53percenter's Blog

Social justice affects military readiness.

Via Stars and Stripes:

The Trump administion on Friday once again asked the Supreme Court to bypass the usual legal process to take on another controversial issue — President Donald Trump’s decision to ban transgender people from military service.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco asked the justices to consolidate the challenges to the ban — which so far have been successful in lower courts — and rule on the issue in its current term.

The challenges are to the administration’s order that would prohibit transgender men and women from enlisting, possibly subject current service members to discharge and deny certain medical care. The order reverses an Obama administration policy allowing transgender men and women to serve openly and to receive funding for sex-reassignment surgery.

Federal judges so far have prohibited the Trump order from being implemented.

“The decisions imposing those injunctions are wrong, and they warrant this Court’s immediate review,” Francisco wrote.

Trump in July 2017 suprised military leaders and members of Congress when he abruptly announced the proposed ban in several tweets. In announcing the change, Trump said he was “doing the military a great favor” by “coming out and just saying it.”

Challengers have used such statements to argue that the directive is the result of discrimination rather than a study of how allowing transgender personnel affects the military, and lower court judges largely have agreed.

“There is absolutely no support for the claim that the ongoing service of transgender people would have any negative effect on the military at all. In fact, there is considerable evidence that it is the discharge and banning of such individuals that would have such effects,” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a case filed in the District of Columbia.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is scheduled to hear an appeal of the ruling next month.

The Trump administration has taken an aggressive posture when lower courts have ruled against it on important issues. It has asked the Supreme Court — with varying degrees of success — to accept the cases before they have run through the normal appeals process. The administration argues that such cases can only be settled by the high court.

Keep reading…

Much of today’s incivility and contempt for personal liberty has its roots on college campuses, and most of the uncivil and contemptuous are people with college backgrounds. Let’s look at a few highly publicized recent examples of incivility and attacks on free speech.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, were accosted and harassed by a deranged left-wing mob as they were leaving a dinner at Georgetown University. Sen. McConnell was harassed by protesters at Reagan National Airport, as well as at several venues in Kentucky. Sen. Ted Cruz and his wife were harassed at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Afterward, a group called Smash Racism DC wrote: “No — you can’t eat in peace — your politics are an attack on all of us. You’re (sic) votes are a death wish. Your votes are hate crimes.” Other members of Congress — such as Andy Harris, Susan Collins and Rand Paul — have been physically attacked or harassed by leftists. Most recent is the case of Fox News political commentator Tucker Carlson. A leftist group showed up at his house at night, damaging his front door and chanting, “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!” “Racist scumbag, leave town!”

Mayhem against people with different points of view is excused as just deserts for what is seen as hate speech. Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray discovered this when he was shouted down at Middlebury College and the professor escorting him was sent to the hospital with injuries. Students at the University of California, Berkeley shut down a controversial speaker and caused riot damage estimated at $100,000. Protesters at both UCLA and Claremont McKenna College disrupted scheduled lectures by Manhattan Institute scholar Heather Mac Donald.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has discovered so-called bias response teams on hundreds of American college campuses. Bias response teams report to campus officials — and sometimes to law enforcement officers — speech that may cause “alarm, anger, or fear” or that might otherwise offend. Drawing pictures or cartoons that belittle people because of their beliefs or political affiliation can be reported as hate speech. Universities expressly set their sights on prohibiting constitutionally protected speech. As FIRE reported in 2017, hundreds of universities nationwide now maintain Orwellian systems that ask students to report — often anonymously — their neighbors, friends and professors for any instances of supposed biased speech and expression.

A recent Brookings Institution poll found that nearly half of college students believe that hate speech is not protected by the First Amendment. That’s nonsense; it is. Fifty-one percent of college students think they have a right to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. Nineteen percent of students think that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking. Over 50 percent agree that colleges should prohibit speech and viewpoints that might offend certain people. One shouldn’t be surprised at all if these visions are taught and held by many of their professors. Colleges once taught and promoted an understanding of Western culture. Today many professors and the college bureaucracy teach students that they’re victims of Western culture and values.

Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Whoever would overthrow the Liberty of a Nation, must begin by subduing the Freeness of Speech.” Much later, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart said, “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” From the Nazis to Stalinists to Maoists, tyrants have always started out supporting free speech, just as American leftists did during the 1960s. Their support for free speech is easy to understand. Speech is vital for the realization of their goals of command, control and confiscation. The right to say what they please is their tool for indoctrination, propagandizing and proselytization. Once the leftists gain control, as they have at many universities, free speech becomes a liability and must be suppressed. This is increasingly the case on university campuses. Much of the off-campus incivility we see today is the fruit of what a college education has done to our youth.

