Read it.

A U.S. visa program for skilled foreign workers has long stoked concerns over American workers losing their jobs to lower-paid foreigners. Now a group of experienced American professionals is accusing an Indian outsourcing giant of firing them on short notice and filling many of their roles with workers from India on H1-B visas.

The American workers say that India’s Tata Consultancy Services illegally discriminated against them based on their race and age, firing them and shifting some of their work to lower-paid Indian immigrants on temporary work visas.

Since late December, at least 22 workers have filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against TCS, whose clients have included dozens of the U.S.’s biggest firms.

Read it.

Since the invasion of Israel by Hamas terrorists on October 7 and the massacre of around 1,200 people there, antisemitic, pro-Hamas marches have swept both majority-Muslim countries and Western nations.

In London, antisemitic hate crimes are up 1,350% according to police, and pro-Hamas protestors chanted, “Oh Jews, the army of Muhammad is coming.” In the Tunisian city of Al Hammah, hundreds of people were filmed setting fire to a synagogue. In Russia’s Muslim Dagestan region, hundreds of people stormed into the main airport and onto the landing field, chanting antisemitic slogans and seeking passengers arriving on a flight from Israel. In California, a Jewish dentist was killed, and two others injured in a shooting by a Muslim. In Chicago, a Jewish man was attacked by anti-Israel protesters at an October 7 documentary screening in the Logan Square. In Paris, a Jewish man was attacked outside a synagogue; and another was stabbed in Zurich.

In the Middle East, North Africa, and the Gulf Region, this genocidal hatred has resulted in the ethnic cleansing of Jews. Over 850,000 Jews were forced to leave their homes in Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Morocco, and several other Arab countries in the 20 years following the re-establishment of Israel in 1948. Another major exodus of Jews took place from Iran in 1979-80, following the Islamic revolution. Jews had resided in those lands for over 2,500 years. The rising Muslim population in the West has imported the same—and exceedingly violent—Jew-hatred into Western nations. Antisemitic attacks and threats abound since Hamas ignited the war in Gaza by massacring and raping Israelis on October 7. To learn about the theological and historical roots of Muslim antisemitism, I interviewed a prominent specialist and researcher on Islam, its history and theology.

Read it.

Three climate demonstrators arrested this evening after interrupting Easter services at St. Patrick’s Cathedral with a banner reading, “Silence = Death.”

As they were shoved out, one yelled out, “Free Palestine!”

If they had so interrupted a prayer service at a mosque, the congregation would have beaten them to death before the police could arrive.

Christians … not so much.

Read it.

President Joe Biden’s State of the Union vow to build a humanitarian pier for Gaza had good intentions perhaps, but it effectively makes American troops targets for terrorist attacks in the unstable region, experts continue to warn.

Read it.

Leonel Moreno, the illegal alien known as the “migrant influencer,” who amassed a half million followers on TikTok, was finally arrested by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Friday in Gahanna, Ohio, according to Epoch Times.

In a series of short videos on TikTok, Moreno bragged about receiving ‘stacks of cash’ from American taxpayers and urged other illegal aliens to take advantage of all the free money progressives were handing out. He has thanked “Papa Biden” for the free cash.

‘America is a nation of believers, dreamers, and strivers that is being led by a group of censors, critics, and cynics.’ — Donald Trump, 2016

The Other McCain.

You don’t want to be a “swing voter,” the kind of idiot who tells pollsters he’s undecided who to vote for two weeks before Election Day. Politics is a team sport. and unless you want to be some schmuck who’s a mere spectator at the game, well, you have to join the team you’re on.

Read it.

I have said it many times in the past but I think it bears repeating once again: If you want to understand why world events happen the way they do, you must understand the goals and influence of globalist institutions. You must accept the fact that these people create most of the national and international disasters you and I have to deal with on a regular basis and oftentimes they create these disasters deliberately.

…

The primary purpose of the globalists is to erase national borders and homogenize all countries and cultures under one economic and governmental system. They have openly admitted to this plan on numerous occasions. One of the most revealing quotes on the agenda comes from Clinton Administration Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbot, who stated in Time magazine that:

“In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority… National sovereignty wasn’t such a great idea after all.”

Washington Free Beacon.

