The Left digs in for a long siege

The American left still has its adherents among State and local elected officials, the media, and Members of Congress. Now they are digging in for a siege, and expect their readers, listeners, viewers – and voters – to lift the siege. How ugly it gets, depends on how many conservative rank-and-file will help President-elect Donald J. Trump enforce certain laws. And also on the willingness to go to court to protect certain rights the left doesn’t want people to have.

Primary objective of the left – to retain illegal aliens

By far the objective the left considers most vital, is the retention, and eventual registration to vote, of illegal aliens. Without that, the left might as well decamp from America completely. (Several Hollywood celebrities, among them Ellen DeGeneres and her same-sex housemate sharing bed, are doing so already. Whether their flight is due to post-election sour grapes, as they profess, or to avoid prosecution for activities at one or more of Sean “Diddy” Combs’ wild parties, as many suspect, remains an open question.)

President-elect Trump has announced plans to deport at least four million illegal aliens during his term, and seal the border. (The total foreign-born population stood at 51.6 million in March, according to Breitbart.) Already Democratic officials are lining up to thwart that. This week, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously declared Los Angeles a sanctuary city. Officials in a sanctuary city refuse to share information on known illegal aliens, and forbid their police or other law-enforcement agencies to assist federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers to locate, arrest, or detain illegal aliens. Twenty-four Democratic State Attorneys General have pledged to challenge all deportation measures in court. California AG Rob Bonta is supremely confident of victory in court. But Washington State AG Bob Ferguson admits Team Trump might be better prepared than the first Trump administration was.

Lee Gelernt of the ACLU admits something else:

The Trump team has apparently been preparing for four years to implement anti-immigrant policies, and the rhetoric in the country has gotten so much more polarized than it was in 2016. Lee Gelernt

Translation: this time around, Team Trump has the support of the American people.

Resources for deportations

President-elect Trump is serious about declaring a national emergency, empowering him to use the military to find and deport people. “Catch and release” would end; the idea is catch, hold, then airlift out. To do that, ICE would double the 41,000 detention beds it currently has. That might present a problem. Jack Davis at The Western Journal cited an NBC report, and said:

Areas the report singled out as likely places for new centers to be opened include Denver, Los Angeles, Miami and Chicago, while expanding or reopening facilities to serve as detention centers might be an option for New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, one of NBC’s sources said.

Los Angeles, of course, is a new problem. The Mayor of Denver threatened to station his police at the county line (Denver City and County are consolidated) and mobilize his city-county’s residents as some kind of authorized militia to forbid ICE or the military to enter. Trump “carried” Miami-Dade County in Florida but did not carry Chicago, New York (City or State), or Washington, D.C. Philadelphia would present another problem, because Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-Pa.) might interfere.

But Texas offered 1400 acres for building a detention facility on the northern bank of the Rio Grande. Gov. Kevin Stitt (R-Okla.) has pledged the cooperation of his State’s prison officials, to deport illegal aliens in their prisons.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum spoke of trying to persuade Trump to let illegal aliens stay. But she also said she was ready to take them back if Trump kicks them out.

Border Czar-designate Tom Homan is on record, telling illegal aliens to self-deport while they still can. Moreover, “thousands” of retired Border Patrol agents and military veterans are asking where to volunteer, re-enlist, etc.

The left, media, and censorship

But the left still has significant media control – and now proposes to get State governments into the censorship business. Colleges and universities have already been in that business. Mike Benz, a former State Department official, told Bannon’s War Room to expect blue States to pass European-style censorship laws. Those laws would dictate the sort of material a social-media platform may host, to reach users within a State. They also would introduce the concept media literacy:

These states will aim to box out social media platforms that allow free speech and box out news institutions like the War Room, preventing access to them on public Wi-Fi or from being cited in high school, middle school, or college exams.

Censorship bureaucrats would also scatter from the State Department, and

mov[e] into civil society jobs at Brookings, the Atlantic Council, CSIS, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Penn Biden Center, Stanford University, the Harvard Belfer Center, and other similar institutions. They will use their residual influence to make back-channel deals with NATO, the European Union, and governments in Brazil and Australia.

Already several celebrities, among them Hollywood Director Rob Reiner, have decamped from Elon Musk’s X to a new platform, Bluesky. (But Mr. Reiner has lately committed himself for psychiatric treatment from the “stress” of fielding barbs from conservatives.)

