A BOTCHED DECAPITATION REFUTES A FILING CABINET FULL OF POSITION PAPERS.

John Feffer's "Pete Hegseth’s D-Day Remarks Prove the US Is No Longer an Ally to European Democracy" is a predictably silly appeal to Foreign Policy in Focus types, you know, the sort of conscience-cowboy for whom "rules-based international order" is a Holy Incantation and blaming America first is as instinctive as splitting tens.

DEFINITELY A MISSED OPPORTUNITY.

At the beginning of the month, we noted a deportation of two Iranian fashion plates.

The "missed opportunity" my post refers to is the upcoming deportation of Iranian women alleged to be kin of Iranian terrorist commander Qasem Soleimani, who have been living in California and much more in the way of the Californian than of the Shiite.  "Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, who celebrated attacks on US soldiers and military bases in social media posts, and her daughter Sarinasadat Hosseiny, were nabbed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Friday and had their green cards revoked over ties to the Iranian regime."  Power Line's John Hinderaker notes that Western fashion influenced the ladies in a way that, put simply, would not go down well with the guardians against vice back in Asia Minor.  "Afshar may have reviled the U.S. as the Great Satan, but she herself reveled in a luxurious Los Angeles lifestyle, presumably courtesy of the oppressed people of Iran."

My use of that "alleged to be kin" might have been prudent.  Reason's Matthew Petti notes, "The State Department and ICE claimed to have caught Islamic Republic nepo babies 'enjoying a lavish lifestyle.' Instead, they tore apart an innocent family."  A family of refugees from the theocracy, to be specific.

The story sounded too good to be true—because it wasn't. The alleged niece, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, and her daughter, Sarinasadat Hosseiny, are not actually related to the late general, documents obtained by Drop Site show. Soleimani Afshar's father was an only child whose parents died before the general was born, in an entirely different part of Iran. In fact, Soleimani Afshar was once jailed for protesting the Iranian government, and she fled Iran with her teenage daughter after Hosseiny appeared in a dance competition on a banned TV channel.

The young lady has assets that the local Guardians of Public Morals would rather the faithful not see.  As we publish though, we note that there are no official channels for deporting Iranians to Iran, and that someone in the current government didn't consider how turning exiles, whether middle-aged and frumpy or young and nubile, into voices for Californian freedom, might have been a better strategy.  "Instead, the administration seems to have latched onto a much more dubious case for political clout—and, ironically, ended up publicly humiliating two women over exactly the lifestyle they were persecuted for in Iran."  Dumb.

A MISSED OPPORTUNITY?

We are a creedal nation.  Regular readers know the argument.

"Give these kids an America to buy into, and an America that buys into these kids, and we'll be OK."  Pajamas Media contributor Jamie K. Wilson would like to restrict that a bit.  "An American is a person who belongs to the historic political, cultural, and moral community formed by the United States — a community joined not by ancestry alone but by entering, adopting, and upholding its constitutional order, its laws, its common language, its civic story, and its ethic of self-rule, ordered liberty, and mutual responsibility."  I suppose my youth in Milwaukee where one could still find storefronts and sometimes libraries labelled in German, Polish, and Spanish makes me less inclined to be restrictive about language, and I've tended to view cultural and moral communities as emergent and evolving: do we still want to observe Sundays in the way of the Puritan rather than of the German?

The "missed opportunity" my post refers to is the upcoming deportation of Iranian women alleged to be kin of Iranian terrorist commander Qasem Soleimani, who have been living in California and much more in the way of the Californian than of the Shiite.  "Hamideh Soleimani Afshar, who celebrated attacks on US soldiers and military bases in social media posts, and her daughter Sarinasadat Hosseiny, were nabbed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Friday and had their green cards revoked over ties to the Iranian regime."  Power Line's John Hinderaker notes that Western fashion influenced the ladies in a way that, put simply, would not go down well with the guardians against vice back in Asia Minor.  "Afshar may have reviled the U.S. as the Great Satan, but she herself reveled in a luxurious Los Angeles lifestyle, presumably courtesy of the oppressed people of Iran."

I'll expand on my "missed opportunity" thesis, complete with eye candy, below the jump.

WHAT'S THE MOSLEM VERSION OF A KAREN?

In "First They Came for the Plastic Pigs, but I Was Not a Plastic Pig, so I Said Nothing," Robert Spencer of Pajamas Media sees a creeping caliphate ... in Italy.