Reading an account of Kamala Harris’s political career is like examining the stalled career of a can’t-miss baseball prospect struggling to hit major league pitching. In Charlie Spiering’s new biography of the vice president, Amateur Hour: Kamala Harris in the White House, the book portrays Harris as a hyped candidate who consistently makes egregious missteps to the point that being a heartbeat away from the presidency is giving Democratic operatives heartburn.

There are two things clear about Harris after reading Spiering’s account: She’s a cautious politician who reflects conventional progressive thinking. She’s also shown consistently poor judgment about the direction of American politics, particularly in her role as a national figure, tacking far to the left as a senator and during her unsuccessful 2020 presidential campaign and later, serving as an emissary to the left in the White House, even when her political fortunes demanded a broader appeal.

Read it.

On March 15, federal judge Aleta Trauger “ordered the Federal Bureau of Investigation to hand over documents to her for a private review in an ongoing Freedom of Information Act case that will decide if the public will see documents related to the Covenant School shooter’s motives.” The documents did not emerge before March 27, one year since Audrey Hale, 28, shot dead nine-year-olds Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs, along with Covenant headmaster Katherine Koonce, custodian Mike Hill and teacher Cynthia Peak.

On the anniversary of the mass murder, the Tennessee Star named all the victims and noted that the shooting “was carried out by Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who identified as transgender.” The Tennesseean named the victims “gunned down in a mass shooting,” but the shooter was not identified. The Associated Press story failed to name any victims or identify Audrey Hale, whose possible motive also escaped notice.

Power Line.

For some months now, Chairman James Comer and his House Oversight and Accountability Committee have patiently been assembling evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption. This has been done largely out of public view, not because the proceedings have been in any way secret but because the Democratic Party press has, for the most part, acknowledged the investigation only in order to jeer at it.

In fact, though, the evidence of Biden’s guilt is clear. The committee has traced $24 million in payments by foreign entities into Biden family bank accounts. No discernible services–legal services, that is–were provided in exchange for those payments, and some of the money went to individuals who could not plausibly have provided such valuable services, like Hallie Biden.

The press has often mischaracterized the issue as whether Joe Biden was involved in his son Hunter’s businesses. To which the logical question is, what businesses are those? Hunter has not run any business that manufactures products or provides services–other than Joe’s, of course. The only business Hunter and James Biden engaged in was influence peddling. And in all likelihood the $24 million we know about is only a portion of the Biden family’s ill-gotten gains.

Read it.

The “Black Mayors’ Coalition on Crime” gathered this week in Memphis, Tennessee to discuss the dangers of crime across the US, as well as apparent solutions to the growing threat. The question is, was the meeting really about stopping crime, or, was it all about maintaining optics and making the public believe crime is going down when it’s not?

It’s difficult to say because public and media access to the event was strictly limited. In many states private meetings between public officials related to policy are illegal. However, in Tennessee the regulations are a bit more lax in terms of what constitutes a “meeting subject to law.”

The Tennessee Open Meetings Act defines a “meeting” as “the convening of a governing body of a public body for which a quorum is required to make a decision or to deliberate toward a decision.” A “governing body” is “any public body [consisting] of two or more members, with the authority to make decisions for or recommendations to a public body on policy or administration.”

In other words, a quorum is required, which means Tennessee was very carefully chosen by the Black Mayor’s Coalition (the vast majority of them Democrats) because it allowed them more legal room to hold closed door meetings. But why not include the press and the public in this discourse?

Perhaps they don’t want people seeing what goes on behind the curtain?

Read it.

The Italian journalist Eugenia Fiore recently paid a visit to a no-go zone in France as part of her investigation into the murder of a high school teacher by a culture-enriching “youth” named Mohammed. She and her camera crew were attacked for filming in front of a mosque, and Ms. Fiore was knocked to the ground, beaten, and kicked. The police were of no help. They averred that the journalist was, after all, Muslim territory, and besides, she hadn’t been veiled.

You had it coming to you, girl!

Newsweek.

According to legal analyst and attorney Jonathan Turley, President Joe Biden faces “clear” evidence he lied amid his impeachment inquiry.

