Hard to fathom the worthlessness of the liberal establishment.

In a story clearly planted by the DNC, the New York Times wondered yesterday whether top Democrats regret an (imaginary) leftward turn on immigration ahead of the 2020 election, as voters allegedly surged to the right.

They cite a moment during the 2019 primary debate when the Democratic candidates were asked if they favored decriminalizing border crossings. Most candidates on stage had raised their hands, the writers mournfully observe. “Six years later, the party remains haunted by that tableau.”

If the event were as pivotal to the fate of the Democratic party as the authors assert (I don’t remember it) that’s because by that time, MAGA had successfully framed the immigration debate as chaos vs. stability; criminal alien vs. law-abiding citizen, without any really counter-narrative from Democrats.

What now? The Center for American Progress is on it. They’ve come up with a totally original and inspiring plan that’s never been tried by Democrats before: 1. run toward the right 2. Remind voters that “the other guy is worse.”

Democrats did screw themselves on immigration, yes. But not by being too far left. They screwed themselves on immigration by helping Trump move the Overton Window—the range of acceptable discourse on a given topic—on immigration, like they were valets carrying his suitcases.

And here we are today. Today being the day after heavily armed federal forces terrified kids playing in Los Angeles’ MacArthur park, I guess to make a point that Los Angeles is under military occupation by the federal government?

Again, I blame Democrats. I’ve made this point before: if you agree with the fascists that something is a very big threat to people’s family’s safety voters will vote for the fascist, not their milquetoast opposition, even if they occasionally try and “talk tough.”

Yet still, here we go. Running propaganda for the hugely, hugely unpopular Democratic establishment, the NYT does its “some say” brand of brave journalism to suggest that Democrats’ must “moderate” to never. again. find themselves reflecting on the “haunting tableau” of political leaders raising their hand to support the idea that people shouldn’t go to prison for trying to come to America.

Some are pushing for a course correction they see as overdue. A new proposal from the Center for American Progress, the party’s leading policy shop, calls for expanding legal immigration while embracing ideas long championed by conservatives, including making it harder for migrants to qualify for asylum.

Neera Tanden, the center’s chief executive, said the plan acknowledged a reality that Democrats had long resisted: They must embrace new immigration restrictions in order to have the credibility with voters to fight the far more expansive plans of the Trump administration.

“I’m happy to argue with Stephen Miller or anyone else about why they are wrong,” she said. “But the way we’re going to be able to do that is to also honestly assess that the border has been too insecure, that it allowed too many people to come through and that we need to fix that.”

Thanks Neera Tanden. Never mind that the most popular (social) Democrat in America, Zohran Mamdani, is unabashedly pro-immigration—he screamed at Tom Honan at a protest and promises to thwart ICE raids in New York—and an immigrant himself.

Now, what happened the last time Democrats—in a big way—agreed with Republicans that we need to restrict immigration?

Ahead of the last election, the governors of Texas and Florida shipped hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers and recent immigrants to liberal cities. Man, how Democrats fell for their evil trick.

Here’s what happened in New York. After the first few buses of immigrants arrived, Adams waxed eloquent about how New York is a city of immigrants that welcomed our new neighbors.

The buses kept coming. It took a very short time for Adams to start screeching about the influx of mostly Venezuelan immigrants. “No more room!” he kept declaring. It was a ploy to get Joe Biden to expedite work permits so the new arrivals could get jobs — which is all they want!

As Biden delayed, Adams stoked a social panic about the new arrivals, which served as a nice cover for his total incompetence in running the city in general. The city’s right-wing rags outperformed, blasting images of people of color sleeping and massing around outside of the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan, the main intake center.

Left out of the discussion that there’s “no more room” is that every Mayoral administration since at least the 1980s has severely mismanaged the problem of family homelessness in New York, Adams included; the shelters were overflowing before the surge of immigrants. Also left out is that except for the images of chaos promoted by Adams and the rags, things were … totally fine by the Roosevelt and elsewhere in the city.

I went a few times. It was no more and actually less chaotic than anything on almost any street in New York on almost any day—nothing like the Hieronymus Bosch-like horrors depicted by right-wingers clearly intended for a national audience.

Instead of collaborating at the federal, state and local levels to address the problems associated with the sudden surge, Democrats yelled “Yes! This is a catastrophe!” It was a perfect political coup by Republicans. They told a wildly effective story about the hypocrisy of smug, hypocritical liberals. And Democrats, at every turn, made ads for Donald Trump by agreeing that immigrants = chaos and danger.

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The thing is, Republicans are now returning the favor. Every day the ugly little Nazi in the White House, Stephen Miller¹ and the DHS Gestapo, are generating ads for Democrats.

Daily—daily!—local news has stories about increasingly violent and egregious ICE raids. Schools. The street. Home Depot. Car washes. Everywhere and anywhere. These stories almost always follow a similar narrative arc.

ICE does something violent and egregious, faces covered in balaclavas, to people, including women and children, that are very obviously not the dangerous criminals of MAGAs fevered dreams. Passersby film and scream at them to stop. It was surreal to watch one such encounter at a car wash in my parents’ boring, placid SoCal suburb, palm trees in the background.

If the local reporter interviews witnesses, they often say they thought Trump would be purging the country of gang members and criminals. Not their neighbors, friends or harmless street vendors or gardeners.

My favorite one of these features an old white guy standing on his lawn. I hate to do this, but sorry he very much looks like a Trump voter: right age, demographic, attitude, etc.

He’s standing, bewildered, on his half-mowed lawn. Earlier that day, ICE had snatched his gardeners away, mid-job. They just left their truck, with all their tools, idling. The man was bewildered and pissed. Not, mind you, because of the state of his lawn, but by the betrayal of the idea that “We don’t do things like this in America.”