This time, it's not about the tempting odors from the smoker wafting into your house, the way it can be Stateside.  Mr Spencer suggests it's the followers of Mohammed seeking to impose the same empty life on their neighbors they live themselves.

Nowadays, however, the warriors of jihad are not besieging the cities of Europe and attempting to breach their walls. Instead, the conquest is taking place in a vastly different manner. Leftist open-borders policies have allowed millions of Muslims to stream into Europe, where the European left’s dogged commitment to “diversity” and “multiculturalism” has foreclosed on any effort to convince the migrants to assimilate and adopt European values. Meanwhile, as adherents of a supremacist ideology, those migrants are doing just the opposite of assimilating.

The latest example of this is a dispute in Italy over a most unthreatening item, a plastic pig. The European news service Remix News reported Thursday that “a plastic pig displayed in the window of a newly opened delicatessen on the Piazza dei Signori in the Italian city of Padua has triggered a local controversy after a senior representative of the city’s Muslim community called for its removal, arguing that it is offensive and inappropriate.”

The loutish pig in question is actually the Italian cousin of the happy, chef’s hat-wearing pigs that adorn the signs of barbecue joints all over our own fair land, and is no more offensive and inappropriate than they are. But if you’re trying to establish and enforce the principle that everyone must always and in every case bow to Islamic sensibilities, then the Padua pig might end up becoming a thorn in your side.

Remix notes that the pig, “placed in the window of the deli Mortadella… e Non Solo, is used to advertise the shop’s sandwiches and cured meats, which are primarily made from pork.” Nothing offensive or inappropriate about that, but Salim El Mauoed, who is the regional vice president of the Muslim community in Padua, nevertheless “urged both the shop’s owners and local authorities to intervene, describing the display as ‘in bad taste’ and offensive to Muslims who pass through the area.”

Now, you might notice that “Salim El Mauoed” is not exactly a conventional Italian name. The man is from somewhere else, yet he does not hesitate to dictate to the Paduans regarding the kind of items they are permitted to have in their shops. Should he succeed in compelling the deli Mortadella… e Non Solo to remove the plastic pig from its window (as well as from its logo and promotional materials), it is not remotely inconceivable that Salim El Mauoed and his fellow Muslims in Padua will then demand that Mortadella… e Non Solo stop selling pork as well. If you can get a beer or a glass of wine at this deli, those are going to have to go, too.

Salim El Mauoed issued his demand in the name of “diversity,” but ultimately, the “diversity” for which he stands is decidedly monochromatic. He says that the plastic pig in the window is “in bad taste” and offensive to Muslims who might pass by, but he has no concern whatsoever for the possibility that some native Italians might find the removal of the pig to be just as offensive and inappropriate as he regards the pig itself. The Padua of Salim El Mauoed’s dreams will be entirely stripped of material that is offensive to Muslims, but the sensibilities of everyone else will not be taken into consideration.

Maybe Mr El Mauoed ought light a candle to Saint Anthony of Padua, see if that will help.

The reason I seek the Moslem version of a Karen is that a few years ago we documented the woke wine women of Austin, in the act of gentrifying a neighborhood, who were less than happy about weekend impromptu car shows with tailgating and ethnic music.  Those protests of immigration operations?  Support them in the abstract, but keep their traditions out of the neighborhoods we're taking over.  When the Salims of Padua tell the local wine women to cover their heads and abstain from the mortadella, let it be said that the judgements of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.

CONTEMPLATING THOSE THREE MAPS.

I concluded my "Tale of Three Maps" with a call for additional research.

Internal migration, and shifting voting patterns, might not be the "red state boom and blue state depression" Red State's Nick Arama hails, let alone the flight from bad governance Town Hall's Guy Benson cheers.  "These shifts are a direct result of bad governance in blue states and cities. Right/leaners and normies aren’t melting down and forming militia style mobs to harass and stalk leftist leaders. They’re just leaving."

There's definitely room for additional research, perhaps conducted, if that is still possible, in a dispassionate way.  Note, for instance, how Mississippi rates among the least free and not losing seats, while Tennessee rates among the most free and not gaining seats.  What is a parsimonious set of explanatory variables to capture internal migration?

None of which stops City Journal's Steven Malanga, in "Blue States’ Demographic Nightmare," from thinking, yet again, of a permanent electoral realignment.  I'm old enough to have seen that sort of triumphalism, from court intellectuals of all political persuasion, come a cropper as complex adaptive systems do what they darn well please.

