Another obligatory contrarian take on the Texas border standoff

Let's take a chill-pill or two... or three

I wrote most of this piece and published it at the start of the Texas border standoff. As I predicted (I’m right btw), Texas lost (at least temporarily) its Supreme Court case arguing that Texas officials had the right to arrest illegal immigrants as federal officials deliberately stand down to enable unlimited immigration. I’ll add a few more thoughts down at the end, but since most of the argument remains unchanged, I won’t change much in the article either.

EDIT: It looks like the story about the Supreme Court blocking one of the Texas provisions came too soon, they just upheld Texas’s premier piece of legislation being used to stop illegals. Huge win! EDITED EDIT: A Federal Appellate court just blocked the law again. This isn’t going to be resolved for a while.

I really want to stop writing about contemporary politics but several people have asked me what my opinion is regarding the recent dispute between Governor Abbott of Texas and the openly treasonous and corrupt people running our federal government. I haven’t seen anyone articulate what I think are the most important considerations in this standoff, so I wanted to briefly explain my thinking here.

For those who haven’t been following: The Biden administration has completely opened the border. It’s brought in about 8 million immigrants in just 3 years. With the help of “charity” organizations and NGOs (who often receive direct government funding to aid in illegal immigration), these immigrants are allowed to make bogus asylum claims if they bother to check in with American authorities at all. Although this is bad in general from a long-term demographic perspective, it is disastrous for Americans actually near the border: there are millions of foreign transients passing through these areas. All normal life is affected.

For years now, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas has been providing many illegal immigrants with free bus tickets to “sanctuary” cities like New York and Boston. This solves a real problem for the citizens of his state, however much I dislike the idea of ferrying illegals deeper into the country. Abbott’s effort is not a cynical political stunt like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s infamous Martha’s Vineyard flights. Abbott’s bussing is only a drop in the bucket, however, when it comes to moving illegals to these cities. Numerous NGOs and the federal government itself transport many times more illegals to all of these places. Abbot has bought about 100,000 bus tickets, but there are millions of illegals moving around.

Ultimately it’s impossible to give liberal areas so many illegal immigrants that they will be forced to change their views. The country is too big and has no internal barriers to movement. Eventually illegals can always make their way to somewhere where they can find work and housing and be absorbed into the larger immigrant (there are like 100 million at this point) community. Liberals, especially the people who make policy, are also true believers—they genuinely want to transform the country into something new. They can’t be convinced, they have to be stopped.

Since federal authorities are now openly assisting illegal immigrants in crossing the border in huge numbers, Governor Abbott has directed the Texas National Guard to set up barriers to prevent illegals from entering. He has even directed Texas state police to arrest illegal immigrants for trespassing. Most importantly, Texas authorities are refusing to allow federal agents to access areas under their control to clear the barriers. The federal government, citing federal supremacy (a cornerstone of American law since the beginning), has challenged Texas’s ability to set up these barriers and block federal entry. The Supreme Court (through a convoluted mechanism that I can’t explain) just affirmed the federal government’s right to remove the barriers and, going further, blocked Texas’s attempts to effectively enforce federal immigration law through a new state law.

The legal argument is absurd: Essentially, the federal government is asserting its exclusive right over immigration matters and control of the border just so that it can facilitate illegal entry into the country (I know that many of the illegals are making dubious asylum claims so they can be released immediately on parole forever but this is such an abuse of the traditional notion of asylum that it’s not worth responding to). It’s made more absurd because they’re probably right from a purely legal perspective (I’m not a lawyer so your mileage may vary with this statement), but wrong using any kind of normal understanding of how a government is supposed to operate.

The people in charge of the US government today are traitors. I don’t really care about the exact legal definition of treason. Every single person involved in this process is traitor, from the President to the DHS Secretary to the activist lawyer to the pear-shaped volunteer handing out water to dusty immigrants from who-knows-where to get a slight dopamine rush. They want to destroy the country. They are arguing for the federal government’s right to allow the country to be invaded. Whether or not that right is consistent with American jurisprudence is irrelevant. This is not a legal issue.

