undocumented immigrant,” usually with a criminal record, several deportations, and revolving-door arrests.

In Los Angeles, we were treated to street scenes of immigrants, apparently both legal and illegal, waving the Mexican flag while occasionally burning the American flag, sending the message that they would resist returning to the country whose flag they chauvinistically waved but demanded permanent residence in the nation whose flag they trashed and burned.

The net result was that our recent generations of immigrants have done the impossible: turned the most generous nation in the world from the most welcoming to increasingly resistant to mass immigration of any sort.

Again, why the change? They have read the news of one too many horrendous semi-truck accidents, one too many horrific murders, one too many anti-Semitic screams, and one too many massive abuses of a generous welfare state.

In sum, Americans now believe that the current generation of immigrants interprets their magnanimity and generosity as weakness and stupidity to be manipulated and scorned, and rarely as generosity to be appreciated and reciprocated in kind.

A Day In The Life.

Up at 8:30a on Friday, a cold 25°F, overcast, cloudy, breezy morning, I upped the heat, made coffee, fired-up the Win-7 Pentium HP Desktop to let its 32 million lines of code load, had breakfast, had a couple smokes in the garage and checked the leftover errands list. I scanned the weather -- snow squalls south of the PA line into MD and DC -- and news, tuned into the "CP Show LIVE" at 9, and relaxed for the morning. Today and next week are clear, so Sherry can come by around 3p today for a short visit, and we can enjoy the beautiful day together.

I scanned the weather and news, and this caught my attention: "Whistleblower warns massive fraud is happening in Ohio Somali community, Minnesota ‘just tip of the spear’", coinciding with the ongoing Minnesota Somali BILLION-PLUS Fraud Investigation. Note that 81% of Somalis are on US Welfare and 42% are on some part of US SNAP Benefits. THEY'RE muslim(SPIT!) GRIFTERS, CRIMINALS, LOWLIFE, SUBHUMAN SCUM AND FILTH! DEPORT THEM ALL, Trump!

I had breakfast around 11:30, got ready for the day, and got used to the cold garage for the occasional smoke. I completed a couple projects on my desk's ever-growing, "Stack of Stuff". Sherry arrived around 2:30p, after taking a load of crafts for the Christmas Holidays, to Daughter Hollie's Shop, and we had a couple nice hours together. She left just before dark, I finished some niggling paperwork, and had some dinner. I watched Discovery's "Gold Rush" and "Gold Rush: Mine Rescue" until 1a, and unplugged.

Up at 9a on Saturday, a heavily-clouded, cold 18°, breezy morning, I upped the heat to 75°, made coffee, and scanned the news headlines and weather forecasts, and found this:

★★★ WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY ★★★

• WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY IN EFFECT FROM 7 PM SATURDAY TO 1 PM EST SUNDAY...
• Snow expected with bitter cold. Total snow accumulations between 3 and 5 inches. Locally higher spot amounts are possible.
• Lancaster and York Counties.
• From 7 PM Saturday to 1 PM EST Sunday.
• Plan on slippery road conditions. The hazardous conditions could impact the Monday morning commute. Near-zero temperatures to follow.
• Slow down and use caution while traveling. The latest road conditions for the state you are calling from can be obtained by calling 5 1 1.

I like the snow! I really like snow, and I really like blizzards. The coffee was wonderful, and I was excited to hear about the snow forecast; I'm not going anywhere tomorrow, so I can just enjoy it. I got a Weis Market Food Delivery, thru Amazon, at around 11:30a, brought it in and unpacked. I had lunch, did a few small condo chores and took a 2hr nap on the LR couch. I checked the local WGAL-8 weather radar maps, and by 4:30p, the snowstorm front was just a few miles west of York, as it was getting dark. After dinner, I watched some news, and switched to Discovery's "Expedition Unknown" and Motor Trend's "Vegas Rat Rods", with breaks to check the weather maps and look out the front door... SNOW! I called it a day around 1a.

Sleeping-in until 10a on Sunday, a Winter wonderland outside, but very windy and cold, the hum of e-snowblowers and scraping of snow shovels woke me. Beautiful outside. Looks like 4-5" of heavy, wet snow, coating everything. I lounged around until almost 1p, and finally got ready for the day, started the first load of laundry, had some breakfast and checked email. Our new lawncare/snow plowing company's guys were thru and did a nice job, so it looks like 5-6" from the front door. Did I mention that I like snow?