In December, the House of Representatives voted to launch an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden in a 221-212 vote, with members voting along party lines. Republicans allege that while serving as vice president under President Barack Obama, Biden used his influence to improperly support the business activities of his son, from which they suggest he gained financially. The president has said he had no involvement with Hunter’s business dealings

Republican Rep. James Comer proposed in a letter Thursday that Biden appear on April 16 to testify before the committee. Comer cited testimony at last week’s public hearing from former business associates of Hunter Biden — Tony Bobulinski and Jason Galanis — in which Comer said their testimony contradicted statements the president has made about his involvement in his son’s business dealings.

WABC-TV.

Eyewitness News captured what a growing number of property owners and police are dealing with on a daily basis – a squatter standoff.

“It’s not fair that I, as the homeowner, have to be going through this,” Adele Andaloro said.

Andaloro inherited her family’s home in Flushing, Queens after her parents passed away. She was in the process of selling it when she noticed a problem. Someone changed the entire front door and lock of her home.

Read it.

Imagine a movie studio promoting a film by amplifying Islamic outrage against it.

You can’t. It’s impossible.

The same holds for most major religions. Antisemitism is flaring on the far-Left, meaning a movie studio would be loathe to target that community at this point.

Christians? It’s fair game.

Always.

Read it.

On Thursday, March 28th, Donald Trump attended the wake of a New York police officer who had been killed in the line of duty. That same day, Democrat President Joe Biden was joined by two former Democrat presidents, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, at a fundraiser where attendees had to pony up $500,000 to get in the door.

The stark difference between the two events illustrates with painful clarity the divide that has gradually emerged in American society over the past 30 years. It is a divide between an increasingly arrogant elite and the American people they look down their noses at with contempt in their eyes.

Read it.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) was confronted by a mourner during the wake for slain NYPD officer Jonathan Diller Friday afternoon, after which a round of applause could be heard as she left the scene.

Read it.

On the face of it, the antitrust action against Apple is about their secure communications network. The Justice Department wants the company to share their services with other networks. As with so many other antitrust actions in history, this is really about the government’s taking sides in competitive disputes between companies, in this case Samsung and other smartphone providers. They resent the way Apple products all work together. They want that changed.

The very notion that the government is trying to protect consumers in this case is preposterous. Apple is a success not because they are exploitative but because they make products that users like, and they like them so much that they buy ever more. It’s not uncommon that a person gets an iPhone and then a Macbook, an iPad, and then AirPods. All play well together.

The American Mind.

Dr. John Eastman is a patriot, a constitutional scholar, a lawyer, a husband, and a father. He is our friend, colleague, and fellow board member of the Claremont Institute, who has spent his life defending the principles upon which this great nation was founded. After a ten week travesty of a trial, a California Bar Court judge, seeking to criminalize disagreements in constitutional interpretation, recommended that John should lose his license to practice law in California.

The term “lawfare” has become part of the American vernacular in the past few years. It means the manipulation and corruption of the legal system to gain political advantage and attack and destroy one’s political opponents. The most famous example of lawfare is, of course, the shocking abuse of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Attorney General’s office in the state of New York, and the District Attorney’s office in Fulton County Georgia in an attempt to destroy the current Republican candidate for the presidency, Donald J. Trump. But the assault on Trump is just the most widely publicized example of this evil practice, which is destroying the rule of law in America.

Anyone who dares to oppose the reigning progressive regime, at any level and in any way, is a potential target of this lawfare. Especially targeted are those who dared to raise any question about the legality of the 2020 election. Prominent among these is John Eastman.

Read it.

A recent Washington Post article indicated that only 12% of the reading public were interested in reading science fiction.  A perusal of bestseller lists for science fiction shows an even more alarming truth: the science fiction books that do sell are a shrinkingly small number of reprints, classics and novels that had been adapted into movies.

The December 2023 bestseller list on Publisher’s Weekly contained only two novels published originally in 2023: Pestilence by Laura Thalassa (an odd addition to the Science Fiction list as it is marketed as fantasy / romance) and Starter Villain by John Scalzi. The bestselling SF novel in that time period, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, sold almost 17,000 copies. This puts it far below the bottom of the top 10 overall fiction bestseller list where Sarah J. Maas’ romantasy novel A Court of Mist and Fury sits at 19,097 copies sold.

Science fiction is not selling.

Read it.

White House reporters like to portray themselves as the guardians of democracy who hold the powerful accountable, but if a Thursday Politico report by Eli Stokols, Lauren Egan, and Ben Johnson is true, they are also a collection of thieves who steal things from Air Force One.

