53percenter's Blog

President Trump in his first eighteen months in office eliminated many governmental regulations, opened federal offshore lands for drilling of oil and gas, greenlit the pipeline, negotiated a fairer trade deal with the E.U., and reduced the income tax rates and simplified the tax code.  This caused the economy to surge and grow.  For example, this quarter, the GDP grew by 4.1%.

As a result, more jobs are created, and we have the lowest unemployment rate since 2000.  Black unemployment is at the lowest rate since 1972.  In comparison, in 2010, under Obama, the black unemployment rate was 16.8%.  The unemployment rate for Hispanics in June 2018 dropped to 4.6%.

President Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

On foreign matters, President Trump is dealing with North Korea to reduce the tensions.  North Korea agreed to return the remains of U.S. servicemen killed in the Korean War, and fifty-five (55) have been returned.

President Trump cancelled the disastrous Iran deal, but Iran still keeps the $150 billion Obama gave it.

 NATO has agreed to pay its fair, proportionate share of expenses for defense.

On immigration, the Supreme Court upheld the travel bans issued by President Trump.

A real conservative would and should support this agenda and give credit to President Trump for moving this conservative agenda.

But George Will, regarded for the past forty years as a leading conservative commentator but now in his new role as the housebroken pet conservative at MSNBC, described President Trump as a “lowlife from Queens.”

Previously, Will called Trump the worst president in U.S. history.

According to Will, Trump is not merely a lowlife, but a lowlife from Queens.  Evidently, being from Queens is a further example of a lowlife.  Will fancies himself a wordsmith, so he did not use Hillary’s “deplorables” or Obama’s “those who cling to God and guns.”  But the meaning is the same.  Trump is a lowlife, so his supporters must be lowlifes to vote for him.

Why do so called conservatives like Will, Bill Kristol, and most of National Review and the Wall Street Journal hate Trump personally with such vitriol?  If they truly cared about a conservative agenda, as they have been writing for years, they would support Trump’s policies, give him credit, and refrain from the incessant personal attacks on President Trump.  What is the purpose of the constant personal attacks?  How do such vicious personal attacks help move the conservative agenda?

The Will boys view themselves as the self-appointed media spokesmen for conservatives.  They have seen their power and influence decrease substantially because of the diverse conservative sites on the internet, such as American Thinker, where one can read various viewpoints.  The Will boys have lost their monopoly, which they had for years, appearing on the Sunday morning TV shows, to “speak” the approved line. 

The Will boys are upset that deplorables, lowlifes, and those who cling to God and guns do not follow the wishes of the Will boys on voting.  They are offended that we did not vote for a polite “Jeb!”

Simply stated, we do not need Will, Kristol, etc.  They are history.

Photo credit: Croppped from Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

President Trump in his first eighteen months in office eliminated many governmental regulations, opened federal offshore lands for drilling of oil and gas, greenlit the pipeline, negotiated a fairer trade deal with the E.U., and reduced the income tax rates and simplified the tax code.  This caused the economy to surge and grow.  For example, this quarter, the GDP grew by 4.1%.

As a result, more jobs are created, and we have the lowest unemployment rate since 2000.  Black unemployment is at the lowest rate since 1972.  In comparison, in 2010, under Obama, the black unemployment rate was 16.8%.  The unemployment rate for Hispanics in June 2018 dropped to 4.6%.

President Trump appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

On foreign matters, President Trump is dealing with North Korea to reduce the tensions.  North Korea agreed to return the remains of U.S. servicemen killed in the Korean War, and fifty-five (55) have been returned.

President Trump cancelled the disastrous Iran deal, but Iran still keeps the $150 billion Obama gave it.

 NATO has agreed to pay its fair, proportionate share of expenses for defense.

On immigration, the Supreme Court upheld the travel bans issued by President Trump.

A real conservative would and should support this agenda and give credit to President Trump for moving this conservative agenda.

But George Will, regarded for the past forty years as a leading conservative commentator but now in his new role as the housebroken pet conservative at MSNBC, described President Trump as a “lowlife from Queens.”

Previously, Will called Trump the worst president in U.S. history.

According to Will, Trump is not merely a lowlife, but a lowlife from Queens.  Evidently, being from Queens is a further example of a lowlife.  Will fancies himself a wordsmith, so he did not use Hillary’s “deplorables” or Obama’s “those who cling to God and guns.”  But the meaning is the same.  Trump is a lowlife, so his supporters must be lowlifes to vote for him.