WHAT ARE THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT?

Did a man die in Minneapolis on Saturday because a federal official didn't handle the pistol that man dropped properly?  Does that even matter?  Before Saturday, Cato's Walter Olson was already claiming "In Minnesota, ICE Is Assaulting the Constitutional Rights of Citizens."

It is crucial to grasp, though, that ICE and Border Patrol also routinely violate the rights of US citizens, both the naturalized kind and those born right here. With the Minnesota campaign of recent weeks, these assaults on citizens’ rights appear to be multiplying rapidly.

Until lately, the citizens most visibly targeted for abuse have often been reporters and protesters. Members of those groups have been repeatedly attacked while taking pictures of ICE actions in a nonobstructive way or protesting nonviolently, in what looks very much like a practice that is being tolerated by policy.

He concludes, "Many advocates of constitutional liberty have begun pushing back against ICE and Border Patrol’s incursions on the Bill of Rights. More should join them."

Despite incoming foul weather and Conference Weekend in professional football, another protest put down with force in Minneapolis has brought people out.  Paul Krugman asks, "Was This a Murder Too Far?"  He suggests it is, because of the wide range of people crying foul.

Centrist Democrats, who have spent weeks trying to ignore Minneapolis so they could talk about the price of eggs, are finally taking a stand and appear ready to vote against another round of DHS funding. And several Republicans are now speaking out.

The NRA and other gun groups are now calling for a full investigation of Pretti’s murder, angry that the DHS justifies the execution of Pretti because he was, entirely legally, in possession of a gun. Even Fox News’ s Maria Bartiromo, a tireless Trump cheerleader, sounded patently skeptical when questioning Kash Patel about DHS’s outlandish claims.

The first post-Pretti execution poll, from YouGov, shows that ICE’s brownshirt tactics are evoking a wave of anger, shame and revulsion across America. People who have seen videos of the shooting overwhelmingly say that it was unjustified. Calls to abolish ICE have gone from the fringe to the center, with a plurality of Americans supporting them.

Does this mark a tipping point? Or will the revulsion simply fade away, as it did after Good was killed? I think that this time is different, for several reasons.

Well, politics is the only "respectable" art in which compromising your integrity for the sake of a talking point is normal behavior.  It gives Paul Krugman free rein to sneer at people he disagrees with, or finds disagreeable.

I believe that a significant number of people brushed aside the murder of Renee Good because she was a woman — at a time when right-wingers are still dismissing opponents of fascism as “gangs of wine moms” — in a same-sex relationship.

Second, while the video evidence on Good’s killing was clear if examined closely, it did need close examination to reveal that she was simply murdered. The videos of Pretti’s killing don’t need close examination. That sound you heard Saturday was millions of Americans, myself included, crying out in horror as we watched agents repeatedly shoot a man who was already restrained.

His closing sentence expresses the sentiments that prompted the questions introducing my post.  Outside the Beltway's Steven Taylor answers my "Does it even matter?" with a better question.

Even if you are a reader who thinks that protesters should keep their distance from ICE, or maybe you think that they shouldn’t be protesting at all, please stop and consider that none of this is justified, and that we should expect any law enforcement entity to behave professionally and to de-escalate, not as both of these incidents indicate, lash out in anger at US citizens exercizing their constitutional rights.

Ask yourself, upon watching any of these videos: Is there any defensible reason that ICE couldn’t have just walked away?

His continuation is correct in part, incorrect in part. "Annoying law enforcement is actually a First Amendment right. The notion that instead of being protected speech, it carries the death penalty without trial is the stuff of authoritarian nightmares."  The "annoying law enforcement part" might not be correct.  Rich Schapiro of NBC News breaks that down in "One called it murder. Some need more information."  By all means, read it in full.

BILL BLUM'S KINSLEY GAFFE.

The concluding paragraph of his predictable Common Dreams lament about what happens when sanctuary city officials refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities by, oh, handing over illegal aliens being held on local criminal charges, includes an admission that ought to be obvious.

The struggle against ICE and our emerging dual state is now approaching a critical inflection point. We can be heartened by the fact that the United States is not Germany in 1933, and Trump, for all his bluster and megalomania, is not Hitler. The country’s fate remains open, and dependent on the nonviolent and lawful collective action that we—all of us—take in the coming weeks, months, and years.

Yes, the country's fate remains open, and yes, for the moment I am restricting my participation in lawful collective action to voting for local officials who will help the federal immigration authorities enforce the federal immigration laws.

