Opinion and Commentary since 2003
Oops, sorry.
It was actually a guy with a Hungarian surname who supplied drugs to a woman with an Irish surname who was about to testify as a witness in a trial involving alleged racketeering and bribery by members of the Italian mob.
To my knowledge, all the people involved are American citizens.
This is the text of a letter I wrote to the Casilio campaign and other listed candidates / electeds who are hosting what is being called a “Migrant Crisis Forum” tonight.
Will pitchforks and torches be provided, or should your anti-immigrant posse bring their own?
I am truly disappointed that I am unable to join your “migrant crisis forum” this evening. I would very much have appreciated the opportunity to tell all of the participants, to your faces, how ashamed and disgusted I am by your use of some of the most vulnerable people in our community as pieces in a political game of checkers. Your flyer for this event invites people to have their “voices heard” because Democrats have “blindly welcomed this crisis without any input from residents.” I wasn’t aware that asylum-seeking refugees, whose cases are being managed by a coalition of local resettlement agencies, needed to subject themselves and their housing and safety to your right-wing base.
I say “ashamed” because western New York already has a reputation for being especially racist and xenophobic. Stoking hatred and politicizing Immigration is an easy play for craven politicians who wish to attain power through fear.
Here we have an invitation to a “migrant crisis forum” hosted by people with Italian surnames like “Casilio” and “Todaro” and Polish ones like “Zachowicz” and “Jasinski”, with Kracker and Ortt bringing up the Teutonic rear. Mr. Zachowicz’s campaign even hosted a recent “Party in Polonia” without a hint of irony.
How soon we forget. It was a short century or so ago that white Anglo-Saxon protestants were aghast over the influx of what they considered to be uncouth Catholic immigrants from places like Italy, Ireland, and Poland. These immigrants were derided as degenerate, disease-carrying ne’er-do-wells whose presence in the country was a negative development in all respects.
Now, people fleeing some of the worst violence and political oppression in the world from places like Venezuela, Cuba, and sub-Saharan Africa trek thousands of miles, with just a few belongings, making a perilous journey to come to America to find peace and asylum and a chance at the same prosperity that people like the Casilio family enjoy today. Venezuela is a post-Stalinist socialist failed state. It must have taken a lot for you all to opt for “hate immigrants” over “hate communism” but hey ho, it’s a new, edgier Republican Party than the one I remember.
The tell here is that you don’t refer to these people as refugees or asylum seekers – you rely instead on “migrants” and you know full well that a large swath of your supporters considers these legal refugees as “illegals”. You know they’re not illegal, but you’re not going to correct anyone if they say it. You know that given some help and a work permit, they’d be overwhelmingly good for this region and a net asset, but for some reason you’re not really looking for solutions to a problem – you’re looking for scapegoats. After all, it’s an election year and you have literally nothing else.
When you stoke fear and hatred against refugees, as you have, and as you are, and as you will continue to do (because of politics), you embarrass yourselves. You shame your families. You bring disgrace to your own ancestors who endured exactly the same kind of hatred, scorn, and defamation a century ago.
There’s a difference, though. The difference is that your ancestors weren’t fleeing persecution when they left Poland or Italy. They were just seeking a better economic situation. They came to a country where everyone was from somewhere else and the force of old-world prejudices was blunted. They came here for opportunity and freedom. Yet you would deny this to people who are no different from the Casilios and Todaros and Jasinskis and Zachowiczes of yesterday. Here you all stand, ready to pull the ladder of opportunity up behind you. Here you all are, taking a lazy focus-group-approved, push-poll fueled move to stoke fear, hatred, and division against people who left behind everything they had – and everyone they knew – to start fresh in a free country. Here you all are, making sure that the absolute worst people in our community have someone new to hate and to fear. As refugees from Burma, Sudan, and Somalia enrich our little region with their culture and labor, you insult them and anyone else whose path to this country came about due to war and oppression.
So, that is why I am ashamed. As for disgusted, all of this is disgusting. When my parents came to this country from an Eastern European dictatorship, my father was drafted only 3 years after his arrival, receiving expedited citizenship and he served this country during the Vietnam War. They encountered no problems in the melting pot of Queens, New York, but when stationed in the South Carolina of 1969, they were treated to exactly the kind of vile, hateful rhetoric and behavior that you all now gleefully heap on people from Congo and Ghana and Venezuela.
