I want to preface all this by saying that I didn’t watch most of the FORUM event. I know that there were hours of discussions that I can’t comment on because I didn’t see them. I have no bias against the panelists or the organizers, I’m sure that there were probably many things that I would like and support that occurred at this event. This article was prompted by my reaction to a single, 1 minute and 25 second, clip that a panelist posted of herself speaking, and my general impression of the panel, which I later watched to make sure I wasn’t mischaracterizing the clip.
First, the clip I saw. Brenna Morello is a former Fox News, Newsmax, and Infowars reporter who has become an independent journalist with a large following on Elon Musk’s Twitter. Morello made these remarks while speaking at the recent FORUM panel on immigration that took place alongside the GOP’s Midterm convention in Dallas. You can watch the full event here (the immigration panel begins at 50:20).
I’ve transcribed the full exchange below:
[Blaze commentator and panel moderator John] Doyle: I guess, continuing on our last discussion, the attitude everyone feels about immigration. This is supposed to be a bit more practical. I guess I’d first ask does anyone have any objections before we continue, that immigration is a very big problem, that these people at scale can’t assimilate and they’re fundamentally changing the character of the nation. Does anyone have minor or major disagreement with that?
Morello: No.
[Blaze reporter Sara] Gonzalez: It is the problem.
Doyle: Wonderful. Ok. Well, how do you think we are so far at solving the problem? I mean, going into the first Trump administration I remember covering fights over wall funding. Now the border is sealed Day 1, we’re building hundreds of miles of wall, we have the mass deportation operations occurring. But still people are seeing the fruits of the invasions in their communities. The young guys still understand they’re going to be made to compete with these people for jobs they were promised were they to keep their nose clean and get into good schools. Is this issue being solved quickly enough? Is the bleeding stopped? Where do you see this right now?
[Gonzalez’s response excluded]
…
Morello: … I also want to bring up the fact that Markwayne Mullin since taking over as DHS Secretary has done a horrific job so far in my opinion. Mainly due to the fact that under Kristi Noem’s leadership a lot things were happening. There were warehouses that were purchased under the Big Beautiful Bill. 11 of them were purchased under Noem. And those warehouses were supposed to be detention facilities for illegal aliens because obviously Democrats claim that they’re supposed to get due process. So, the idea was to stack them up into these facilities, and unfortunately once Markwayne Mullen took over he either sold seven of them or reallocated them. So far, we have about several of them either sold or reallocated and the problem with that is that’s $700 million of our money that was intentionally given to us, or to the government, to get rid of these illegal aliens, and the White House, DHS, no one’s denying this report. It was initially reported by the New York Times, which I was very skeptical at first, but I reached out to everyone and they’re not denying it…
As far as I can tell, no one bothered to challenge or rebut Morello on this point later in the event.
It is true that the Department of Homeland Security has paused the purchase and retrofitting of warehouses to serve as immigration detention centers. DHS under Kristi Noem had set aside $700 million dollars to purchase and redevelop such warehouses. However, a simple Google search would have revealed that the DHS just spent $1.5 billion to purchase existing private prisons and expand them in order to house greater numbers of immigration detainees, likely far more safely and sustainably than would have been possible in a retrofitted warehouse. Rather than a betrayal, the abandonment of the warehouse scheme was a change in tactics that could have been explained in any number of perfectly reasonable and valid ways.
That DHS is changing tactics from warehouses to prisons is not secret or obscure knowledge. It was reported about in Time Magazine well before the FORUM event. Liberal activist groups are tracking this development all around the country with great concern. It is very strange that this shift would go unmentioned by someone who is supposedly passionate about the issue and makes her money by talking about it.
Of course, a reasonable person might disagree about whether or not this particular change in tactics is a good idea or necessary. You don’t have to (and shouldn’t) take everything the government says at face value. At the same time, it’s obvious that these people are only presenting a very narrow part of the story with objectives that are distinct from merely conveying the truth. There were a lot of other things said at the panel, I agreed with many of them, but you have to wonder how many statements like this slip in that you just don’t catch.
Recently we have heard about lots of “betrayals” by the Trump administration that are actually pretty easy to explain in other ways if you have a more complete picture or viewed developments through the lens of government procedure. I was trying to figure out why this statement in particular bothered me, then I realized where I had seen Morello’s name before: She showed up in one of my previous articles.
Morello was one of the people who claimed that Secretary Mullin had abandoned the Trump administration’s commitment to deport “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) recipients, illegal immigrants who had received what amounted to indefinite legal status and work authorization, immediately after the Trump administration had won an important court case that allowed these illegal immigrants to be deported.
Morello falsely claimed that the Trump administration had failed to even revoke recipients’ TPS designations. In essence, she tried to reframe one of the Trump administration’s biggest wins into a betrayal.