We can talk about making legal immigration pathways less burdensome when Common Dreams types and their establishmentarian enablers in coastal media and Democrat caucuses stop treating four years of open border policy as fait accompli.

ADVANCED, OR NOT-SO-ADVANCED, TRIBAL SOCIETIES.

In "What's the Matter With Minnesota?," Michael Barone develops the argument that European social democracies might better be understood as advanced tribal societies, with an emphasis on Minnesota.

Minnesota? Somalis? Nine billion dollars in alleged welfare fraud?

To understand what's going on from a distance, it helps to understand basic culture. Minnesota was settled largely by people of Scandinavian and German ancestry.

In survey after survey, Minnesota has ranked No. 1 or No. 2 among states, often just behind neighboring and much smaller North Dakota, in social connectedness, civic participation, workforce participation and voter turnout. It has traditionally led the nation in levels of trust and conscientiousness.

This has been coupled with political behavior that resembles Scandinavian patterns. Minnesota, like North Dakota and its neighbor Wisconsin, had lively socialist-leaning third parties in the 1930s. It's still the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party, the result of a fusion engineered by future Vice President Hubert Humphrey in 1944.

As you might expect, Minnesotans have built a high-tax, high-spending state government. Like Scandinavians, they have trusted the state to provide services and have trusted individuals not to cheat in claiming benefits. Public support for these programs, as in Scandinavia, has traditionally been founded on confidence that aid goes only to the genuinely deserving.

The Somalis who have been the most visible and politically active migrants to Minnesota over the past generation provide a vivid contrast.

Or, Cynical Me notes, perhaps putting a bureaucrat in charge of bailing out improvident relatives is a good thing.  "It's your third cousin once removed that your taxes are supporting.  That might not be so easy once enough immigration changes the dynamic between tax payer and benefit recipient."  So it has been going in Denmark and Sweden.  Here's where that led, ten years ago.  "Europe's migration problem is worse to the extent that the self-despising multiculturalists enable third worlders to continue to behave badly and not prosper, and in like measure, provide evidence of the absence of cosmic justice and cause for further social reform. In the United States, migrants become mascots for ward-heeler politicians."

Mr Barone doesn't quite go there, but he's tiptoeing along the sideline.

Somalis, after three decades in Minnesota, have made little progress on those dimensions. A low-trust, low-conscientiousness culture has proved to be stubbornly persistent, and, unlike the Minnesota liberals who helped the Hmong fit in, the last generation of Minnesota liberals has done little to move Somalis away from a dysfunctional culture that they brought from their embattled and unproductive homeland and from an adversarial attitude to the larger American society.

The strength of these United States is in its origin as a creedal, not a tribal, nation.  Yes, let Minnesotans, or residents of any other state, buy into the aspirations of their new neighbors.  At the same time, let them encourage those new neighbors to buy into the ways that have persisted as the creed emerged, including high conscientiousness culture and bourgeois norms.

A STORY LINE TOO CRAZY FOR DOSTOYEVSKY.

On Saturday, we learned of an economics review session at Brown University that ended with shots fired.  When Cold Spring Shops resumed posting on Monday, law enforcement was still looking for their suspect or supects.  Providence authorities were not inspiring much confidence, at least among Militant Normals.

Sometimes it's prudent to hold off on any speculation until the evidence is in hand.  But Providence authorities are not doing much to clear the fog of war.  This story broke Saturday just after Navy sang second, with early reports of a "person of interest" questioned and released, and a second "person of interest" detained and questioned Sunday and ultimately released.  There was security camera tape available.  "The footage showed the gunman walking calmly down a street near campus, dressed in all black with his face covered."  The difficulties Providence authorities are having identifying the real suspect do not please Town Hall's Matt Vespa.

Monday evening came news of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology fusion researcher sustaining a mortal wound, shot in the foyer of his condominium in Brookline, Massachusetts.  Dear reader, it is prudent to hold off on speculation, between the news networks and the internet were all sorts of assurances that the professor's murder had nothing to do with Brown or it might have been the jihad presenting itself and who knows what I might have missed paying attention to Aaron Rodgers doing Aaron Rodgers things on Monday Night Football.

QUINTESSENTIAL BLUDGEONSPEAK.