Theft is apparently so rampant aboard the presidential aircraft that the authors describe it as “shockingly common — a rite of passage where the thieves proudly discuss and display their stolen goods.”

They report that the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, NBC’s Kelly O’Donnell, had to remind her colleagues that such behavior is not permitted and does not reflect well on the press corps.

Q; What’s the difference between a progressive and a criminal?

A: Opportunity.

Read it.

pupils to remove her headscarf—forcing him to leave his job. In turn, the French government has announced that it intends to lodge a complaint against the young woman behind the scandal.

The affair is further proof of the authorities’ inability to deal with Islamist threats, particularly in schools.

Just think: If there were no Muslims, there would be no Muslim terrorists.

I Tested 7 Temperature Control Mugs to Figure Out If They’re Worth It.

Our favorite temperature control mug is the Ember Travel Mug. It can be controlled via its app or the mug itself, is easy to use, and is travel-friendly. Our budget-friendly pick is the ionMug and Charging Coaster. In our tests, it worked well, but we do question its longevity.

Read it.

Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation announced Wednesday it will pour $1 million into the Black Panther building, a planned $80 million complex in Oakland, Calif., that will house 79 subsidized apartment units as well as a grocery store, community garden, and fitness center, all run by former prison inmates. Former Black Panther party leader Elaine Brown is spearheading the redevelopment of the building, which stands on the plot of land where Black Panther Party cofounder Huey P. Newton shot and killed a police officer in October 1967.

Thug culture ascendant.

Read it.

Two high-speed military cargo ships are stuck in the Port of Baltimore following Tuesday morning’s collapse of the 1.6-mile-long Francis Scott Key Bridge. The major US East Coast port has been paralyzed for several days as the bridge collapse prevents inbound and outbound vessel traffic along the harbor’s channel.

Using the automatic identification system, or AIS, data that tracks commercial vessels, three bulk carriers, two general cargo ships, one vehicle carrier, one tanker, and four Ready Reserve Force vessels (RRF), along with the container ship Dali that struck the bridge, are trapped in the harbor, according to the shipping blog gCaptain.

Read it.

In a 40-minute audio message published on Thursday, the terrorist group Islamic State (IS) threatened attacks on Jews and Christians all over the world, while once again claiming responsibility for the Moscow massacre that left more than 140 dead and 360 injured.

In the message, IS spokesman Abu Hudhaifah al-Ansari called on the movement’s “lone wolves” to “attack and target crusaders (Christians) and Jews everywhere,” particularly in Europe, the U.S., and Israel during the month of Ramadan (which ends April 10th).

The latest IS threat comes just days after several European nations issued warnings of potential attacks in Europe by the terrorist group.

Just think: If there were no Islam, there would be no Islamic State.

Read it.

Prior to October 7, there were roughly two million Arab citizens of Israel but no Jewish citizens in Gaza. Gazans in 2006 voted in Hamas to rule them. It summarily executed its Palestinian Authority rivals. Hamas canceled all future scheduled elections. It established a dictatorship and diverted hundreds of billions of dollars in international aid to build a vast underground labyrinth of military installations.

Thank you, Joe Biden.

Washington Post.

They realize that, no matter how much they may dislike Trump, he’s still better than Biden.

The Guardian.

That flapping sound you hear is chickens coming home to roost, proglodytes.

Read it.

An illegal migrant’s viral TikTok video that essentially explains how to “invade” unoccupied residences and assert squatter’s rights has brought attention to a “dangerous” trend that law enforcement fears is only going to worsen.

Gee, I wonder why….

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

For now, at least, I hope everyone has a blessed Good Friday and Easter weekend with your friends and family. For the Orthodox readers, you will have to wait another month this year, but that is how it goes some years. Catholics, of course, will be saying a special thanks for the Episcopal Church. It is a reminder that no matter how terrible things have gotten for Catholics, it can always get worse.

Amen to that.

Newsbusters.

On March 25, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart uncorked a typical not-so-funny sermon about how Donald Trump overvaluing real-estate properties was not a “victimless crime.” Trump has been found liable for fraud despite no banker or financier ever claiming Trump victimized them.