Someday, I hope and pray that your children or grandchildren will ask you about the history of each of your families and the unique and rich history they all brought to this country, and the difficulties they faced and sacrifices they made to succeed in the New World. And I hope you know and learn of those stories. And then I hope someday that you are confronted with the legacy of your lies, fear, ignorance, and hatred. Maybe someone you love will come under the care of a Venezuelan nurse who came here in 2022, or a Congolese physician. You should look that person in the eye and tell them the truth about how you talked about them when they were penniless, alone, afraid, and vulnerable.
Our region likes to tell people that we are a city of good neighbors. That we are kind and welcoming. That we are friendly and that we celebrate our diversity. Your cheap and lazy “migrant crisis” rhetoric really puts the lie to all of that.
Shame on all of you.
Erie County Sours on Refugees
Erie County has a lot of descendants from Polish and Italian and Irish immigrants, among others. These people proudly celebrate things like the Italian Fest and Dyngus Day and St. Patrick’s Day, but far, far too many of our neighbors here in the nominal city of good ones would like very much to tell the new immigrants from Ghana and Venezuela and Somalia and Yemen and Burma (etc. ad infinitum) to please just fuck off. Not just to fuck off, but to go anywhere but here. Ironically enough, the long-ago immigrants who came here from the Old World of the late 19th and early 20th century were, for the most part, economic migrants leaving not violent oppression but simple poverty. And good for them. The asylum seekers now making headlines are fleeing not just poverty alone, but political and gang violence. They are fleeing lawless failed states and oppressive totalitarian regimes. They are not “illegals” but lawfully in the country and would very much like to take some sort of menial work that you and your kid don’t want to do, in order to rebuild their lives in a new country. Some of them will succeed and others will fail, but not one of them is less deserving of a chance to become an American than any prior immigrant or refugee. =
To the people whose biggest pet peeve is why those refugees did not seek refuge via some other way, you can thank your master Trump, who shuttered the US offices worldwide that helped to vet and process asylum claims.
I also want to criticize the local TV news, especially Channel 2, which has really helped to fuel distrust and hatred of refugees thanks to clumsy reporting by Ron Plants. Look at these posts to xitter:
I don’t know whether it ever occurred to anyone to just leave the asylum seekers the fuck alone? These people who gave up and risked everything – including their lives – to flee violence and persecution only to come to western New York to be pummeled with more hatred and misinformation, distrust and suspicion egged on by the local GOP (“guns over people”) and media dullards?
You’re really going to go on the television and insinuate that helping 115 kids get an education is a terrible burden that no district in WNY should bear? I am absolutely sickened by people with Polish and Italian surnames taking the lead on heaping scorn and derision on these refugees, and fueling hatred and resentment of them. Obeisance to Trump and gratuitous cruelty are the two platform planks that make up the contemporary GOP. It was absolutely disgusting for failed politician Stefan Mychajliw to refer to immigrants as an “infestation” but now it’s become Republican policy to be as nativistic as they can get away with without being overtly racist about it.
The Trump Tax Hike
Hey, remember when the Donald Trump tax reform was passed back in 2021, which cut taxes on the wealthiest Americans?
President Trump and his congressional allies hoodwinked us. The law they passed initially lowered taxes for most Americans, but it built in automatic, stepped tax increases every two years that begin in 2021 and that by 2027 would affect nearly everyone but people at the top of the economic hierarchy. All taxpayer income groups with incomes of $75,000 and under — that’s about 65 percent of taxpayers — will face a higher tax rate in 2027 than in 2019.
For most, in fact, it’s a delayed tax increase dressed up as a tax cut. How many times have you heard Trump and his allies mention that? They surmised — correctly, so far — that if they waited to add the tax increases until after the 2020 election, few of the people most affected were likely to remember who was responsible.
Guess what? That’s starting now! Those rich men north of Richmond sure did a number on you all.
This is why the right-wing are going in so hard on culture war bullshit like Bud Light and Disney and drag queen story time and whatever other outrage they can concoct – it’s to keep you poor, angry, armed to the teeth, and blaming someone else.
Right-Wing Terrorism
We all saw it on January 6th, well it continues apace as these monsters who scream bloody murder about “antifa” and “BLM” have their acolytes going around literally murdering people who dare to fly an LGBTQ flag outside of their private business. This is the future that the right-wing want.
Didn’t hear about the cold-blooded murder of Laura Ann Carleton in Lake Arrowhead? Don’t know that a right-wing lunatic murdered her for the crime of flying a pride flag? I’ll bet you that you would have heard all the fuck about it had she been flying a Trump flag and some young zoomer leftist killed her. That’s because the whole notion of there existing a “liberal media” is a joke and a lie. The media in this country are owned by millionaires and corporations. If they have an underlying agenda at all, it is to protect and defend whatever status quo exists to enable them to continue to make money. The murder of Laura Ann Carleton will never get the attention it deserves, as an avatar for nascent right-wing eliminationist violence. They tried to hang Mike Pence, they tried to murder the governor of Michigan, and now they have a lunatic shampoo magnate running around calling himself the “maximum leader” waiting to create a “Foundationalist” society that is violent and medieval.