I did one of two loads of laundry, watched History's "American Pickers" all day and evening; lights out at 1a.

Up at 7a on Monday, a sunny, very cold 16° morning, I upped the heat, made coffee, and tuned into the "CS Show LIVE" until 9, then switched to the "CP Show LIVE", from 9-12. I had an onion bagel for breakfast, and left at 11:30. The roads were nearly empty, until I hit Dallastown, which was near the end of the trip, so no biggie. Back home in under an hour, I readied the garbage & recycle bins for p/u in the morning, had lunch and scanned the weather and news. 14° is just too uncomfortable for me to be outside for any extended period. Flesh freezes solid in 7-8 minutes, and I've had 'frost bite' far too many times, and that was painful when thawing-out the fingertips and toes. No thanks; I'm staying inside.

After lunch, I grabbed a short 1hr nap on the LR couch, and my CPA called with news that I owed the State of PA some money from 2023, so I paid that by check, and put it in with some checks and deposit slip for tomorrow's stop at the bank and post office. Light snow began falling around 4p, and we had a 'heat wave' going on: 23°. Looks like 2 inches, in total. Nice. I had an early dinner, watched the news, and switched to History's "Ancient Aliens" and TWC's "Weird Earth", until 12:30a, and unplugged.

Up at 8a on Tuesday, a sunny, breezy, bitter cold 10° -- 4° on my back patio -- morning, I upped the heat, made coffee, had a smoke in the cold garage, and scanned the weather forecast and news headlines. The pain in my R/S buttock and leg, is bad thisa morning -- I have it every morning, but a simple 250mg aspirin usually takes care of it -- was real bad and I doubled-up opn the aspirin, to 500mg, to help out, before taking any of the narcotic/opiate 50mg Tramadol caplets. I had Biscuits & Sausage Gravy for breakfast, around 11, and get the PA Dept of Revenue payment and bank deposits ready to go, after 1p.

I left at 1p, for the bank and post office. I also need fuel, but it's much too cold to stand outside for the slow, half-frozen pumps to dole out gas at such a slow rate. I'll wait until tomorrow or Thursday, when temps get back into the 40s, to get gas. High for the day here, would be 22°. Traffic was VERY heavy, but I made the local 2 stops and was home in 35mins. With the Jeep parked outside the garage, I did a few condo chores, took a 2hr snooze, had dinner and watched the news. 18° was nasty, but after brining-in the Jeep, and closing-up, it warmed up a little in the garage.

I did the 2nd load of laundry, watched the evening news, switched to History's "Curse of Oak Island" and Discovery's "Xplored Mysteries", and called it a day at 1a.

Up at 10a on Wednesday, a heavily-clouded, "warmer" 33°, I upped the heat, made coffee, and tuned into the "CP Show LIVE", already in progress. My 4 big projects and 5 smaller projects are now done; I only have "The Document" to finish (95% done), and I'll get to that, soon enough.

Did you see the 11min recording of the 2 POS muslin(SPIT!) shooters at the Jewish beach party in Australia? And here's the Brown University shooter POS muslim(SPIT!) scumbag; *maybe*. YES, this fat, POS muzzie(SPIT!) slob, did the shooting. Nail his ass into prison!

I had some paperwork to get thru, and as usual nowadays, had to use my magnifier to read it all. Heh.

I watched the evening news, had dinner and watched History's "American Pickers" and Discovery's "Ghost Adventures" until 1a, and unplugged.

Up at 7a on Thursday, a clear, sunny, foggy, windy, still cold 23°, I upped the heat, made coffee, tuned into the "CS Show LIVE", scanned the weather and news, and just relaxed thru the morning. Sherry was coming over around 1p, so I got ready for the day, and scanned the news and weather, again. She was here at 1, and we had 3 wonderful hours together, as usual. Did I tell you that she's a *genius*? She found the problem with two of my four external WD Drives: they were properly seated in the power strips, and after she made that observation, which I missed, all 4 of the units are functional. Woo-Hoo! Kudos to Sherry!

