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Despite MSNBC treating Biden’s State of the Union address like the royal wedding, you probably didn’t watch it. But it doesn’t matter because... I’ve got the highlights reel! 

FUNNIEST DEMOCRATIC BASE SUCK-UP: “I met a young woman named Saria, who is here tonight. For 30 years... she’d been a proud member of Ironworkers Local 44...” 

Good for Saria, but 95% of ironworkers are men. Democrats, can’t you ever give it a rest?

[Note to fact-checkers: Did Neil Kinnock ever know a ”Saria”?]

BIGGEST LIE: “[We are] the only nation in the world built on an idea.”

First of all, this hoariest of all cliches, autoloaded into every Democrat’s teleprompter, is patently false. Tons of other countries are based on ideas! Ukraine: We will be a nation of corrupt grifters who suck dry the treasuries of other countries. Canada: Accomplish nothing, be incredibly boring, and have a nincompoop as prime minister. Nigeria: We will send you emails every 15 minutes saying you can share in a $30 million inheritance.

In fact, our country is not a mere ”idea.” If it were, we could just give it to other countries. We’ve been trying to do that, often forcibly, by invading and nation-building, forever. It hasn’t worked. They all still want to move here.

America is a nation of British Protestants, based on beautifully written governing documents, from John Winthrop’s 1630 sermons to the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. Demographically, it remained about 80% to 90% white, 10% to 20% black and overwhelmingly Protestant for several centuries.

Thus, in 1776, King George referred to

Give the Biden Regime credit for one thing: creativity in finding excuses to release illegal aliens that should, of course, not only be in custody but also deported. The Department of Homeland Security has decided that the accidental release of an illegal alien’s personal information is a get-out-of-detention free card and chance to stay in the country. Thus did DHS set free almost 3,000 illegals to further colonize—and terrorize—the heartland. Naturally, the latest administrative Amnesty cooked up by unindicted visa fraudster Alejandro Mayorkas has no basis in immigration law, but a little thing like the law hasn’t stopped Mayorkas and Biden before. After all, they refuse to enforce it. No measure, it seems, is too extreme if it pushes ahead the dispossession and replacement of the Historic American Nation.

The Amnesty doesn’t have a name, but it appears to build on crime-victim visas. Illegals have long abused the U Non-Immigrant Visa, a path to lawful permanent residency. Another is the T NIV  for alleged victims of trafficking. My guess: These could be permanently expanded to include the illegal-alien “victims” of the government’s publicly exposing, however briefly, their personally identifiable information. The result might not just be release but also the reward of a green card.

ICE releases nearly 3,000 detained immigrants affected by accidental data leak https://t.co/Xnbe5vjPbS

— Fox News (@FoxNews) January 20, 2023

Visa fixer Mayorkas isn’t the only bad actor here, by the way. Include affirmative action appointee Tae Johnson of ICE SVU, a key Treason Lobby legman in the effort to elect a new people.

Here’s the stunt Mayorkas and Johnson have

Paul Johnson RIP.     British writer Paul Johnson died on January 12th at age 94.

Hearing the news I felt as though I’d lost the other party in a friendship going back decades, but which I’d been neglecting for the latter half of that span.

That’s ”felt as though.” I wasn’t a personal friend of P.J.’s. I only met the man in person once, at a Library of Congress event in the late 1990s. I introduced myself, we exchanged some brief pleasantries about the event, whatever it was (I’ve forgotten), and he turned away to speak to others.

I had been reading him since my college days in the mid-1960s, though. At that time he was on the political left. In fact he was editor of New Statesman, Britain’s main leftist weekly magazine. I was a lefty myself so there was no contradiction there.

I took a liking to P.J.’s prose early on. When the week’s New Statesman came out I turned first to his editorial page, published under the heading ”London Diary.” Some of his throwaway remarks stuck in my mind for decades afterwards.

Here is an example from July 2003, when I was writing for National Review. Peter Robinson had organized a Q&A with P.J., we National Review hacks supplying the Qs and P.J. the As. Here was my contribution.

(Note that by this point P.J. had been on the political right for over twenty years. In the late 1970s he had become an ardent admirer of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and had switched his regular weekly commentary from New Statesman to The Spectator. We were in sync there: my own political orientation had taken the same turn at about the same time.)