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at www.creators.com.

Obstruction of justice.

Via Fox News:

Monica Lewinsky has opened up for the first time about how Bill Clinton convinced her “to break the law” and lie under oath.

In the final part of the A&E docuseries “The Clinton Affair,” Lewinsky revealed that Clinton convinced her to deny the affair if she was called to testify in the Paula Jones case. The 45-year-old recalled the former president telling her that she could avoid being deposed if she denied the affair in an affidavit.

Lewinsky said that Clinton had called her at 2:30 in the morning to let her know that she was on the witness list for the Paula Jones case.

“I was petrified. I was frantic about my family and this becoming public,” Lewinsky tearfully recalled. “Thankfully, Bill helped me lock myself back from that and he said I could probably sign an affidavit to get out of it, and he didn’t even know if a 100 percent I would be subpoenaed.”

She was subpoenaed a few days later.

And though she clarified that Clinton never said the words “you’re going to have to lie here,” Lewinsky pointed out that he also never said “we’re going to have to tell the truth.”

After being subpoenaed, the former White House staffer decided to talk to attorney Vernon Jordan, a close friend of Clinton. In the documentary, Lewinsky claims that she managed to secure a meeting with Jordan on her own and from that meeting, she was introduced to lawyer Frank Carter.

“Frank Carter explained to me if I’d signed an affidavit denying having had an intimate relationship with the president it might mean I wouldn’t have to be deposed in the Paula Jones case,” she recounted. “I did feel uncomfortable about it but I felt it was the right thing to do, ironically, right? So, the right thing to do, to break the law.”

Keep reading…

Parkland student Kyle Kashuv is asking others to sign a petition he started to encourage President Donald Trump to give a student who died in the Parkland Shooting while helping others the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Peter Wang, 15, was a Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (JROTC) cadet who was killed while holding the door to let others out of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February last year during an active shooter situation where a total of 17 students and staffers were killed.

Wang and two other JROTC members who were killed, Alaina Petty, 14, and Martin Duque, 14, were honored by the Florida National Guard.

Wang was posthumously accepted to the U.S Military Academy at West Point— where he dreamed of going to school— “for his heroic actions,” the academy said in a statement.

“It was an appropriate way for USMA to honor this brave young man,” the statement said. “West Point has given posthumous offers of admission in very rare instances for those candidates or potential candidate’s whose actions exemplified the tenets of Duty, Honor, and Country.”

The petition claims Wang was buried in his JROTC uniform.

In an interview with The Daily Wire, Kashuv said that his initiative is “a great way to unify all Americans around something we can all agree on.”

“Peter is the very definition of a hero,” Kashuv said. “If you go through the past honorees, they’re all American heroes. Whether it’s sporting heroes, military heroes, musical heroes, etc. there’s no doubt in my mind that Peter belongs among those names and exulted even higher, to be honest.”

“It’s also incredibly important that the president, on behalf of a very grateful nation, is given the opportunity to thank Mr. and Mrs. Wang for raising a hero,” Kashuv added.

The petition has been shared or retweeted by the Founder and CEO of the Young Turks, Ceny Uygur; former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell, and The Daily Wire’s Editor in Chief, Ben Shapiro, among others.

“This is an easy nonpartisan issue all Americans can agree with,” Uygur tweeted, “Let’s honor Peter Wang!”

Yale economics professor Howard Forman shared the petition and thanked Kashuv for “reminding us one of the many things we have to be thankful for. And the many people who have sacrificed to keep us all safer.”

So far, the petition has garnered more than 3,200 signatures of its 100,000 signature goal.

Kashuv said that in the wake of the shooting, he and other student activists entered the national spotlight causing Wang and others to be “overshadowed.”

“It’s an utter shame that people like myself and other activists took the spotlight,” Kashuv said. “We messed up. We should’ve kept saying in every media situation that we must honor and remember those we lost, especially Peter and Coach Feis who are heroes.”

“The Presidential Medal of Freedom is the highest civilian honor possible,” Kashuv added. “There’s literally nobody who deserves this more than Peter.”

To most eyes, it’s just a tiny stone, so plain that it probably wouldn’t get a second glance.

To archaeology experts in Israel, however, that stone took on deep historical meaning after it was uncovered in Jerusalem.

According to The Times of Israel, an extremely rare “beka” stone was recently unearthed at the Western Wall, an ancient portion of Temple Mount in the famous biblical city.