An infusion of printed money during the corona tyranny was so tempting to Minnesota officials that even New York's Times had to notice.  "Prosecutors say members of the Somali diaspora, a group with growing political power, were largely responsible. President Trump has drawn national attention to the scandal amid his crackdown on immigration."  It's possible that the grift began long before the state's Democrat governor did what Democrat governors did when Tony Fauci panicked.

In July 2019, Minnesota state officials spotted early signs of fraud that would eventually siphon away more than $1 billion in taxpayer money, but they quickly faced pressure from leaders of the charitable group Feeding Our Future to stop asking questions, according to multiple former employees at the Minnesota Department of Education.

The scandal, which has already led to 61 convictions, has widely been viewed as a byproduct of the COVID-19 pandemic. At one point, then-Attorney General Merrick Garland called it "the largest pandemic relief fraud scheme" in the United States.

Acting U.S. Attorney Lisa D. Kirkpatrick said those convicted "took advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to carry out a massive fraud scheme that stole money meant to feed children."

But state officials say the schemes aimed at diverting federal dollars meant for people who are poor, food insecure or disabled, actually started far sooner, months after Minnesota's Democratic Gov. Tim Walz took office in 2019. In its early stages, members of the charitable group Feeding Our Future billed the state for some $3.4 million.

By 2021, however, that number ballooned. Before it was finally halted, Feeding Our Future had falsely claimed to have served 91 million meals, for which the group received nearly $250 million in federal funds, according to federal prosecutors. That money did not go to feed kids, federal officials said. Instead it was used to fund lavish lifestyles.

Another day, another manifestation of rent-seeking.  It's pretty standard stuff.  It is the reaction of the editorial board of the Star-Tribune up where there are no Lombardi trophies that interests me.  "Trump’s anti-Somali rampage thrusts Minnesota into the national spotlight."  Let the bludgeonspeak commence.  "The president’s racist, divisive rhetoric will do nothing to actually prevent fraud."  It gets better from there.

Minnesota finds itself in a harsh spotlight as President Donald Trump revs up his attacks on Gov. Tim Walz, an old political foe, while simultaneously expanding his demonization of Somali Minnesotans.

After unleashing torrents of foul language against Walz last weekend, and then this week referring to Somali Americans, including U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, as “garbage,” Trump reportedly dispatched additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota. Their orders are yet uncertain, but Trump suggests they will patrol a specific class of people, Somali Americans. In other words, strict racial profiling will now extend to our neighbors.

To read some online discourse, including that spewed by Trump in a feverish late-night troll session of more than 160 posts, Minnesota is a den of fraud perpetrated solely by immigrant hordes. This rhetoric is divisive, racist and wrong.

Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali community. These residents are our colleagues, friends, law enforcement officers, public servants, neighbors and taxpayers. That Trump would demonize an entire diaspora — the vast majority of whom live here as legal citizens or permanent residents — is beyond reprehensible. It’s dangerous.

That final sentence contains one nugget of truth: undoubtedly there are Somali immigrants who are in the United States seeking a better life, who migrated because where they used to live is not a pleasant place, who might be won over to voting for less crazy Democrats not to mention Republicans with the right sort of message, whose children and grandchildren will lose the headscarves.  Otherwise, though, the editorial is an exercise in shaming the deplorables.

NOT ALL MOSLEMS.

I told you I could post all week using only commonplace observations becoming controversial.  Today's example comes from Common Dreams.  “Exploiting a single incident to cast suspicion on Afghans—people who have already endured decades of displacement and America’s forever wars—is both irresponsible and cruel.”  The "single incident" involved an Afghan man formerly involved in Operation Enduring Freedom who was brought to the United States during Dementia Joe's bug-out and who is accused of killing one National Guard troop and seriously injuring another in the Federal Capital.

YES, WE ARE A CREEDAL NATION.

That has long been the Cold Spring Shops position.  "Give these kids an America to buy into, and an America that buys into these kids, and we'll be OK."  Pajamas Media contributor Jamie K. Wilson would like to restrict that a bit.  "An American is a person who belongs to the historic political, cultural, and moral community formed by the United States — a community joined not by ancestry alone but by entering, adopting, and upholding its constitutional order, its laws, its common language, its civic story, and its ethic of self-rule, ordered liberty, and mutual responsibility."  I suppose my youth in Milwaukee where one could still find storefronts and sometimes libraries labelled in German, Polish, and Spanish makes me less inclined to be restrictive about language, and I've tended to view cultural and moral communities as emergent and evolving: do we still want to observe Sundays in the way of the Puritan rather than of the German?