Then the New York Post reported talk-show host Tim Pool tweeted that in 2014, Stewart sold his 6,280-square-foot Tribeca duplex to financier Parag Pande for $17.5 million. But according to 2013-2014 assessor records obtained by the Post, the property had an estimated market-value at only $1.882 million. The actual assessor valuation was even lower, at $847,174.

“Records also show that Stewart paid significantly lower property taxes, which were calculated based on that assessor valuation price,” the Post reported, “precisely what he called Trump out for doing in his Monday monologue.” In his original tenure at Comedy Central, Stewart was making an estimated $25-30 million dollars a year for his satirical labor.

Read it.

Heart scarring was detected more than one year after COVID-19 vaccination in some people who suffered myocarditis following receipt of a shot, researchers reported in new studies.

A third of 60 patients with follow-up cardiac imaging done more than 12 months after their myocarditis diagnosis had persistent late gadolinium enhancement (LGE), which is, in the majority of cases, reflective of heart scarring, Australian researchers reported in a preprint of a new study, published on March 22.

Read it.

Now if they can just do that to fleeing felons….

UPDATE: Traffic jams, AirTags and GPS darts are ways NY, NJ are trying to stop car theft

Read it.

In a move which may force the lunatic greens to storm the White House, on Wednesday the federal government announced that it would provide a $1.5 billion loan to restart a nuclear power plant in southwestern Michigan. NJ-based Holtec International acquired the 800-megawatt Palisades plant in 2022 with plans to dismantle it, but with support from the state of Michigan and the Biden administration, the emphasis has shifted to restarting the nuclear power plant by late 2025 instead.

Read it.

After 9/11, elected officials told us that Islam had nothing to do with terrorism. And that accusing Muslims of supporting Islamic terrorism was a dangerous bigotry they dubbed “Islamophobia.”

In the decades since, the same speech has been delivered after every Islamic terror attack.

Now, as Muslims and leftists riot in support of Hamas, after Islamic groups and public figures from campus groups to the leader of the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) celebrated the Oct 7 atrocities, we are not allowed to suggest they support terrorism.

Power Line.

On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Texas cannot enforce its border control law, SB 4, because it conflicts with federal law that preempts the field of immigration. The decision is here. Jonathan Turley analyzes the issue here.

Briefly, Turley thinks the panel decision is a correct interpretation of the Constitution and of case law on preemption. The constitutional issue turns on the meaning of “invasion,” which the states are empowered to resist under Article I of the Constitution, and against which the federal government is required to defend the states under Article IV. For the moment, I don’t want to debate that conclusion. Let’s assume it is true that the best interpretation of the Constitution and existing case law is that states cannot act to stop illegal immigration because that is a federal role, even if the federal government has completely abdicated its responsibilities. What then?

Whether or not the influx of millions of illegals across the southern border is an invasion in constitutional terms, it certainly is an invasion in common parlance. And for a border state like Texas, it is a comprehensive disaster. The people of Texas plainly have a right to defend themselves against this evil. If being part of the Union makes it legally impossible to defend themselves, it is only right that they should consider whether they want to remain in the Union. This is doubly true if the problem arises from a malicious determination on the part of the federal government to abandon, indeed subvert, one of the basic responsibilities that Texas and other states have delegated to that government.

The Foundry.

Over the past 18 months, The Daily Signal’s Virginia Allen and I have visited the border from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. What we saw in all our travels was the same: President Joe Biden’s deliberate abandonment of every measure that has worked in the past to reduce incentives for illegal immigration, combined with diminished enforcement of immigration law in the interior, has attracted economic migrants from all over the globe.

People from over 180 countries who want to enter the U.S. but have no legal basis to do so know that the Biden administration will let them in and allow them to stay, so they come. It’s as simple as that.

Read it.

While Piketty’s claims about the desirability of egalitarianism and wealth taxes are to some extent subjective, his book and his reputation are premised on the claim that he carefully assembled data that showed an increasing return to capital over time.

He claims to have based his work on three centuries of data.

Unfortunately, for fans of Piketty and left-wing economists who prefer a more fact-based economics approach, it looks like Piketty’s data work is quite sloppy.