Inscribed with Hebrew script, bekas were used as a crude form of currency by religious pilgrims making their way to the holy site. Today, however, they’re incredibly hard to find.

Straight from the #Bible: Tiny First Temple #Beka Stone Weight Unearthed In #Jerusalem, The #Eternal #Capital Of #Israel! https://t.co/PXb3fw8YMh via @timesofisrael

— JohnJohn (@realJWJ777) November 22, 2018

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The Israel Antiquities Authority told The Times that only a few beka stones have ever been discovered in Jerusalem, and the one just found in Jerusalem seems to have a unique inscription.

The lettering on this item is “mirrored,” and experts believe that a seal-maker who was used to making mirrored images was the ancient artisan behind the historic piece.

“Apparently, the seal craftsman got confused when he engraved the inscription on the weight and mistakenly used mirror script as he was used to doing,” archaeologist Eli Shukron said.

Beka stones were used as a sort of intermediate currency or weight that was used as a measure of value.

“The word ‘beka’ appears twice in the Torah: first as the weight of gold in a nose ring given to matriarch Rebecca in the Book of Genesis, and later in the Book of Exodus as a weight for the donation brought by the Jewish people for the maintenance of the Temple and the census,” the Israeli newspaper explained.

In addition to the rarity of this find, experts are also excited about its historical and biblical significance.

“The Bible, the artifact found close to Solomon’s Temple, north of the City of David, the Temple foundations — everything is connected,” Shukron said.

It is estimated that the rare discovery may go back to around a thousand years before Christ.

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“This 3,000-year-old beka weight, inscribed with ancient Hebrew, was likely used in the First Temple, anchoring once again the deep historical connection of the Jewish people to Jerusalem,” said Doron Spielman, vice president of the City of David Foundation.

That point may seem trivial, but it’s vitally important to Israelis. Palestinians also lay claim to Jerusalem despite the long history of Jewish roots there, and that dispute has dominated much of Middle Eastern and world politics.

If nothing else, the beka discovery is a vital reminder that we are not isolated and disconnected from the past. Understanding our history and the people who shaped the world we live in is important, and even a simple stone can speak volumes.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

To quote the great theologian Lucy Van Pelt, “Look, Charlie, let’s face it. We all know that Christmas is a big commercial racket. It’s run by a big eastern syndicate, you know.”

I’ve always found a certain irony in that line, given that “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was originally sponsored by the altruistic folks at Coca-Cola; in early airings, the can that Linus manages to shoot off of the fence with a snowball was actually a Coke.

However, the point was manifest: Yes, the Christmas season is overly commercialized, and the antidote isn’t to give into it but to anchor ourselves in the true meaning of the holiday, which is the birth of our Savior as Christians.

If you haven’t managed to catch “A Charlie Brown Christmas” in the last half-century, I apologize for the spoilers. At least you can still wait with bated breath to find out what happens to the poxed little sapling Charlie picks out from the Christmas tree lot.

But I digress. There’s a third option to the commercialization/Christian dichotomy coming out of Merrie England, which is either ingenious or horrifying, depending on how you look at it.

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At Lady Lumley’s School in Pickering, North Yorkshire, Christmas has been “banned” by officials for being too commercial — unless, of course, the students can convince one of the holiday’s apparatchiks otherwise.

“In an assembly this week, ‘Father Christmas’ told students about the true meaning of Christmas being ‘lost and buried under an avalanche of commercialization’ before announcing the holiday was canceled,” Fox News reported.

“Cards, gifts and Christmas activities were banned unless ‘persuasive arguments’ can be made to argue the real meaning of Christmas, he said.

“Children at the secondary school now have until November 30 to email their teacher to persuade her the school should celebrate Christmas.”

Leaving aside the obvious supererogatory red tape of making the teachers intermediaries in this whole shebang (I don’t think even Thomas Sowell’s arguments about the value of middlemen would justify this arrangement), this is more interesting than it might appear on its face.

“In assemblies this week, Mrs. Paul, one of our teachers of (religious education), spoke about Christmas and whether the message of Christmas has been lost and buried under an avalanche of commercialization,” headteacher Richard Bramley said.

“Christmas is a day celebrating the birth of Jesus and should be a time of goodwill to all, yet it can be a very stressful, expensive, argumentative and lonely time.”

Parents had mixed takes on the whole thing.

“I understand the way the RE teacher is trying to educate the kids. But it’s the way the kids have been told … Mine came in upset,” one parent said.

