Texas

Since President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris won’t come to the border, the border is coming to them. On Thursday, two buses of illegal immigrants unloaded in front of Harris’s vice presidential residence. Others have arrived in downtown New York, Chicago, and D.C., to the fury of local mayors and governors. A small planeload caused an uproar on Martha’s Vineyard when it landed on that self-proclaimed sanctuary island. More busloads are sure to come, probably in cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Minneapolis, and perhaps a beach community in Delaware. The immigrants are being transported from Republican-led border states to northern Democratic enclaves, which have long proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries” for the migrants they are now so appalled to find arriving.

I’ve never been blessed enough to vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, but if you’re an illegal alien who’s always dreamed of biking with the Obamas, you might be in luck. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has just sent two planeloads of migrants to the New England paradise. You’d think the residents of Martha’s Vineyard would be thrilled at the opportunity to increase the diversity of the approximately 80 percent white island. Oddly, there have been reports of elderly women in straw hats and kaftans packing up their “no human is illegal” signs and marking their doors with the blood of slaughtered lambs.

To hear New York mayor Eric Adams tell it, you would think that a crisis has gripped the streets of our nation’s largest city as busloads of illegal immigrants arrive from Texas. Some of the new arrivals, courtesy of Texas Governor Greg Abbott — who wants to send a message about the very real crisis in his state — have been met in person by the mayor. He claims the city is now scrambling to take care of them. It’s a lie. Thus far, Abbott has sent 75, maybe 100 illegal immigrants to New York, a city of 9 million people, a city which, in fact, already has a population of 500,000 illegal migrants. Are we really to believe that a few dozen more from Texas has our system at the breaking point?

Donald Trump headlined CPAC Texas, delivering a series of broadsides to the Biden administration to a packed arena at Dallas’s Hilton Anatole. The more than 2,500 seats were filled — with even more guests lining the aisles. Donald Trump Jr.’s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle, was supposed to introduce the 45th president — but found herself bumped at the expense of Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, for reasons that remain unclear. Prior to the former president’s speech, a short film played on the large TV monitors. “We are a nation in decline,” a Trump voiceover began. “We are a failing nation.” Gloomy black-and-white footage followed, accompanied by thunder and rain sounds. A screenshot of Trump’s suspended Twitter account was perhaps the most moving image.

Dallas, Texas Howdy from the Lone Star State, where Cockburn is braving 100-degree heat, overpriced IPAs and America First applause lines to bring you coverage of CPAC Texas. The conservative conference has come to the Hilton Anatole in Dallas for the second year — and is once again headlined by former president Donald Trump, set to speak this evening. Appropriately, the hotel’s two bars are called “Media” and “Gossip,” as if they’d been purpose-built for your intrepid correspondent. Cockburn managed to finagle his way into the $375-a-head Cattleman’s Ball for free on Friday night, where he sat at a table with a cadre of fellow hacks, chief among them John Fredericks, the “Godzilla of Truth.

Cockburn has witnessed a lot of legal screw-ups in his day (and has been apart of several himself!), but revelations in the Alex Jones defamation trial have taken it to a new level. In a surprise twist while Alex Jones was on the stand, it was revealed that Jones's attorneys had accidentally sent the entire contents of the Infowars chief's phone to the Sandy Hook parents' attorney. A startled Alex Jones seemed taken aback when emails he claimed didn't exist appeared on a screen in front of the court room, with the Sandy Hook attorney asking, "You know what perjury is?" https://twitter.com/acyn/status/1554875445253812225?

The debate over President Joe Biden's immigration policies exploded again on Monday after news broke that more than forty migrants had been found dead in the back of a truck in Texas. Texas governor Greg Abbott blamed the deaths on Biden, tweeting, "These deaths are on Biden. They are a result of his deadly open border policies. They show the deadly consequence of his refusal to enforce the law." https://twitter.com/GregAbbott_TX/status/1541596214705135617 Thousands of Twitter users piled on Governor Abbott's tweet, arguing that if the border is really "open," then why did these migrants need to be smuggled across the border in the back of a truck?

Americans aged eighteen to twenty account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murderers, almost always male. School shootings get the most attention. The problem is not just the guns. It is the young men who wield them. That means any possible solution rests with the shooter, not the firearm. There’s a pattern inside those sordid statistics, with some 70 percent of school shootings since 1999 having been carried out by people under eighteen. The median age of school shooters is sixteen. It’s kids shooting kids; whether because they are left out, bullied, teased or angry at some slight or teacher’s offense, it is kids killing kids.

The calls started almost immediately. The bodies of nineteen children and two teachers had barely cooled when politicians and activists took to social media demanding some sort of action on guns. Some called the National Rifle Association a terrorist organization, while others castigated Republicans for allegedly supporting gun rights over children. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer was urged to bring a bill on background checks up for a vote so the “votes fall with the children who died.” Politics takes no break during tragedies. The crescendo of activist furor will likely peak this weekend during the NRA Convention in Houston. Demonstrations are already planned near the George R. Brown Convention Center with political actors of all kinds expected to attend.

The “Tinder Swindler” has some competition in the “romantic entanglement gone wrong” department this week. Congressman Van Taylor, Republican from Texas, has just announced he’s ending his re-election campaign, which the Texas Tribune reports he had in the bag with 49 percent of the primary vote. The reason? According to Breitbart, Taylor had an affair with Tania Joya, a so-called “ISIS bride.” Cockburn notes that the details are sordid. Joya had been married to the late John Georgelas, an American who had converted to Islam, embraced jihad, joined ISIS and was reported to have been killed in Syria in 2017. Joya says Taylor paid her $5,000 to keep the affair quiet and provided Breitbart with bank records that appear to prove that Taylor did, indeed, make such a deposit.