In 2015, Magness and Murphy pointed to a wide range of flaws or mistakes in the book writing that they found “evidence of pervasive errors of historical fact, opaque methodological choices, and the cherry-picking of sources to construct favorable patterns from ambiguous data. Additional evidence suggests that Piketty used a highly distortive data assumption from the Soviet Union to accentuate one of his main historical claims about global “capitalism” in the twentieth century.” According to Magness and Murphy, Piketty bases his measure of 150 years of the world economy on a sample size of just six individual years and just extrapolates the rest of the data! Yikes!

Quillette.

The left is undergoing an overdue reckoning. Progressive mass movements have achieved little more than mass in recent years. Occupy Wall Street didn’t beget economic redistribution, to say nothing of Marxist revolution. Large-scale marches for gun control and climate action produced neither. Following the police killing of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter blossomed into the largest social movement in U.S. history, drawing millions into the streets to demand racial justice, police reform, and even an “end” to policing. What they got instead were some statues taken down and municipalities quietly rolling back hollow promises to defund the police. Street protests and social media fervour dissipate as quickly as they roil over. Placards hit the garbage bins. Profile pictures boasting support for, as the meme goes, hashtag “the current thing” get changed out. The world moves on. Nothing fundamentally changes.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

The American Mind.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was so supremely confident that his thumb on the scale can tip the U.S. presidential election that he just issued a cash demand to President Biden along with a threat: give me money or Donald Trump wins. The spectacle, shameful for all parties, played out on the grand stage of CBS’s 60 Minutes Sunday broadcast.

As my book Overrun shows, Biden launched and nurtured a mass immigration crisis for three straight years. The knock-on effects of this debacle are now being felt all over the country, and not just in conservative enclaves. These days, Biden’s immigration policy registers as so deeply unpopular with the American people that López Obrador offered the old “silver-or-lead” option to the Biden campaign on national television.

If President Biden wants his mass migration crisis to recede from public view before the election, López Obrador will slow the flow of migrants—for the ripe price of a $20 billion down payment. This cash would be sent under the paper-thin cover of the debunked “root causes” theory of mass migration, which proposes that money from the destination country can rebuild countries generating outmigration so that their citizens want to stay.

The American Prospect. (blue check member of the Narrative Media)

Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

‘Neoliberal’ is Narrative-speak for ‘classical liberal’ and pretty much always used incorrectly.

The Foundry.

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson and his progressives promised that the Federal Reserve would avert both depressions and inflation, while preventing the wealthy from controlling America’s financial markets at the expense of the poor.

More than a century later, it’s clear that was all a lie, and the Fed has helped create a permanent American underclass.

The Fed was designed to transfer wealth from the American people to the government, mostly through the hidden tax of inflation. But this process has prevented countless American families from being able to save and get ahead, because their savings are constantly losing value.

The purchasing power of the U.S. dollar is just about 10% of what it was when I got my first job out of college in 1978.

The Spectator.

With Donald Trump confirmed as the Republican nominee, a group of NeverTrump conservatives have tried to hit the former president somewhere vulnerable: the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. The Lincoln Project, an organization led by old-school Republicans, has released a video parodying one of the tunes most associated with Trump’s rallies — the theme song from The Phantom of the Opera.

The American Mind.

The number of Americans who die each year from an opioid overdose has exploded over the last two decades. Each year, over 70,000 Americans succumb to synthetic opioids, mainly fentanyl; that’s more than the total number of American soldiers who died during the Vietnam War. The rate of deaths per capita has quadrupled since the turn of the century.

Most of the fentanyl flooding the country is produced in Mexico by the cartels. These are the same cartels that also smuggle in weapons and traffic hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people across the southern border. The cartels are able to act so freely and with such impunity because the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known popularly as AMLO, has taken a laissez-faire approach to their dealings. AMLO has said he believes a “hugs not bullets” approach is the best way to deal with the cartels.

López Obrador recently reiterated his stance on not taking orders from America regarding combatting the drug cartels. Throughout his presidency, AMLO has provided various justifications for his approach of prioritizing dialogue over confrontation with these criminal organizations. He has emphasized that violence cannot be countered with more violence and has highlighted the importance of addressing the root causes of drug cartel violence such as poverty and limited opportunities. López Obrador explicitly states that his decision to refrain from pursuing the cartels aligns with his “Mexico First” policy, and that the issue of drug overdoses primarily affects the United States, not Mexico. In other words, your problem, not mine.