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“What’s all this about kids not being able to celebrate Christmas??” another wrote.

However, others seemed to agree with the message.

“Don’t know the details, but this actually sounds like quite a good exercise — getting everyone to actually think about what Christmas really is and why we should celebrate it,” one person said.

In terms of giving everyone a caveat lector on this matter, here’s my personal opinion: The only thing more annoying about Christmas than the over-commercialization of the holiday are the people and/or institutions that cannot be helped but to bang on about the over-commercialization of the holiday.

If you’re a Christian and don’t want to participate in the more capitalistic aspects of the season, you don’t have to. Like so many other things in this world, it’s a choice that is neither moral nor amoral. The controversy over this is also used far too often as a trojan horse to sneak anti-consumerist piffle into the holiday discussion by people who care exponentially less about the birth of Jesus than the habits of the earth-bound humans they’re fond of castigating.

As long as my consumption and celebration of the season is within scriptural boundaries and I still remember that this is, first and foremost, about the virgin birth of Jesus, I don’t particularly feel I need to be lectured by you or anyone else about what presents I buy or charities I give to. I doubt I’m alone in this; I’m sure at least some of those fictive couples in those rebarbative, interchangeable commercials in which they exchange bow-wrapped luxury crossovers under a synthetic Hollywood snowfall remember Luke 2 and keep it close to their hearts as they try out the heated seats.

This all being said, I have to throw some minor props in the direction of Pickering, North Yorkshire. The reason is encapsulated in that response where the parent complains about “the way the kids have been told… Mine came in upset.”

Oh. Good.

With all due respect, sir or madam, you’re sending your progeny to a religious school and you’re doing so of your own volition. Part of their education, one therefore assumes, involves the inculcation of Christian virtues.

It’s not like the headteacher was reading them Jonathan Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” (A popular second to “The Night Before Christmas” around the hearth on Dec. 24, as I’m sure you all know.) Their religious ed teachers came up with a unique way to get them to think about the birth of Jesus and how our increasingly secular world celebrates it. I’ve already delineated good reasons to be against this setup. A kid having a conniption isn’t one of them. In fact, it’s one of the things that leads me to believe the faculty at Lady Lumley made the right choice. Pun unintended given the season, but at least you can’t criticize them for giving in to the snowflake mentality.

Of course, the idea of Christmas being cancellable may present other theological issues, but one can’t help but sympathize with Headteacher Bramley when he points out how the religious ed teacher “cited the example of Christmas cards which bear no relation to the origin or meaning of Christmas but carry symbols we now recognize as associated with the holiday season, e.g Santa Claus who, in his modern incarnation, was probably invented by the Coca Cola company!”

As previously stated, Coca-Cola brought us “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” too. Both of these institutions — Charlie Brown and Saint Nick — can be in concert with or in opposition to the spirit of the holiday. Santa Claus can remind us to be cheerful givers for those in dire need even as we think we have too little of our own. He can also be a secular figure of avarice, stoking envy because of how little we believe we have.

As for Coca-Cola’s other baby, well, you don’t necessarily need to be Charlie Brown every waking moment of the season, always picking out the metaphorical dying seedling without ever glancing at the “great big shiny aluminum Christmas tree” because it would be “too consumerist.” On the other hand, it’s probably not a good idea to be Lucy Van Pelt, always fixated on whether Santa will bring you real estate. Whether this will teach the children of Lady Lumley’s the difference is anyone’s guess, and whether the faculty’s heart is in the right place is debatable. However, you can’t fault them for inducing boredom in religious studies.

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I remember being vaguely surprised when Keith Olbermann showed up as a political commentator. He had been, after all, a staple on ESPN. I ingenuously figured that the people of ESPN lived a monastic existence where they pored over our great nation’s sporting life and held long discussions about the semiotics of the Philly Phanatic and whether or not the USFL and spring professional football was a sign of a hopelessly decadent civilization. They were above and/or below politics.

I was quite the naif, I suppose. Of course the personalities on ESPN had political opinions; they were human beings, right? However, even after I was disabused of the notion that there was some sort of sportsmanly cloister up in Bristol, Connecticut, I still figured there would be some sort of line separating ESPN and straight-up politics.

It seems I was credulous on that account, as well. While the network has tried to tamp down on some of its excesses (we don’t hear so much Max Kellerman telling us all how playing the national anthem at games is inherently political, for instance, and Jemele Hill seems to have departed sports reporting for Olbermanville), it’s still likely one factor in a huge $1.44 billion loss that the network is likely to take with a new round of cord-cutting.