Why do so called conservatives like Will, Bill Kristol, and most of National Review and the Wall Street Journal hate Trump personally with such vitriol?  If they truly cared about a conservative agenda, as they have been writing for years, they would support Trump’s policies, give him credit, and refrain from the incessant personal attacks on President Trump.  What is the purpose of the constant personal attacks?  How do such vicious personal attacks help move the conservative agenda?

The Will boys view themselves as the self-appointed media spokesmen for conservatives.  They have seen their power and influence decrease substantially because of the diverse conservative sites on the internet, such as American Thinker, where one can read various viewpoints.  The Will boys have lost their monopoly, which they had for years, appearing on the Sunday morning TV shows, to “speak” the approved line. 

The Will boys are upset that deplorables, lowlifes, and those who cling to God and guns do not follow the wishes of the Will boys on voting.  They are offended that we did not vote for a polite “Jeb!”

Simply stated, we do not need Will, Kristol, etc.  They are history.

Photo credit: Croppped from Gage Skidmore via Flickr.

Twitter, like its Facebook cousin, now claims to have “fixed” the “error” involving the failure of prominent conservatives such as Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to not appear in Twitter’s search box and denies it engages in the practice known as “shadow banning”:

Twitter has denied shadowbanning, saying that the apparent suppression of autocomplete search suggestions for Republican congressman Matt Gaetz is an “error.” A Twitter spokeswoman denied shadowbanning exists, and told Breitbart News that the issue with Matt Gaetz’s search results is being fixed:

As we have said before, we do not shadowban. We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box, and [are] shipping a change to address this. The profiles, Tweets and discussions about these accounts do appear when you search for them.

Yes, Virginia, shadowbanning exists as Twitter plays “trick or tweet” with conservatives. As a shadowbanned Twitter user, I have seen my tweets suddenly become “unavailable,” followers suddenly “unfollow” en masse, Twitter analytics stats suddenly flatline and set to zero, and attached photos or explanatory graphics suddenly become “unavailable”. If you are a prolific Twitter conservative, you will be accused of “automated” behavior and have your account locked or even suspended. Once I was suspended for “aggressive following behavior” just for following all conservative accounts Twitter suggested I should follow.

Users on Twitter have the option of “blocking” accounts they do not wish to hear from or find offensive. Liberals intent on shutting down debate on Twitter, just like they have done at major universities, find a willing accomplice in Twitter’s algorithms, enabling them to get Twitter to do their dirty work. As Jim Hanson writes at Fox News Opinion:

When I check I often find that a user who has blocked me is someone I have never interacted with. So why the block? Often, it’s due to being on a block list created by a liberal activist group. Twitter supports block lists and makes it easy for users to mass-block entire universes of people they don’t even know.

But Twitter now uses factors such as the number of people who have blocked an account to determine whether to classify it as “low quality” content. The company also uses the number of complaints or reports on the account. If the number of these exceeds certain thresholds, an account can be deemed low quality and access to tweets from that user are severely diminished.

Shadowbanning takes many forms and, as social media icons Diamond and Silk can attest, is only “fixed” when prominent names get caught up in the censorship. Tens of thousands of not-so-famous conservatives on Twitter and Facebook can attest to disappearing tweets, mysteriously static or dwindling follower and friend numbers and the uncertainty that once a tweet or post is made anybody is allowed to see them.

The “error” affecting conservative lawmakers such as Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and Devin Nunes appears to be in retaliation for the increased focus on the censorship of conservatives by social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook:

Twitter’s censorship goes beyond just targeting pro-Trump accounts, they are now actually targeting lawmakers who support the President.

Last week, Rep. Gaetz shredded Twitter during a hearing about the censorship of conservatives on social media in the House Judiciary Committee. So now he’s wondering if this is why the social media giant moved to shadowban his account.

Gaetz tweeted: BREAKING: @Twitter deliberately targeting @RepMarkMeadows, @Jim_Jordan, @DevinNunes, & me to be #Shadowbanned.

Is it only a coincidence that these allegations would arise the week following my heated exchange with Twitter Executives before the Judiciary Committee??

Coincidence? I think not. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has apologized for any role Twitter may have had in President Trump’s victory and accumulating evidence suggests that ever since Twitter has been trying to make amends:

The co-founder of Twitter apologized Saturday for the social media platform’s role in Donald Trump’s rise to the White House.