Robinson:  John Derbyshire asks—well, let me simply read his question: ”Back in the 1960s when Paul Johnson was Editor of the London New Statesman, I was a devoted reader of that journal. I recall that in one of his weekly diaries he passed an observation to the effect that there were only two things he was sure of: One, that money is the root of all evil, and two, that the only cure for unhappiness is hard work. I should like to ask Mr Johnson whether in the subsequent years he has revised his opinion on either of these points.”

P.J.:  Ah, that’s the kind of question one loves to hear. Something from a reader who still remembers what one wrote 40 years ago. It can certainly lead to evil, but, no, I no longer believe money is the root of all evil. And on hard work, I haven’t really changed my mind. It is a cure. And it’s a part of every cure.

That later position of P.J.’s is of course correct. Money can certainly help to advance evil, as with the vast sums George Soros is spending to undermine Western Civilization. The greatest evil-workers of recent times, however—Lenin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot—were not driven by love of money but by love of power.

The other part—that the only cure for unhappiness is hard work—needs slight qualification. I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that heedless hedonism, perhaps even addiction to alcohol or narcotics, might cure unhappiness at least for a while. So: The only personally and socially healthy cure for unhappiness is hard work. That’s better.

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The man and the work.     P.J. was an opinion journalist in his heart and soul. He didn’t just want to record things, he wanted us to know what he thought about them.

However, his prodigious intellect and tireless appetite for reading made him a very superior kind of opinion journalist, perhaps lifting him above that classification altogether into the ranks of scholarship. P.J. didn’t pull his opinions out of thin air; he grounded them in long hours of reading and reflection.

It shows in the bibliographies (usually ”Source Notes”) at the ends of his books. I tallied the following number of pages of bibliography to some of his popular histories.

• A History of Christianity (1977):  15 pages.
  
  
• Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s (1983):  54 pages.
  
  
• A History of the Jews (1987):  37 pages.
  
  
• The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 (1991):  71 pages.
  
  
• A History of the American People (1997):  84 pages.

There is a definite upwards trend there. I think it got to be too much for his publishers. Around the year 2000 P.J. decided to write a history of art, a subject of deep interest to him. (His father was, like Kipling’s, an art instructor.) When the book came out in 2003 it included this in its preface:

I have put everything I know and feel deeply into this book. It tries to cover all time and the world and, in the process, threatened to become prohibitively expensive and bulky. So I was obliged to cut it, for the first time in my life as a book writer, and the pain has been acute. I have left out source notes and bibliography for the same reason. I beg readers to forgive the omissions.

I have a mental image of P.J.’s publisher, 800-odd pages of manuscript already piled up on his desk, receiving the author’s 100-odd additional pages of bibliography and shrieking ”NOO-OO-OOO!…”

P.J. wasn’t infallible in his opinions, but even when I disagreed with what he was saying—with his Catholicism in The Quest for God (1996), for example—I always felt I was dealing with a highly civilized person with whom, if we could discuss things in person, I’d find common ground and likely come away knowing something I didn’t know before.

On points of fact he, like Homer, occasionally nodded. The most famous such incident was when, in the first edition of A History of the American People, he translated John F. Kennedy’s declaration Ich bin ein Berliner to mean ”I am a hamburger.” A berliner is not a kind of hamburger; it’s a kind of jelly donut. (The error was corrected in later editions of the book. And no, JFK’s German listeners did not suppose he was describing himself as a jelly donut. They took his declaration in the spirit intended.)

If I were asked to name my favorite among P.J.’s books… I couldn’t. I mean, I’d give a different answer if asked on different days. One of those answers would surely be Intellectuals (1988), though.

That’s the book where P.J. offers a parade of would-be world-improvers and saviors of humanity from the past three hundred years—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Sartre, James Baldwin, and so on—and shows us what awful people they were. While professing love for humanity in the general, they had not much patience with human beings in the particular.