“ESPN has shed about 2 million domestic subscribers over the past 12 months, according to Disney’s newly released annual report,” Variety reported this week.

“ESPN’s total U.S. subscriber base stands at about 86 million, per Disney’s report for its 2018 fiscal year, which ended in September. That sub number compares to 88 million as reported in Disney’s fiscal 2017 report.”

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Clay Travis’ Outkick the Coverage notes how much of an issue this is.

“Now the positive for ESPN is that the rate of subscriber decline seems to have slowed this year, but the negative is that since 2011 ESPN has now lost 15 million cable and satellite subscribers,” Travis wrote Friday.

“Those 15 million lost subscribers equate to $1.44 billion a year in lost yearly revenue that ESPN will never be able to book. (This is based on an $8 a month subscriber cost for ESPN multiplied by 12 months in the year.) Again, this isn’t just a one time yearly revenue loss, this is a loss in yearly revenue forever.

“Now every cable and satellite channel is losing subscribers — as dumb Twitter users who don’t read this article will immediately respond in my mentions — but the impact disproportionately impacts ESPN for two reasons: 1. the network makes far more in revenue off the cable bundle than any other channel so it stands to lose, by far, the most off the collapsing business model and 2. the network has guaranteed tens of billions in sports rights fee payments over the next decade and more to sports leagues.”

Theoretically, ESPN should be the linchpin of cable’s strategy going forward. It has live sports, supposedly the one thing that’s saving the traditional TV model in the streaming age. It also has the three major U.S. sports leagues — the NFL, the NBA and Major League Baseball.

At least for this week, executives at ESPN can crow about the ratings for “Monday Night Football.” For those of you who aren’t NFL fans, last week’s matchup featured arguably the two best teams in the league — the 9-1 Los Angeles Rams and the 9-1 Kansas City Chiefs — in a 54-51 shootout Rams win that saw the lead change roughly 842 times. It also saw ratings up 57 percent over the Week 11 matchup last year.

There’s also the fact that NFL ratings are up this season in total, albeit by a more modest 3 percent. That’s after several years of steep declines, however, which means they’re not anywhere near back to where they were.

And while good matchups and tons of offense are part of the reason behind the slight rise, there’s also the fact that there haven’t been as many national anthem protests this season. Of course, there are also still fans staying away — again, something that can be attributed to politics.

In terms of the NFL, ESPN definitely has issues. It’s paying $2 billion a year for “Monday Night Football” right now, a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t proposition.

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“Remember, it’s even worse than this too, it’s the ‘Monday Night Football’ deal which allows ESPN to show NFL highlights,” Travis wrote.

“Even if ESPN is outbid or can’t afford to purchase ‘Monday Night Football’ rights, the company still would be forced to pay hundreds of millions, if not a billion, just for the right to show NFL highlights at all.”

ESPN can’t necessarily control politics in the NFL. The network can control politics on its own programming — something it’s done a terrible job of. How much money that’s cost ESPN directly is anyone’s guess.

What we have is a number showing how much it’s lost in subscribers. ESPN was supposed to be what stemmed the cord-cutting trend. That doesn’t seem to be what’s happening — and its politics almost certainly have played some role in that.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

The migrant caravan making its way to the U.S. in a bid to cut the line ahead of legal immigrants has revealed quite a few instances of chutzpah and ingratitude, in part because its participants aren’t really the mere moms and kids fleeing violence that their organizers say they are.

The instance that stands out is the one of a rather well-fed-looking Honduran woman named Miriam Celaya holding up a plate of tortillas and beans donated by the Mexicans, screwing up her nose disdainfully at the plate that looks as though it actually had fingers dragged through it, and explaining to a Deutsche Welle interviewer that it was food “for pigs.”

Get a load of the ingratitude:

Now, the food was donated food by the Mexicans, whose government is spending $26,000 a day on housing and feeding the migrants and it represents the normal cuisine of the country. When you go to Mexico, tortillas and beans are what you eat. It’s something everyone eats, too. War story: Back when I was a reporter for Forbes magazine, doing the Mexican billionaire’s list, I had breakfast with Mexican billionaire Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala, who owns much of the Corona beer fortune. What did she order at the restaurant we met at? Kid you not, tortillas and beans.

If the Honduran migrant here can’t handle tortillas and beans without dragging her fingers through the plate and calling it pig food, how is she going to handle American food? There’s kind of an assimilation deficit.