In an interview with the New York Times, Evan Williams said that he recently learned that President Trump said he believes Twitter put him in the White house.

“It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that,” he said. “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.”

Gaetz has suggested that the biased treatment of conservative politicians on Twitter and “errors” that do not seem to affect progressive socialist Democrats may amount to an “in-kind” political contribution:

Rep. Matt Gaetz is considering filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over Twitter’s alleged suppression of his account, the Florida Republican told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Wednesday.

Gaetz was one of several prominent conservatives, including members of Congress and the chair of the Republican National Committee, whose accounts Twitter suppressed by making it harder to find in the site’s search function, a Vice News investigation published Wednesday found.

“Democrats are not being ‘shadow banned’ in the same way,” the report concluded, noting: “Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search.”

Twitter announced in May that the company would rely on “behavior-based signals” to boost the visibility of some accounts and to suppress the visibility of others as part of a step “to improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter.”

And what behavior-based signals would Twitter use? Conservative pro-Trump hash tags or themes perhaps? Indications of conservative support may already be employed in triggering shadowbans:

Covert (and overt) censorship of conservatives and right-wingers has been a reality on Twitter for some time. In January, Twitter employees were caught on camera discussing “shadowbanning” some conservative accounts, and classifying others as “bots” if they made too many tweets about “God, guns, and America.”

Thanks to James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, we know some of the details of, methods, and reasons for Twitter’s pro-active censoring of conservatives:

Twitter direct messaging engineer Pranay Singh admitted to mass-banning accounts that express interest in God, guns, and America, during a Project Veritas investigation.

“Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like, guns, God, ‘Merica, and with the American flag and the cross,” declared Singh, who was secretly recorded by Project Veritas reporters. “Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot.”…

“So if there’s like ‘American, guns,’ [in the account bio] can you write an algorithm to just take all those people out?” asked one undercover reporter.

“Umm, yeah, it’s actually how we do it,” Singh replied. “You look for ‘Trump,’ or ‘America,’ or any of, like, five thousand, like, keywords to describe a redneck, and then you look, and you parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then look for stuff that matches that stuff… You assign a value to each thing, so like Trump would be .5, a picture of a gun would be like 1.5, and if the total comes up above a certain value, then it’s a bot.”

Well, I do all of that, and I am not a bot. I am a conservative who supports Trump.  Would Twitter shadow ban users who constantly say “Impeach 45” or “Trump is Putin’s puppet”? Planned Parenthood and its ilk are not affected so why should pro-life Christians who support the Second Amendment?

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.              

Twitter, like its Facebook cousin, now claims to have “fixed” the “error” involving the failure of prominent conservatives such as Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., to not appear in Twitter’s search box and denies it engages in the practice known as “shadow banning”:

Twitter has denied shadowbanning, saying that the apparent suppression of autocomplete search suggestions for Republican congressman Matt Gaetz is an “error.” A Twitter spokeswoman denied shadowbanning exists, and told Breitbart News that the issue with Matt Gaetz’s search results is being fixed:

As we have said before, we do not shadowban. We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box, and [are] shipping a change to address this. The profiles, Tweets and discussions about these accounts do appear when you search for them.

Yes, Virginia, shadowbanning exists as Twitter plays “trick or tweet” with conservatives. As a shadowbanned Twitter user, I have seen my tweets suddenly become “unavailable,” followers suddenly “unfollow” en masse, Twitter analytics stats suddenly flatline and set to zero, and attached photos or explanatory graphics suddenly become “unavailable”. If you are a prolific Twitter conservative, you will be accused of “automated” behavior and have your account locked or even suspended. Once I was suspended for “aggressive following behavior” just for following all conservative accounts Twitter suggested I should follow.

Users on Twitter have the option of “blocking” accounts they do not wish to hear from or find offensive. Liberals intent on shutting down debate on Twitter, just like they have done at major universities, find a willing accomplice in Twitter’s algorithms, enabling them to get Twitter to do their dirty work. As Jim Hanson writes at Fox News Opinion:

When I check I often find that a user who has blocked me is someone I have never interacted with. So why the block? Often, it’s due to being on a block list created by a liberal activist group. Twitter supports block lists and makes it easy for users to mass-block entire universes of people they don’t even know.

But Twitter now uses factors such as the number of people who have blocked an account to determine whether to classify it as “low quality” content. The company also uses the number of complaints or reports on the account. If the number of these exceeds certain thresholds, an account can be deemed low quality and access to tweets from that user are severely diminished.