The chapter on Bertrand Russell, for example, burst a bubble I had been caressing since my student days: an admiration for Russell based on his writings about math and his History of Western Philosophy (which even P.J. allows is a ”brilliant survey… the ablest thing of its kind ever written and… deservedly a best-seller all over the world”). The Cold War revealed Russell to be an impulsive and inconsistent thinker where public affairs were concerned, and none too honest. Nor does the philosopher’s sex life shine bright under P.J.’s close scrutiny: ”a long tale of petty adulteries,” etc. So we lose our idols.

I had better stop or I shall fill this whole diary with commentary on Paul Johnson. As I started by saying,

The GOP/GAP took back the U.S. House of Representatives in 2022 on the pledge to thwart Amnesty and to stop the illegal alien invasion at the southwest border. But, while the caucus generally shows no sign of wavering on Amnesty, some squishes are wimping out on serious border control. And they cower from impeaching, not only President Biden, but also even his appalling Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Nor do they want to force the immigration issue into the upcoming debt ceiling fight. Still, patriot Republicans, like Arizona’s Andy Biggs and Texas’ Chip Roy, are pressing for something more than talk—and they believe the debt ceiling fight is the perfect opportunity. Will they stage a revolt of the kind that forced House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to make key concessions to get his job?

Biggs just announced articles of impeachment against Mayorkas. “The first thing that goes when a country is actually devolving is when you lose your geographical integrity,” he told Tucker Carlson. “And Secretary Mayorkas—that’s his main job—he has willfully imposed his own dangerous policies on us,” Biggs continued, channeling VDARE.com. “It’s not negligence. It’s not incompetence. It’s willful” [Mayorkas facing articles of impeachment from GOP lawmaker, by Charles Creitz, Fox News, January 31, 2023].

Biggs’ is the second impeachment effort offered by Republicans in the new Congress. Oklahoma Rep. Pat Fallon also introduced articles of impeachment over Mayorkas’ undermining border security and encouraging illegal immigration. That measure even gained the support of squishes like Texas Rep. Dan Crenshaw. Significantly, Fallon had opposed impeachment in the last Congress, but now thinks it’s time to send a message [House GOP lays groundwork for Mayorkas impeachment as moderates balk, by Melanie Zanona, Manu Raju and Annie Grayer, CNN, January 17, 2023].

The effort to impeach Mayorkas is tacitly supported by

Earlier: ”Religious Charities” (AKA Refugee Contractors) Praise Biden’s 125,000 Refugee Admission Plan

President Dwight D. Eisenhower once decried the “military-industrial complex.” (Has it brought us the war in Ukraine?) Yet my years in the Border Patrol taught me that there’s also an immigration-industrial complex that is similarly venal, and dangerous.

Northern Virginia has two of the country’s wealthiest counties because so many residents are in the business of government, either as bureaucrats or the federal contractors once called “Beltway Bandits,” or as think tankers and staffers on Capitol Hill. They’re taking taxpayer money in one form or another, and so the biggest business in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area is the government itself.

Similarly, a few years back, when I was detailed to help out the border invasion that occurred when Trump capitulated to the “kids-in-cages!” propaganda, I learned a corollary to the adage that nothing is more expensive than cheap labor: Nothing is more expensive than stopping border enforcement. It costs the taxpayers a lot more money to invite an invasion of illegals than securing the border to keep them out.

When I landed at Ground Zero, not just the number of illegals coming across appalled me—so did the amount of money we spent to import them.

Borders agents detailed from the northern border or interior stations were paid a per diem, and for hotel rooms and plane flights. But we weren’t the only federal employees there. Personnel from other components of Homeland Security were there too: U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services, the Transportation Security Administration, the Federal Protective Service and even one or two employees from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. They, too, received the same reimbursement deal.

There were also personnel from Health and Human Services and National Guard troops. They helped feed the illegals and reported those crossing illegally, but they were not allowed to stop them. If no Border Patrol Agents were around, they had to ignore them and watch them enter the country illegally.

All this is happening again, because of the Biden Rush.

When I started my career in the Border Patrol, we were always short staffed and underfunded. We could have used more agents in the field, newer vehicles, more detention beds, and more.

Yet when we were releasing people into the United States, we received all the money and personnel we needed to help the illegals into the country! The local motels and hotels must have loved it. Huge profits for everyone… courtesy of U.S taxpayers.

On top of that, government money went