I've been watching the meme of the Brown-MIT shooter develop for a now-deleted student at Brown, with great amusement, on both FR and YouTube, and as AI entered the picture, it got hilarious and beyond. I even sent some of the articles to Family and Friends, to get their amused reaction. They got the murderous, POS guy.

I skipped dinner, watched the evening news and switched to History's "Ancient Aliens" and MT's "Roadworthy Rescues" until 11p. A massive warm front moved thru from the Southeast, bringing a LOT of rain with it. Lights out early.

Tomorrow starts a new week, here in the "Journal", and there's a clear week ahead, until Christmas Day. Sherry and I will try to figure something out.

Can Anyone Believe Anything?

Tis the season to be flummoxed. Now you see what it’s like when all authority is suspect and nobody can believe anything. The question, of course, is how much of that is engineered by interested parties. . . and who are those parties? The fire consuming you is the fire that tempers.

There’s the legion of monied orgs and foundations supported by sinister billionaires, starting with George and Alex Soros’s Open Society Foundations, a bewildering matrix of worldwide political activism ops aimed at sowing Marxist-inflected chaos wherever a polity is threatened by stability and coherence. Or Singapore-based Neville Roy Singham, the American tech honcho (Thoughtworks) who funds the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party, the Shut It Down for Palestine org, and Code Pink, for spicing up every political quarrel in Western Civ with Feminist psychodrama. Or Arabella Advisors (re-branded in November as Sunflower Services), founded by Clinton alum Eric Kessler, a “dark money” spigot for social justice and equity initiatives (i.e., race and gender hustles), climate agitation, ballot harvesting, and anti-deportation efforts. Or Linked-In billionaire Reid Hoffman’s cattle-drive of Democratic party-aligned political action committees, starting with super-PAC Future Forward — more ballot harvesting and other election shenanigans. (Hoffman notoriously financed the E. Jean Carroll fake rape defamation lawsuit brought against Donald Trump — for denying the incident took place.) Or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation with its tentacles suckered onto Big Pharma and government medical bureaucracies around the world, including the USA (until Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., came on the job), especially vis-a-vis Covid-19 vaccine advocacy.

All of the above orgs have a bought-media component, meaning news designed to subvert reality. The object is to prevent Mr. Trump from interfering with any of the racketeering activities run by the Democratic Party benefitting its clients (the “marginalized”). Case in point: the recently revealed billion-dollar welfare fraud case perped for years by Somali Immigrants in Minnesota through fake billing for undelivered services in child nutrition, autism therapy, and housing programs, all under the watch of Governor Tim Walz. The state’s news media ignored the story until it got too garish to cover up. Now they’re suitably humiliated.

At the national level, it’s unclear who is serving whom. Do the managers of The New York Times actually still believe the Russia Collusion story they were awarded a Pulitzer for, or their 1619 Project Woke-rewrite of US history? Or their mulish defense of the Covid vaccines. Or their florid esteem for the leadership of “Joe Biden.” Or are they simply ruled by blind Trump derangement? (Or do they receive instructions from nefarious others about how to report and opine on things?)

The so-called deep state is a set of interested parties not directly controlled by billionaires but with agendas of their own. For instance, the millions of bureaucrats at every level — federal, state, and local — who receive comfortable salaries and first-rate benefits (pensions, medical insurance), in many cases for doing little-to-nothing in their offices all day every day (or else obstructing Americans not in government from making a living). Mr. Trump, who would like to fire many of them, is a clear and present danger to their cushy sinecures. Unsurprisingly, they have taken to styling themselves as “the Resistance.”

There are the mysterious denizens of the furthest, darkest backwaters of the Swamp: the CIA, with its fabulous black budget for black ops, and the purported sixteen other nodes of the Intel Community, the folks who have — as Sen. Schumer mis-put it to Mr. Trump years ago — “. . . six ways from Sunday to get you. . . ”). Rumors are flying around that John Brennan is still running the CIA, or at least some operational wing of it. CIA Director John Ratcliffe has not been exactly reassuring on this. There are likewise rumors that Mr. Ratcliffe is “compromised.” Something about a “honeypot.” This is no time to lack faith in the authority of the CIA Director, but you must for now because hardly anybody commands authority except Mr. Trump, the president, and he has been busy frittering it away on childish tweets, calling his enemies names as though we were back in the third grade.