Shadowbanning takes many forms and, as social media icons Diamond and Silk can attest, is only “fixed” when prominent names get caught up in the censorship. Tens of thousands of not-so-famous conservatives on Twitter and Facebook can attest to disappearing tweets, mysteriously static or dwindling follower and friend numbers and the uncertainty that once a tweet or post is made anybody is allowed to see them.

The “error” affecting conservative lawmakers such as Gaetz, Jim Jordan, Mark Meadows, and Devin Nunes appears to be in retaliation for the increased focus on the censorship of conservatives by social media giants such as Twitter and Facebook:

Twitter’s censorship goes beyond just targeting pro-Trump accounts, they are now actually targeting lawmakers who support the President.

Last week, Rep. Gaetz shredded Twitter during a hearing about the censorship of conservatives on social media in the House Judiciary Committee. So now he’s wondering if this is why the social media giant moved to shadowban his account.

Gaetz tweeted: BREAKING: @Twitter deliberately targeting @RepMarkMeadows, @Jim_Jordan, @DevinNunes, & me to be #Shadowbanned.

Is it only a coincidence that these allegations would arise the week following my heated exchange with Twitter Executives before the Judiciary Committee??

Coincidence? I think not. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams has apologized for any role Twitter may have had in President Trump’s victory and accumulating evidence suggests that ever since Twitter has been trying to make amends:

The co-founder of Twitter apologized Saturday for the social media platform’s role in Donald Trump’s rise to the White House.

In an interview with the New York Times, Evan Williams said that he recently learned that President Trump said he believes Twitter put him in the White house.

“It’s a very bad thing, Twitter’s role in that,” he said. “If it’s true that he wouldn’t be president if it weren’t for Twitter, then yeah, I’m sorry.”

Gaetz has suggested that the biased treatment of conservative politicians on Twitter and “errors” that do not seem to affect progressive socialist Democrats may amount to an “in-kind” political contribution:

Rep. Matt Gaetz is considering filing a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over Twitter’s alleged suppression of his account, the Florida Republican told The Daily Caller News Foundation on Wednesday.

Gaetz was one of several prominent conservatives, including members of Congress and the chair of the Republican National Committee, whose accounts Twitter suppressed by making it harder to find in the site’s search function, a Vice News investigation published Wednesday found.

“Democrats are not being ‘shadow banned’ in the same way,” the report concluded, noting: “Not a single member of the 78-person Progressive Caucus faces the same situation in Twitter’s search.”

Twitter announced in May that the company would rely on “behavior-based signals” to boost the visibility of some accounts and to suppress the visibility of others as part of a step “to improve the health of the public conversation on Twitter.”

And what behavior-based signals would Twitter use? Conservative pro-Trump hash tags or themes perhaps? Indications of conservative support may already be employed in triggering shadowbans:

Covert (and overt) censorship of conservatives and right-wingers has been a reality on Twitter for some time. In January, Twitter employees were caught on camera discussing “shadowbanning” some conservative accounts, and classifying others as “bots” if they made too many tweets about “God, guns, and America.”

Thanks to James O’Keefe of Project Veritas, we know some of the details of, methods, and reasons for Twitter’s pro-active censoring of conservatives:

Twitter direct messaging engineer Pranay Singh admitted to mass-banning accounts that express interest in God, guns, and America, during a Project Veritas investigation.

“Just go to a random [Trump] tweet and just look at the followers. They’ll all be like, guns, God, ‘Merica, and with the American flag and the cross,” declared Singh, who was secretly recorded by Project Veritas reporters. “Like, who says that? Who talks like that? It’s for sure a bot.”…

“So if there’s like ‘American, guns,’ [in the account bio] can you write an algorithm to just take all those people out?” asked one undercover reporter.

“Umm, yeah, it’s actually how we do it,” Singh replied. “You look for ‘Trump,’ or ‘America,’ or any of, like, five thousand, like, keywords to describe a redneck, and then you look, and you parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then look for stuff that matches that stuff… You assign a value to each thing, so like Trump would be .5, a picture of a gun would be like 1.5, and if the total comes up above a certain value, then it’s a bot.”

Well, I do all of that, and I am not a bot. I am a conservative who supports Trump.  Would Twitter shadow ban users who constantly say “Impeach 45” or “Trump is Putin’s puppet”? Planned Parenthood and its ilk are not affected so why should pro-life Christians who support the Second Amendment?