I know that I’m widely hated for my view that there is no civil war, National Divorce, or any kind of geopolitical shakeup or sustained irregular warfare (at least from the Right) coming. I am further hated for my assertion that in the extremely unlikely event that one of those bad things did occur, there is literally zero chance of it working out well for the American Right. I stand by both of those views.

With this in mind, there are two key considerations in the current crisis:

1. Texas is in an extremely good position now, and taking a stand against behavior that the overwhelming majority of American find objectionable

2. The further things escalate, the worse the situation becomes for Texas

Texas has the ability to block illegal immigrants on the ground, to force the federal government into increasingly absurd and criminal public actions, and to expose the sophisticated networks behind the ongoing invasion of the US. Texas (or any coalition of similarly-aligned states) does not have the ability to win a physical confrontation with federal forces, secede from the US, or exist as an independent nation. It probably won’t even win the court case.

It’s very important to understand that the reason Texas is in a good position is because the crisis is narrowly defined right now: The federal government is allowing unlimited numbers of immigrants to enter the country. Texas is trying to stop that. The issue is immigration. Most Americans, when they’re actually made aware of the country’s current open border policies, think that those polices are absurd. Texas’s actions are popular with the general public. Trump won in 2016 on immigration.

This is not a crisis about federalism or states rights or any of the other (totally reasonable) grievances that people have against the Biden regime. The more issues get confused, the harder the situation becomes to manage. You don’t want other considerations steering the ship (i.e. “Is this really about the existence of the US?”), escalating rhetoric causing people to try to handle this situation extrajudicially or, at the very least, public officials biting off more than they can true. The worst case scenario is some kind of bloodshed, and then issue will no longer be immigration, it will be about Civil War (tm). There’s a reason they’re pumping out that shitty-looking Alex Garland movie (if you pay for it, you’re dead to me) now.

I don’t think an actual civil war or anything close to it has any chance of happening, but the pretext of an impending civil war could be used by the feds to justify a lot of things to the general public that they normally wouldn’t be able to justify. It could also be used to bait conservatives into making mistakes they normally wouldn’t make. The powers at be could totally annihilate the American Right, without any organized opposition, right now. Never kid yourself into thinking that they couldn’t do it just because everything is a DEI clown show today. It’s important to remain focused. The only thing people should be thinking about now is the country’s absurd immigration policies and the ongoing invasion of the US.

I’ve already spoken about this (widely hated opinion btw) before, but the #1 thing that the American Right needs today is for a normal election to happen in November 2024. Keep Biden on the ballot. Nothing too crazy. Trump is winning decisively at the moment. He’s up in every poll and his numbers are higher than ever before. If the proper election integrity and voter turnout infrastructure is built by Republicans in time for the election, Trump can probably overcome the margin of fraud.

Americans today generally understand that all of Trump’s predictions were correct. There is basically no one who can claim they’re better off since Trump left office. This represents an unprecedented opportunity to shift the political balance of the country. If Trump enters the White House, he’s going to have more tools at his disposal and a stronger mandate than any incoherent secession force could ever hope to obtain.

So what does this mean for the Texas standoff? Well, every effort should be made to keep this a fight for a limited objective that leaves civilization intact. Keeping civilization intact is more important than any other concern. We have a good idea what will happen if things proceed relatively smoothly until Election Day: Trump wins. The crazier things get, the less certain a good outcome becomes.

This might mean taking a few Ls, at least superficially. If the Feds really want to force this issue, they’ll win. The barbed wire will come down one way or another. It’s not worth getting into a shootout over it or whatever. That said, there’s certainly nothing wrong with Texas making federal “victory” as embarrassing and public as possible. Make the obstacles really difficult to remove. Provide them with no accommodations. Make them the ones who have to react at every step of the way. The public should have no illusions about the fact that Democrats support open borders. Passive resistance won’t offer the Feds the chance to move the focus away from immigration.

I’m sure smarter men than me are working on this but there really should be some way to go after the NGO/charity networks behind the invasion with state criminal charges. That’s the real issue, turning off the spigot. I’m sure that simply creating more legal headaches for these people would interfere with their work, even if they didn’t do a day in jail. These groups are regulated by state authorities in many ways and exist specifically to facilitate criminal behavior, there’s got to be something.