YES, THAT CHEAP LABOR SUBSIDY IS REAL.

In two published papers, Eliakim Katz and I analyzed immigration amnesties as a way of screening the pool of illegal immigrants by subjecting them to exploitation in the underground economy and confronting a positive but not certain prospect of an amnesty, in order to induce favorable self-selection, meaning it wouldn't pay to sneak into a rich country in the hopes of going on welfare later.

Yes, that sounds cynical, and yes, we did get some grief for characterizing the underground economy as a sort of apprenticeship.  Other scholars subsequently expanded on our work.

We show that an amnesty is more desirable the bigger is the gain to aggregate income induced by granting legalized workers access to all the available employment opportunities. On the contrary, a more redistributive welfare state makes an amnesty less desirable, as low-skilled legalizedforeign workers will gain access to benefits. We also find that the introduction of a legalization program can only be optimal if there is a positive shock affecting the income received by the natives. In this case, the legalization allows the government to mitigate the adverse effects of an excessively restrictive policy implemented in the first period.

That paper offers the following elaboration on our work.

Karlson and Katz (2003) consider instead the role of amnesties as a tool for governments to induce immigrants to self–select based on ability. Similarly to our model, they also consider migrants that differ in their skill level. In particular, they emphasize that a legalization will offer skilled workers better labor market opportunities. As a result, the latter might be enticed to migrate even as illegals, in the hope that an ex–post legalization will improve their income opportunities. Differently from us, in Karlson and Katz’s (2003) model and in their companion paper (Karlson and Katz 2010), legal immigration is not explicitly considered together with illegal immigration.

The authors continue in an academic vein, and it looks like light bedtime reading.  But not tonight.  Rather, I'm in the mood to thank loudmouth leftist Jill Filipovic for simultaneously validating our cheap labor argument and demonstrating the folly of minimum wage laws.

If you would like to pay $30 for a pint of strawberries, $700 for someone to clean your one-bedroom apartment, and $100,000 for a new roof on your normal-sized house, then deporting all undocumented people is a policy you should support. https://t.co/l3m7JyCzfP

— Jill Filipovic (@JillFilipovic) November 18, 2025

Twitchy's Brett T. compiled a few of the more pungent ripostes.  "Are Americans that spoiled by cheap, illegal alien labor?"  Hie thee hence, and judge for yourself.

WE CALLED ATTENTION TWENTY YEARS AGO.

Minding the Campus contributor Jared Gould goes looking for fudge and finds something to fret about.  "Mackinac Island’s Workforce Offers a Preview of the Grim Job Market Facing American College Grads."

At first reading, it sounds like an update on "Working their way through college – in Bulgaria."

I left frustrated by what my trip revealed about the state of the American labor market.

Nearly every worker I encountered on the island—waitstaff, hotel clerks, bike rental attendants, even the carriage tour guides—was a foreigner. Some were seasonal guest workers. Others were international students, ostensibly in the U.S. for a “cultural exchange.”

After leaving the island, I looked deeper into this. What I discovered is that Mackinac Island is a case study in how the U.S. outsources jobs to a rotating cast of temporary foreign hires. Employers rely on both H-2B visa holders—seasonal workers brought in for jobs supposedly “Americans won’t do”—and J-1 visa students, who are nominally here to learn but mostly come to work.

Something similar might have been going on at Wisconsin Dells long ago, and that despite Wisconsin law mandating that public instruction, including at the universities, cannot start before Labor Day (unlike Northern Illinois University, where the fourth Monday in August, which can come as early as the 22^nd, is the first day of classes.)

FRIDAY SHORT TAKES.

Emergence is like that.  "Taking out the leadership of Iran is likely the easy part. Controlling what happens after that is not so easy."  Best case scenario: the young women break out the mini-skirts and summer tops, the men in their lives or who would like to be in their lives stand up to what's left of the mullahs' morality police, and Israel and the United States enforce a no-fly zone.  What follows will still be interesting.

Reality is like that.  "They have become too accustomed to relying on American leadership and guidance and have been inculcated in the notion that the means to resolving disputes is through toothless multinational organizations like the UN. They have deluded themselves into thinking that 'soft power' is a substitute for fighting. Altogether, they need to wise up. Bullies aren’t impressed by words. They are cowed by well-timed punches."

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

DUE PROCESS.

A federal warrant has a judge's signature on it, doesn't it?  That sounds a lot like due process.