More importantly, there’s a gratitude deficit. And that was obvious enough to the Mexicans, who obviously see beggars who insist on being choosers. It’s not just bad character we are seeing – it’s actually proof that the migrants, with their new logo-festooned clothes and expensive strollers, aren’t really all that poor at all: like most migrants, they are members of their country’s lower middle classes, well fed to the point of being overweight as many are and accustomed to certain things. Tijuanans protested these migrants over the weekend, in part because of the ingratitude showed for the imposition thrown at them. At the protest Sunday, they actually did chants shouting their favor of tortillas and beans based on widespread outrage at the video.

Knowing her remarks were making the caravan migrants unpopular in Tijuana, Celaya, or someone making Celaya do it, apologized. According to Newsweek:

As a result, BBC Mundo reached out to the woman identified as Miriam Celaya, who “apologized to all Mexicans” on Wednesday. She explained to the media outlet that she left Honduras so that her daughter could receive treatment in the U.S for her hearing and speech loss.

But for us in the U.S., the apology revealed even more undesirable things. She apologized because she said she was coming to the U.S. to get health care for her daughter, who had some expensive medical conditions? That’s a rationale for ingratitude? Because it’s important to make gringo pay instead? She wasn’t looking to escape violence, she was coming for the free stuff. And that’s the sort of person the U.S. should let in above all other legal immigrants if the leftwing press is to be believed? Given her requirements on the food front, whatever free health care America has to offer her isn’t likely to satisfy her, either. And if the Mexicans are paying $26,000 in meals, imagine what the U.S. health care she’s not going to pay for is going to cost.

Guess who’s gets to pay for that one?

Image credit: YouTube screengrab

The migrant caravan making its way to the U.S. in a bid to cut the line ahead of legal immigrants has revealed quite a few instances of chutzpah and ingratitude, in part because its participants aren’t really the mere moms and kids fleeing violence that their organizers say they are.

The instance that stands out is the one of a rather well-fed-looking Honduran woman named Miriam Celaya holding up a plate of tortillas and beans donated by the Mexicans, screwing up her nose disdainfully at the plate that looks as though it actually had fingers dragged through it, and explaining to a Deutsche Welle interviewer that it was food “for pigs.”

Get a load of the ingratitude:

Now, the food was donated food by the Mexicans, whose government is spending $26,000 a day on housing and feeding the migrants and it represents the normal cuisine of the country. When you go to Mexico, tortillas and beans are what you eat. It’s something everyone eats, too. War story: Back when I was a reporter for Forbes magazine, doing the Mexican billionaire’s list, I had breakfast with Mexican billionaire Maria Asuncion Aramburuzabala, who owns much of the Corona beer fortune. What did she order at the restaurant we met at? Kid you not, tortillas and beans.

If the Honduran migrant here can’t handle tortillas and beans without dragging her fingers through the plate and calling it pig food, how is she going to handle American food? There’s kind of an assimilation deficit.

More importantly, there’s a gratitude deficit. And that was obvious enough to the Mexicans, who obviously see beggars who insist on being choosers. It’s not just bad character we are seeing – it’s actually proof that the migrants, with their new logo-festooned clothes and expensive strollers, aren’t really all that poor at all: like most migrants, they are members of their country’s lower middle classes, well fed to the point of being overweight as many are and accustomed to certain things. Tijuanans protested these migrants over the weekend, in part because of the ingratitude showed for the imposition thrown at them. At the protest Sunday, they actually did chants shouting their favor of tortillas and beans based on widespread outrage at the video.

Knowing her remarks were making the caravan migrants unpopular in Tijuana, Celaya, or someone making Celaya do it, apologized. According to Newsweek:

As a result, BBC Mundo reached out to the woman identified as Miriam Celaya, who “apologized to all Mexicans” on Wednesday. She explained to the media outlet that she left Honduras so that her daughter could receive treatment in the U.S for her hearing and speech loss.

But for us in the U.S., the apology revealed even more undesirable things. She apologized because she said she was coming to the U.S. to get health care for her daughter, who had some expensive medical conditions? That’s a rationale for ingratitude? Because it’s important to make gringo pay instead? She wasn’t looking to escape violence, she was coming for the free stuff. And that’s the sort of person the U.S. should let in above all other legal immigrants if the leftwing press is to be believed? Given her requirements on the food front, whatever free health care America has to offer her isn’t likely to satisfy her, either. And if the Mexicans are paying $26,000 in meals, imagine what the U.S. health care she’s not going to pay for is going to cost.

Guess who’s gets to pay for that one?

Image credit: YouTube screengrab