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.              

Estimates place the cost of President Donald Trump’s border wall in the ballpark of $20-$30 billion. That’ll probably get inflated — as government projects inexorably do — but the point is that it’ll probably clock in at somewhere in that general vicinity.

That sounds like a lot, but in the milieu of modern American government, where foreign aid for a single year can approach the lower reaches of that budget, it’s actually quite modest.

So why is it so hard to get funding for it?

The top Democrat in the Senate says that it’s too costly: “Our view on the wall as something that is ineffectual and expensive has not changed,” Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York said back in March as the president was inspecting wall prototypes in California, Reuters reports.

Of course, Schumer supported the wall back in 2006, back when border security was still on the Democrats’ agenda (and abolishing ICE wasn’t). But let’s forget that. The point is, since when does a party which considers $20 billion of taxpayer money to be pocket change suddenly care so much about spending that money in a way that will arguably save taxpayers far more over the life of the project?

TRENDING: Democratic Senator Caught in Blatant Hypocrisy After Attacking Trump Fundraiser

Or, as James Woods puts it in a viral image, how is it that the price of the wall seems to boggle the Democrats while another number doesn’t bother them at all?

So, riddle me this… pic.twitter.com/RWeQijszsD

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) July 28, 2018

Now, it’s worth pointing out here that the $150 billion that Woods is talking about is actually Iranian assets frozen by sanctions that were unfrozen by the Obama administration in the Iran deal.

Under current U.S. law, there’s no particular way to expropriate those frozen funds except in wartime. That said, they didn’t necessarily need to be given back to the Iranians.

There’s no court that the United States recognizes as having authority over the president’s ability to freeze foreign funds — either within America or internationally. And, while the government couldn’t use the money, necessarily, the money could have been saved for the Iranian people if and when the mullahs in Tehran are toppled.

That definitely would have been a better use of that money than what actually happened.

When Trump backed out of the Iran deal, former Bush administration official James Robbins wrote in USA Today that the deal “did nothing to hamper Tehran’s support for terrorism and insurgency. In fact, the up to $150 billion in Iranian assets the deal unfroze has probably helped underwrite the country’s recent military adventurism in Syria and elsewhere.”

In fact, that’s one of the great problems with the Iran deal — it gave a massive infusion of cash to a country that’s using that money to fund extremist groups and build up its military.

You may think that this means these two numbers aren’t related, but they are. They show a shocking consistency among the Democrats: a consistent willingness to make decisions that jeopardize American security.

RELATED: James Woods Destroys Obama Legacy, Shows Americans the 1 Video Barack Wanted Us To Forget

In one case, they think it’s too expensive to build the most effective form of security there is on our southern border — a physical barrier.

In another, they don’t bat an eye when $150 billion is returned to a country where “Death to America” has pretty much become an unofficial motto.

Is it any wonder conservatives like Woods don’t trust the Democrats on security?

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United Airlines, the airline that famously dragged a paying passenger off a flight, stuffed a dog into an overhead compartment and killed it, and junked a priceless guitar in its baggage handlers’ tender care, has come up with a new one for us: free flights for unscreened illegals, sitting right there next to the paying passengers in those newly shrunken seats.  In the name virtue-signaling, of course.

Here’s the news item:

United Airlines is donating flights to help reunited immigrant [sic] families that were separated at the U.S.’s southern border.

The San Francisco Business Times reported Thursday that the pro-immigration lobbying group FWD.us announced United’s donation in a Facebook post, calling it “needed, timely, and critical.”

“A growing community of support is coming together to reunite families who were separated at the border,” the group posted Wednesday.  ”We are so thankful and happy to announce that United Airlines is jumping in and helping.  Thanks to this partnership with United, we are able to provide travel to the recently reunited immigrant [sic] families to get to their next destination with dignity.”

Now, I’m all for an airline showing compassion.  Kids separated from their parents due to their parents’ prison problems and kids separated from their parents due to divorce ought to get free flights, too.  But this is from the airline that just a few days ago refused to refund the ticket of a woman who got stuck sitting next to a masturbator, and then got the treat of hearing United’s flight attendants joking about it.  Here’s the “customer service” she got from United, as she posted it on Instagram:

So as United tightwads this woman who had a repulsive, traumatic experience on one of its flights, and then offers her a fake apology, coupled with a disgusting assumption that she’d actually want to ride again, the company break out the free stuff for illegals, offering $3 million in free flights to people who have thumbed their noses at U.S. immigration law and can’t be bothered to apply for entry legally, though, as Howie Carr notes, they certainly have no problem jumping in for the benefits.  Who’d want to come here legally with so much free stuff being showered on those who don’t?