California law enforcement officials can refuse to cooperate with “ICE detainers,” requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement to transfer illegal migrants held in local jails to federal immigration officials. That is because ICE detainers are nonbinding and can be disregarded by the local agency.

But Bill Essayli, Trump’s recently appointed U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, has come up with a way to compel California’s cooperation. Local officials can “ignore detainers, but they can’t ignore [federal criminal] warrants,” he told me in an interview.

It's straightforward, dear reader.

[I]n his first weeks in office, Essayli launched Operation Guardian Angel, a federal task force that is scanning criminal databases every day to identify illegal migrants arrested in the Los Angeles area, and then checking their fingerprints against immigration records to see whether they have previously been deported. If they have, Essayli charges them with illegal reentry, a federal crime, and obtains an arrest warrant from a federal judge, which cannot be ignored by sanctuary jurisdictions.

The operation has been underway for less than a month, but already California is being forced to hand over dozens of illegal migrants to ICE each week.

Chicago's turn might be coming.

Once the concept is proven there, the Justice Department can deploy Operation Guardian Angel across California — and then nationwide. “It could be done in every sanctuary city,” Essayli told me. “Every jurisdiction has access to these databases, and everyone who’s booked in a jail has to be fingerprinted.”

Local law enforcement personnel are not objecting.

Essayli says local law enforcement was prevented by state law from complying with an ICE detainer. Saravia-Sánchez was deported in 2013, so had Operation Guardian Angel been in effect, local police could have been forced to turn him over to ICE — and two Inglewood boys might still have their father.

Stories such as this are why, Essayli said, most local sheriffs who have had their hands tied by sanctuary policies want to cooperate with ICE. “We briefed the sheriffs. A lot of the sheriffs were excited. They were like, ‘We’ve been waiting for this.’” Others, he said, were incredulous when presented with their first federal arrest warrants. “They looked like they’re having a heart attack,” he said. “A lot of them were like, ‘Well, what are these?’ I said: ‘It’s a warrant. You deal with warrants every day. There’s nothing different about this.’”

So far, he has faced no resistance from local law enforcement, Essayli said. He cautions that anyone interfering with the federal warrants will face serious consequences.

There are other federal charges that can be brought against people illegally in the country, although if they've avoided a previous (Bush or Obama era?) deportation order and simply stayed out of sight, they're due more process should they turn up as previously convicted of other federal crimes.  "If they have a firearm, it could be possession of a firearm. If they have a drug offense, we can hit them with a drug offense. If they have fraud, we can charge fraud. There’s a lot of charges we can take federally other than illegal reentry."  Interesting potential for plea bargaining?  No contest and a plane ticket home.

Doesn't sound like kidnapping without due process to me.

NED LUDD SMILES.

Thus does Insta Pundit contributor Ed Driscoll summarize his reaction to a silly New Republic article, "The Symbolic Power of Burning Waymo Robotaxis."  What did Rush Limbaugh say about leftists getting silly when they're out of power?  I suspect even he could not anticipate how farcical the likes of The Atlantic and New Republic have become.  If there's a Richter scale for hysteria, the article comes close to pegging the seismograph.

Thousands of National Guard troops are now deployed on the streets of America’s second-largest city, armed with rubber bullets, tear gas, and automatic weapons. They’re officially tasked with protecting federal agents, who are, without warrants, kidnapping people of all ages from court hearings, churches, schools, convenience stores, hospitals, and street corners, on orders to arrest 3,000 per day nationwide. Without due process, those snatched up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement will be disappeared into its secretive network of detention centers and flown to a hellish Salvadoran prison or to countries they’ve never visited. Seven hundred U.S. Marines are standing by to join them this week on the streets of Los Angeles.

We'll let the legal types sort out whether an active deportation order being enforced by the immigration authorities is due process.  Hysteria, though, might be as good an explanation as any for Waymos being burned.