This is a pattern of behavior that is not difficult to detect or understand. It’s very unsubtle that a network of rightwing influencers has set its sights on DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Although Mullin wouldn’t have been my first, second, or third choice to run DHS, these influencers seem to be trying to remove him from his role by mischaracterizing his statements (often bad), the real-world results that DHS under Mullin has delivered (historically good), and the Trump administration’s actual policy on legal and illegal immigration (incredible). I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to force out a senior government official with very uncharitable or outright fake criticism on the eve of an election that will determine how much power that government will have to actually implement its agenda over the next two years.
Although some of the people engaged in this behavior are probably only trying to force a limited personnel change, others I think it’s pretty clear are doing this as part of a larger effort to undermine the Trump administration and depress Republican turnout before the midterms. I won’t speculate about what Morello’s motivations are. I don’t know anything about her. I had never heard of her before she showed up on my Twitter timeline in late June. My position is and has been that someone’s motivations when they are engaged in this kind of behavior do not matter. The impact of their behavior is what matters, and that impact is clearly negative.
What would the natural effect of claiming that your elected representatives have betrayed you be on election turnout? What would voters conclude from the statement that the Trump administration’s immigration efforts have been a disaster if they support mass deportations? Would they be more or less likely to vote for Republicans in the upcoming midterms? If voters do not vote for Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections and Democrats take over Congress and governorships in swing states, will aggressive deportation policies be easier or harder to implement? These are easy questions to answer.
If Morello is a subject matter expert, then why does she make claims that are objectively not true or create a fundamentally misleading impression? Are the risks that this behavior poses to our electoral chances two months from now justified given that there is nearly every indication that the United States is arresting and deporting more people than ever before? If she is passionate about immigration, then why is she saying things that would only serve to reduce the real-world power of immigration restrictionists?
This person does not seem to possess great or unique insight into the immigration issue. She is, most charitably, a popularizer of talking points that are already popular and have been popular for some time. Less charitably, she is just another influencer trying to advance her personal goals by launching misleading or untrue attacks on the Trump administration, thereby undermining Republicans’ overall political position and, necessarily, the implementation of the aggressive deportation policies that she nominally supports.
If someone doesn’t know what they’re talking about or doesn’t tell the truth, what is the purpose of having a substantive conversation with them? There is negative value to this kind of public discussion with this sort of participant. Moving this content off of the timeline and onto a stage does not grant any kind of added salience.
A few weeks ago, there was a debate between “MAGA” and “America First” hosted by Brandon Straka, the founder of the #WalkAway movement.
There were only two notable moments from the event. The first was towards the end when John Doyle, future moderator of the FORUM panel mentioned above and speaking for the “MAGA” side, pointed out that the nature of the conversation itself was subversive: The panel had spent the overwhelming majority of time arguing in circles about the Iran War and the Epstein files, topics about which most of the participants more or less agreed on, and basically no time on immigration, which Republican voters before the election had indicated was their most important issue and the Trump administration had delivered historic results on. Doyle pointed out that many influencers seemed to fundamentally misunderstand their roles.
The other notable moment was when a participant from the “America First” side, Pastor Joel Webbon, shifted his posture to reveal that he had brought a gun into the debate room. The gun was jutting out of the front of his pants in a way that I have never seen someone carry in a suit before. You should not have to explain to an adult why this was an inappropriate thing to do.
There is certainly a lot of debate occurring on the Right now. There is remarkably little value to these conversations. At best, they are mainstreamed retreads of once productive discussions that emerged from fringe circles more than a decade ago, often play acted by people with IQs a standard deviation lower than those of the original participants. At worst, they work to actively undermine important real-world efforts. The continuation of conversations well past exhaustion and the total lack of standards and discernment in the rightwing media environment have created many perverse incentive structures that rob these exchanges of utility.
Perhaps the most perverse of these incentives were on display in the highly publicized “debate” between Andrew Wilson and Candace Owens over the murder of Charlie Kirk.
For nearly a year after Charlie Kirk was assassinated, Owens has launched an unending stream of baseless and demonstrably untrue attacks on Erika Kirk, Charlie Kirk’s widow, and the senior staff of TPUSA, framed as part of an investigation into Kirk’s murder. The spectacle of these false accusations and broader climate of hysteria and confusion that accompanied the murder redirected public attention away from Kirk’s leftwing killer.
Wilson rewarded Owens with $300,000 for the privilege of “debating” her over her obviously false accusations. The debate, despite gathering enormous public attention that dissipated almost instantly afterwards, I’m certain changed virtually no one’s minds. It had zero impact on the court case, where the evidence and witness testimony will actually be examined, that is going to determine the fate of Tyler Robinson, the man who killed Charlie Kirk, who was caught on video and confessed. The existence of the conversation was a net negative. This person was doing something really bad and they gave her money to go on TV with them.