And more to the point, who pays for this?  We pay.  Through higher airline ticket costs, which can certainly add up, as a protected class gets more free stuff and the rest of us cover for them, both through our taxes and our inflated costs for airline tickets.

And if one of those illegals brings a disease and in close quarters infects a paying customer, let alone conducts MS-13 activities, you can bet Lauren Michaels will be on the case, apologizing and refusing a refund.

The whole thing shows a bad pattern, making illegal immigration increasingly lucrative, much more attractive, in fact, than emigrating legally, which is actually getting harder.  Who needs a coyote when United Airlines gives it away for free?  Call it another perverse incentive.

Why is this going on?  The news account says United is distributing its free flights for illegals through Mark Zuckerberg’s pro-illegals activist group, FWD.com.  As if Zuck needs the money.  What it looks like is some kind of one-hand-washes-the-other instance of crony capitalism, on top of the insult to paying customers, in order to virtue-signal good intentions.  Maybe United needed something from Zuck, and this amounts to the everyone-wins solution – everyone except the paying customer and the law-abiding citizens and residents who pay full fare.

Graphic montage by Monica Showalter.  Jetliner image by Alan Wilson via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.

United Airlines, the airline that famously dragged a paying passenger off a flight, stuffed a dog into an overhead compartment and killed it, and junked a priceless guitar in its baggage handlers’ tender care, has come up with a new one for us: free flights for unscreened illegals, sitting right there next to the paying passengers in those newly shrunken seats.  In the name virtue-signaling, of course.

Here’s the news item:

United Airlines is donating flights to help reunited immigrant [sic] families that were separated at the U.S.’s southern border.

The San Francisco Business Times reported Thursday that the pro-immigration lobbying group FWD.us announced United’s donation in a Facebook post, calling it “needed, timely, and critical.”

“A growing community of support is coming together to reunite families who were separated at the border,” the group posted Wednesday.  ”We are so thankful and happy to announce that United Airlines is jumping in and helping.  Thanks to this partnership with United, we are able to provide travel to the recently reunited immigrant [sic] families to get to their next destination with dignity.”

Now, I’m all for an airline showing compassion.  Kids separated from their parents due to their parents’ prison problems and kids separated from their parents due to divorce ought to get free flights, too.  But this is from the airline that just a few days ago refused to refund the ticket of a woman who got stuck sitting next to a masturbator, and then got the treat of hearing United’s flight attendants joking about it.  Here’s the “customer service” she got from United, as she posted it on Instagram:

So as United tightwads this woman who had a repulsive, traumatic experience on one of its flights, and then offers her a fake apology, coupled with a disgusting assumption that she’d actually want to ride again, the company break out the free stuff for illegals, offering $3 million in free flights to people who have thumbed their noses at U.S. immigration law and can’t be bothered to apply for entry legally, though, as Howie Carr notes, they certainly have no problem jumping in for the benefits.  Who’d want to come here legally with so much free stuff being showered on those who don’t?

And more to the point, who pays for this?  We pay.  Through higher airline ticket costs, which can certainly add up, as a protected class gets more free stuff and the rest of us cover for them, both through our taxes and our inflated costs for airline tickets.

And if one of those illegals brings a disease and in close quarters infects a paying customer, let alone conducts MS-13 activities, you can bet Lauren Michaels will be on the case, apologizing and refusing a refund.

The whole thing shows a bad pattern, making illegal immigration increasingly lucrative, much more attractive, in fact, than emigrating legally, which is actually getting harder.  Who needs a coyote when United Airlines gives it away for free?  Call it another perverse incentive.

Why is this going on?  The news account says United is distributing its free flights for illegals through Mark Zuckerberg’s pro-illegals activist group, FWD.com.  As if Zuck needs the money.  What it looks like is some kind of one-hand-washes-the-other instance of crony capitalism, on top of the insult to paying customers, in order to virtue-signal good intentions.  Maybe United needed something from Zuck, and this amounts to the everyone-wins solution – everyone except the paying customer and the law-abiding citizens and residents who pay full fare.

Graphic montage by Monica Showalter.  Jetliner image by Alan Wilson via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.