Disgraced former presidential contender DeSantis made this statement earlier and I think it illustrates exactly why DeSantis never had what it takes. America is (or at least Americans are) going to make it through this. We’re not doomed. There’s still a shot of salvaging the situation, it’s even a pretty good shot right now. Much of the problem today comes from hopelessness. Masturbatory pessimistic statements become self-fulfilling prophecies. Demoralized people feel and act helpless. Now, more than ever, Americans need to understand that they have they power to improve their lives. Your problems are solvable by you.

The biggest positive of the Texas standoff is that someone important is actually doing something to oppose the decline. It’s humiliating to watch bad people get away with doing bad things. That’s why liberals support decriminalizing theft and shitting in the streets: they want the public to be humiliated and subdued, to feel so helpless that they’ll accept any change that promises to fix their problems. I think the courage of Governor Abbott and the people helping him will be contagious. It’s very important that the immense energy building now is harnessed and focused in an organized and systemic way that can actually change the world for the better.

The opposite of a systemic force that can change the world for the better is the kind of escalating reaction to every twist and turn you see online. I’ve spent a lot of time reading about the American Civil War over the last few months. Whatever you think about the Secession Crisis (I think secession back then was dubiously legal and a dumb idea, but understandable given escalating extremism from radical abolitionists and their enablers), the build-up to the Civil War took decades.

Prominent Southern federal officials spent years redirecting war material to Army depots that could easily be seized in the event of a conflict. Southern governments spent decades building support for secession, but it was only Lincoln’s planned military invasion of the South that pushed the most important Southern states onto the side of secession at the last minute. The South was led by some of America’s finest military commanders and statesmen, and had begun training and organizing modern military units under state control after John Brown’s terrorist attack. All of this happened over a lengthy period, involving the equivalent of billions of dollars, and yet they still lost, their great cities were destroyed, and millions of people died.

Americans opposing federal overreach today are in a far worse position by virtually every objective measure. People today are itching for fights they can’t win because there is no thought out towards how these proposed confrontations would play out. However outrageously the federal government is behaving on immigration, once you enter into the realm of a direct confrontation with federal government, the conversation inherently moves away from immigration and to other topics.

In this dispute, the federal government has the law on its side. You can roll your eyes at that, but at the end of the day the federal government (unlike states making it up as they go along) pays millions of people to enforce federal law, and can provide them with legal protection to use force to do so. The states do not. If you directly resist federal law enforcement, you risk going to jail for life. If there is any kind of escalation, the federal government has the ability to take this much farther than Texas or even a coalition of states could ever hope to. With that sort of escalation gap, victory in some kind of hard conflict is an impossibility. There are no guerillas to stand in for state law enforcement, either. Rightwing political violence functionally does not exist.

I guess the reason that escalating rhetoric from rightwingers gets to me is that it often provides low impulse control people with yet another justification to check out of politics: they set an unrealistic goal and, what do you know, didn’t achieve it. I guess nothing will ever work and the situation will never improve absent some other impossible thing (XYZ Red Dawn fantasy) happening.

In reality, the political situation is the best it’s been in years and it’s never been more important for people to get involved. Winning is always a long shot given the forces we’re up against, but it becomes an impossibility if conservatives decide to collectively give up. You see this all the time with discussion of election fraud: the knowledge that some rigging occurs should make people more interested in how their government works. Instead it’s used as an excuse for passivity: “Why bother? The results are rigged anyway. Nothing we do matters.” If those attitudes become widespread, they won’t even have to rig it anymore. Much of Trump’s current lead comes from people who are unlikely to vote to begin with. That’s a huge opportunity but not exactly stable ground to be standing on. Setting unrealistic goals or ramping up rhetoric to nowhere will lead to people becoming discouraged and disengaging altogether. It’s something to be avoided.

So, the Texas border standoff is great as long as it stays a border standoff. Everyone needs to be honest about the situation we’re in and what our options are. This was always going to happen, now the challenge becomes tackling the problems from other directions. It looks like Texas has begun suing some of the NGOs behind the ongoing invasion and arresting illegal immigrants who trespass on state land. This is great to see. I hope that a thorough criminal investigation of the organized groups behind the invasion will lead to arrests and asset seizure. The current process a lot less sexy than Civil War 2, but it’s also something that has a much better chance of leading to a good ending.