He better cut that out and show some decorum or his enemies will peel away the authority that he has left in this epic battle to preserve the republic from utter ruin. His role in this ghastly melodrama is to play the lonely figure that people still have faith in. Perhaps the strain is getting to him. He’s had his moments of remarkable pluck, but the forces arrayed against him are many, and vicious, and determined, and a bit worried about going to jail for their crimes, and this is no time for presidential tantrums. And, just sayin’, perhaps he might also shut up about how much people love him. (There are plenty who don’t, and who would like to act-out how much they don’t.) Mr. Trump needs to take a cue from the name of that desk he sits behind in the Oval Office: it’s called Resolute. Please stop yapping idly and just be resolute in the face of your enemies.

An afternoon at the library.

There are so many advantages to being an old man that I wonder why I put it off for so long . One is that the Proust Reading Group has stopped inviting me to join and another is the number of dreadful stories in the news that for a man my age come under the heading "Not My Problem" such as the shortage of goods due to shipping backlogs, freighters lined up for miles waiting to unload in ports, people unable to find what they need.

I have the opposite problem: too much stuff, need a ship to come up the Hudson River to 96th Street and haul it away. We have twenty fancy dinner plates though we live in a two-bedroom apartment and the days of grand dinner parties are far in the past. She and I now form a majority. Four is a family, six is a crowd.

I chose the right parents, evangelicals, so, yes, I am haunted by guilt and regret, but on the other hand, there was no fetal alcohol syndrome and for a kid who aims to be a writer, the King James is excellent tutelage, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Isaiah, beat out Disney characters and crime novels.

My grandfathers died young, at 73, of hard work and so I avoided hard work and already I'm a decade ahead of them. This is a lucky upbringing. Not privilege, luck.

Privilege is having a car and driver waiting for you and luck is when you go down the steps to the subway station and the train comes just as you go through the turnstile and you walk across the platform just as the train stops and the doors open, which makes your entire day up to that point feel perfectly timed. I take the train to the public library reference room and the long tables with the green study lamps and I plug in my laptop and sit among ambitious young men and women, most of them Asian, and my ambition is gone gone gone, praise the Lord, I'm free of it, I'm here for pleasure.

Coming from the Midwest, you learn not to stand out in the crowd but blend in, harmonize, so I gave academia a wide berth, that beehive of brilliance, where nerds don't feel self-conscious: there's always someone nerdier nearby, and if you are the World's Leading Authority on the mating habits of the jabberwock beetle of the Lesser Jujube Archipelago, you can take comfort in knowing that the pinch-faced man next to you is the W.L.A. on 17th-century Huguenot hymnody or a niche of quantum physics that is understood by nobody but him.

Growing up in the Lutheran culture of Minnesota, you learn to be wary of brilliance, having seen geniuses in the throes of deep thought step into potholes and disappear, like the great economist who put Harvard's endowment into the stock market and almost dropped it into bankruptcy, like taking your child's lunch money and putting it on Valiant Fancy to win in the 5th at Churchill Downs. No, Lutheran culture teaches you to be useful, fit in, do your part, harmonize. We go to a party and we're not good at the whooping and guffawing but we stay late and help clean up.

I blame Ralph Waldo Emerson for the brazen foolishness of the elite. He said, "To be great is to be misunderstood," a mouthful of bubble gum that gives arrogant people grounds to imagine their unpopularity is proof of their acumen.

"Dare to live the life you have imagined"? This is the wisdom that encouraged people who could've been excellent janitors to become bold narcissists who created volumes of unreadable poetry and bales of photography similar to bales of other people's photography, seascapes, sunrises, the sensitivity of shadows.

And Emerson's disciple, Henry Thoreau, and his Bible of bachelorhood, Walden. He wrote that he had learned that if you endeavor to live the life you have imagined, you will meet with an unexpected success. Yes, living alone is an achievable goal, but a good woman could've straightened him out. At least gotten him to do something about his hair. I am happy sitting among children of Asian immigrants working hard to fulfil their parents' dreams, and here I am enjoying the freedom to not read these encyclopedias, to poke Ralph and Henry in the snoot, say a good word for Lutherans.

To be funny means being understood very well; it just doesn't work without it.