There’s no telling precisely why protesters have targeted Waymos in recent days; people tend not to publicly volunteer explanations for their illegal activities. But there are any number of possible practical and political reasons why they might. Some taking to the streets have reportedly dubbed Waymos “spy cars,” thanks to surveillance footage collected by 360-degree cameras that, as 404 News reported, has previously been obtained and published by the Los Angeles Police Department. Google—Waymo’s parent company—hands over that data upon request, typically via court order, warrant, or subpoena. Like other Silicon Valley firms, Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have either directly or through third parties entered lucrative contracts with the federal government, including ICE. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai attended Trump’s inauguration, to which Google donated $1 million. That company also recently removed a pledge in its AI principles to not develop or deploy products that “cause or are likely to cause overall harm.” Alphabet’s cloud computing unit in April expanded its partnership with fellow defense contractor Palantir to allow for the “reliable and responsible deployment of AI solutions” from Anthropic “for sensitive government use cases.” Andreessen Horowitz—the venture capital fund run by Trump ally Marc Andreessen, known as a16z—was also an early investor in Waymo.

Again, nobody really knows why Waymos were vandalized. Maybe they offered a convenient, on-demand way to block traffic that would inconvenience Google executives rather than regular people who need their cars to get to work and the grocery store. While less common in the United States, burning cars are a ubiquitous part of large-scale protests just about everywhere else on the planet. Waymos were vandalized well before recent protests in Los Angeles for a number of reasons laid out by Brian Merchant, the author of Blood in the Machine. Among them seems to be their tendency to honk at each other outside of apartment buildings at 4 a.m.

That's rich.  Rogue car alarms going off at all hours?  Just another day in a thickly settled area, particularly if the local authorities are soft-on-crime Donks.  Third-world style protests?  What do these so-called intellectuals expect to happen, when their preferred immigration policy is to let anyone in with no expectation of assimilation?

GOVERNOR DESANTIS SENT THOSE PLANES IN THE OFF-SEASON.

Nine years ago, when the first Trump presidency was still something for the coastal cosmopolitans to chuckle about, I wrote

Regular readers are familiar with my suggestions that the victory dividend leading to the American High might have functioned much like a resource curse, that Democrat politicians in poor neighborhoods benefit more from the continued destitution of their voter base than they do from those voters prospering, and recently I've been suggesting that the Ruling Class might be more interested in protecting their position than in fostering conditions conducive to people improving their condition.

That post concluded, "As long as those objects [of the coastal cosmopolitans' faux compassion] continue to vote Democrat, the rent-seeking clerisy will continue to summer on Martha's Vineyard."

WHO SETS BAIL AT BAR-TIME?

Yesterday's "Straight Talk about Due Process" concluded with an invocation of the Babylon Bee.  "Sometimes all you can do is crack wise."

Later that night Power Line's John Hinderaker used that wisecrack to clarify the distinction that might exist between the due process a citizen or lawful resident receives and that awaiting a detained illegal alien.

Joe Biden encouraged 10 million or more illegals to cross our borders. It was the worst violation of the rule of law in American history. And now every one of the 10 million is supposed to get a trial before being deported?

How about if we do it this way: instead of the federal courts micromanaging the executive branch in real time, if the administration inadvertently deports an American citizen or legal resident, he can raise his hand and complain. He will have no trouble finding a lawyer who will sue on his behalf, and he will become a millionaire. But so far there is not a single reported instance of a citizen or legal resident being deported. This procedure will provide ample due process to all who followed due process on their way in.

Apparently there are citizens and lawful residents getting caught up in the deportation dragnets (the disadvantage of having a common name?) and yet most of the energy from the opposition party and the willing accomplices in the media is on a few people being shipped to El Salvador, perhaps without the fig leaf of due process.

And there, dear reader, is the genesis of the question in my post title.  There is such a thing as the drunk tank, perhaps referred to these days by more inclusive terminology.  Perhaps there is no magistrate on call at bar-time as everybody brought in at bar time, or during what passes for celebrating a sports championship these days, gets a few hours to sleep it off.  Eventually, though, the occupants of the drunk tank see the magistrate, perhaps some are held without bail, some are given the opportunity to post bail, and some might be released on their own recognizance.

That suggests the possibility that rendering due process to illegal aliens need not burden law enforcement.  Proof of citizenship?  No.  Held without bail pending a relative or counsel proffering that proof; without proof, your flight home is waiting.  At Power Line, some wise guys in the bull session are proposing building detention centers on Martha's Vineyard or in Edina or similar suburbs full of limousine liberals.

STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT DUE PROCESS.

Outside the Beltway's Matt Bernius gets off what could be a Friday short take, but for Cold Spring Shops generally staying away from the niceties of the law.  "EVERYONE should get due process. Full stop. And that includes criminals or people who do things we don’t like."  That column opens with a qualification.  "While undocumented folks don’t get the same level of due process as citizens, they still are entitled to due process as spelled out by our laws."