But the left is losing ground in the media as well. After the election, viewership at MSNBC declined precipitously. It’s owner, Comcast, wants to sell it and might force it to change its name. Such a sale might also see several of the most annoying media personalities lose their jobs, among them:

• “Morning Joe” Scarborough and his wife, Mika Brzezinski, and
• Joy Reid, who tells Trump supporters “people don’t feel safe with you,”

MSNBC host Joy Reid: Stay away from pro Trump family members since they ENDED democracy, may turn you in pic.twitter.com/3v1UGKeSdT— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) November 22, 2024

Consider also the ladies of ABC’s The View, who want to abolish the concept of sex-specific restrooms.

The View calls for ALL BATHROOMS EVERYWHERE to be open to “all genders.”

“We have bathrooms here in this building, it just says ‘all genders.’ Why can’t they just do that everywhere?” – Joy Behar.

Ana Navarro says you’re “a bigot” if you don’t want men in the women’s bathroom. Nicholas Fondacaro

The View calls fort ALL BATHROOMS EVERYWHERE to be open to "all genders."
"We have bathrooms here in this building, it just says 'all genders.' Why can't they just do that everywhere?" – Joy Behar.
Ana Navarro says you're "a bigot" if you don't want men in the women's bathroom. pic.twitter.com/IbMGWI6aK3— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) November 22, 2024

But are the foot soldiers getting discouraged?

But signs are emerging that rank-and-file followers of the left have grown discouraged. Katie Benner, Washington, D.C. correspondent for The New York Times, reported on a few protest marches in New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Those marches took place, all right – but many participants wondered what they were accomplishing. Trump didn’t back down in 2017 when the first round of “marches on Washington” took place. Why, they ask, should anyone expect him to back down now, especially after winning reelection (with the popular vote!)? “Get somebody else to do it,” one former participant mordantly observed.

That article casts serious doubt on the Mayor of Denver’s plan to mobilize his city’s residents to protect illegal aliens. Ben Shapiro, writing on the same subject, pointed out that the causes of the left lack the legitimacy of an end to racial discrimination, not letting people die of a communicable immunodeficiency disorders, and so forth. Now they’re fighting to force women to accept men in their bathrooms. Representative-elect Tim “Sarah” McBride (D-Del.) has already created a stir with his insistence on using women’s bathrooms in the Capitol and the Cannon, Longworth, and Rayburn House Office Buildings. (He affects women’s hairstyle and clothing but has not had “bottom surgery.”) Reps. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) are leading the opposition to that idea. Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), Speaker of the House, has already said that single-sex bathrooms belong to biological males and females, respectively. But that has provoked some absurd statements:

This is the lesson you’ve drawn? From the election in November? This is your priority? That you want to bully a member of congress? As opposed to welcoming her to join this body? Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.), House Minority Leader

Jeffries: This is the lesson you've drawn? From the election in November? This is your priority? That you want to bully a member of congress? As opposed to welcoming her to join this body? pic.twitter.com/ib87yVgUYZ— Acyn (@Acyn) November 20, 2024

There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone. If that’s a defining issue for a voter, there will be a different candidate. We have a bathroom in my office that anybody is welcome to use, including Representative-elect Sarah(sic) McBride. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.)

There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone.

If that’s a defining issue for a voter, there will be a different candidate.

We have a bathroom in my office that anybody is welcome to use, including Representative-elect Sarah McBride. pic.twitter.com/Y8ZZbzFVq6— U.S. Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) November 20, 2024

A few other observations

The left has a few other redoubts for their absurdities. A California judge stripped a Texas father of all parental rights to his twin sons. Now their mother will turn one of them into the likeness of a girl. Elsewhere, the account Libs of TikTok discovered a video of an Alphabet Soup activist – an apparent man “transitioning” into the likeness of a woman – threatening to kill the first person who, having opposed men in women’s restrooms, crosses his path. Rep. Mace highlighted it as an example of double standards of lawful and unlawful behavior.

This man wants to kill women who don’t want him in their bathroom.#HoldTheLine https://t.co/SPqSq9fkM4— Nancy Mace (@NancyMace) November 22, 2024

The Biden administration is denying a “family planning” grant to Oklahoma for not being willing to fund abortions with taxes. Oklahoma is asking for Supreme Court review, and nineteen Members of Congress filed a friend-of-the-court brief in support. Oklahoma v. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 24-437.

At least one State (Oregon) opposed to Trump’s mass deportation plans, already registers people to vote without adequately verifying citizenship. This is part of the Motor Voter process, of course. Theoretically the law treats lying about citizenship when registering to vote as perjury. But this being Oregon, officials wink and nudge about that sort of thing.

Thus the left is digging in for what they think is a four-year siege. But counting on their rank-and-file to lift the siege might represent wishful thinking on their part. Still, the right must press the siege, in court, and, if necessary, with appropriate force.