Although I, like many other people, am profoundly disgusted by the treatment Erika Kirk and the team at TPUSA received even from “friends” after the murder, I do think that they made a mistake by repeatedly attempting to engage the people attacking them and the broader circle enabling the attacks in a rational dialogue rather than responding immediately with lawsuits and blanket hostility.
All the problems I pointed out 18 months ago have gotten far worse. Although I have talked myself blue in the face about how best to solve them, few of my suggestions have been acted upon. In fact, the solutions that many people have arrived at seem guaranteed to make the problems worse. I don’t care what motivates these people anymore. It’s obvious that the situation has been badly mismanaged, if it was ever managed at all.
It’s crazy to me that people can’t tell that Gregory Bovino is a retard now. Morello mentioned him favorably several times during her remarks at the FORUM panel. He lies constantly about the administration’s policy and achievements. The “100 million illegals” claim he popularized is genuinely very stupid. He suggested that the Trump administration was trying to kill him during an interview with Tucker Carlson, who is transparently trying to convince Republicans to stay home before the midterms, and advised a far-left journalist to investigate his former colleagues. Most of his posts on Twitter seem to be written using AI. What are people doing tolerating this character?
There has been much discussion about what to do with the Right’s “radicals” and “revolutionaries,” terms that many seem to confuse for simply having an opinion and loudly restating it over and over again. How can we resolve the questions that have caused so much division and discord without even more talk?
Let me tell you, speaking from my extensive study of the Russian Revolution, that if someone in a revolutionary group were to constantly make false claims about the group’s leaders and policy, if they minimized successes and embellished failures, if they loudly predicted defeat was inevitable due to betrayal from the top, if they tried to engineer temporary losses to teach the Party a lesson or provide an opening for themselves to assert greater internal control, if they merely interacted with people who did these things without hostility, they would not be members of that revolutionary group for very long. Lenin credited the Bolsheviks’ success to their “iron discipline.” Early Soviet history is full of ruthless purges of internal opposition. Actual revolutionaries would just march you out back and shoot you.
The good news is that we are not a revolutionary group in a collapsing empire, we are a normal political party in a normal country. The situation has stabilized. Violent crime has had its largest drop in modern history. The murder rate is at a 100+ year low. The country wasn’t close to a revolution or civil war during the horrible Biden era and it isn’t close to one now. We’re going back to the Moon. Although I still think there’s a systemic challenge coming to our country before 2035, the problem facing us at the moment is winning the peace. You don’t have to send these troublesome figures to the gulag or march them out anywhere; you just have to stop giving them money and affirmation. Audience interest in influencer content is already in steep decline. These figures are dependent on others for relevance. If you just stop helping them, they will wither on the vine and eventually disintegrate.
“Leaders” of the conservative movement have correctly noted a massive drop-in support among young people. Many mistakenly believe that this is because they aren’t doing enough to mirror this group’s rhetoric and preferences, even though this rhetoric and those preferences enjoy far greater tolerance and representation in politics and government than ever before.
A bigger problem is that leaders aren’t showing leadership: When influencers began to say things about the Trump administration that weren’t true, these leaders did not hit back. Lies were treated as a normal part of rightwing discourse. Behavior that would be unacceptable in any kind of professional or social environment was treated as a normal part of rightwing discourse. Suggesting that we put leftwingers in power was treated as a normal part of rightwing discourse. People who do these things are still widely tolerated; some get let in the front door. It is not surprising that nothing good could grow from this poisoned ground. Trying to appease or accommodate bad faith critics only came across as weak. Young people are especially sensitive to this dynamic. No one will support you if you’re weak. Stop being weak.
If we are to win, it will not be because someone found just the right words, it will be because people at TPUSA and various GOP organizations did the difficult, unpleasant, and expensive work required to train and coordinate volunteers and professional activists in competitive elections across the country. It will be because the underpaid young people manning the machinery of state pulled the right lever at the right time. The Right has moved out of theory and into practice. A lot of legacy figures are not equipped to make the jump and are trying to preserve their relevance by creating problems that they say you can solve by giving them money and attention.
It is not productive to allow stupid and dishonest people to spin their wheels about this stuff indefinitely. I think it’s counterproductive. We need more deportations, not more restatements of the now commonplace theoretical case for deportations, paired with rhetoric that makes real world deportations harder to achieve. The online influencer class has built a ghetto for itself. If you cannot close the door behind these conversations and these figures, you will be trapped inside with them forever.
You're such a good writer. I dread the day you eventually self-doxx/face reveal and we find out you really are Joe Biden.
Social media is an outrage machine, rewarding people for spreading outrage whether right or wrong, and this feeding people alarm. It threatens real progress.