This Nazi shampoo cult sounds right up Mychajliw’s depraved alley.
It is high time that the conservative movement and Republican party underwent its reckoning for barrelling full steam ahead into authoritarian cultism, but only Chris Christie, the opportunistic New Jersey loudmouth, has the guts on the right to say what needs to be said about Trump – that he’s a loser, a fraud, un-American, and anti-American.
Two of the myriad asylum seekers now being temporarily housed in Erie County have now been arrested for committing sexual assault or rape. These are obviously heinous crimes that should – and are – being prosecuted with vigor.
But it is not their status as “migrants” or “asylum seekers” or “refugees” that caused the predation. Immigrants do not hold a monopoly on sex crimes, nor are sex crimes any more or less heinous depending on the alleged perpetrator’s visa status.
For Republican candidate for County Executive Chrissy Casilio to roll a podium into the parking lot of a hotel housing refugees in order to heap scorn and derision on Mark Poloncarz over a migrant’s crimes is interesting. Is it the crime that is bad? Because if rape is bad, then should she not be holding a press conference outside every rape location? Or is rape only bad – or especially bad – when the alleged perpetrator is a refugee from Venezuela or the Congo? I mean, it’s bad in all cases, so either every case deserves this sort of attention or it does not.
What all of this really underscores is that the Republicans have literally nothing to run on. They are not a political party with a platform or a set even of shared ideals – they are a ragtag collection of MAGA cult adherents who lurch from culture war item to culture war item and dig in especially deeply when it has to do with minorities or immigrants who are not white.
Chrissy CaBoom is more familiar with making pronouncements on Facebook or at Clarence Republican Committee meetings, safely ensconced in the town where her father is Supervisor and their surname carries a lot of weight. Elsewhere, it’s all coming across a bit tired. With nothing really to run on, she’s taking advice from trolling idiots and going after Mark Poloncarz for two migrants who committed a crime for which CaBoom’s hero Donald Trump himself has already been found liable. So on the one hand CaBoom and her party slavishly pledge fealty to a sex predator and on the other hand somehow think they possess a moral high ground enabling them to criticize the sex predation from someone else because they’re seeking asylum, as if that person isn’t then duly prosecuted and, if guilty, deported.
Every anti-immigrant (R) weasel with a Polish or Italian surname should be routinely called out for especial ridicule.
The way you could tell that “Rich Men North of Richmond” was going to become a “conservative anthem” is this lyric in particular:
Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat
And the obese milkin’ welfare
Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds
Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of fudge rounds
It is a gripe song. It is whiny. Poor me. To backtrack for a second, these are the narrator’s central complaints:
I am old enough to remember when protest songs were about shared values and unity, not dividing. I’m also old enough to remember when conservatives were all about taking personal responsibility and pulling oneself up by their own bootstraps. Under Limbaugh’s law, the song’s protagonist is poor simply because he isn’t trying hard enough.
The welfare queen trope as set forth in this song is also a dog-whistle – if the main villain is supposed to be “rich men north of Richmond” why would the song devote so much time demeaning people who, like the song’s protagonist, are poor and struggling? Why would someone who expresses solidarity for “miners” downtrodden by DC politics not also express solidarity for other people whom this system has ill served?
This is why it’s a conservative anthem – because it doesn’t really attack politicians nearly as much as it attacks welfare queens, and it doesn’t take a genius sociologist to figure out exactly what’s being talked about here.
Every vote mattered so dearly in 2016 and I will never not be mad about people on the left working their damnest to tear down the Democratic nominee, and I can draw a straight, dark line directly from that behavior 7 years ago to this week.
The sharing and repetition of smear after lie after libel against Hillary Clinton helped ensure that Donald Trump would hasten in this current kakistocracy. It was nothing new. It was easy to hate Hillary Clinton. After all, she was a female Democrat with influence who was smart, savvy, professional, and competent. All of this is a lot of people’s kryptonite, to this day.
Donald Trump selected fully 1/3 of the current, corrupt Supreme Court – the same court that embodies what amounts to a coup by the likes of Leonard Leo and his ultra-right-wing, Christianist ideology. All of this matters tremendously, and the disingenuous cries about the “neoliberal shill” who “can’t be worse than Trump” because “Democrats are just rainbow Republicans” really didn’t do the country any good.
The Supreme Court’s legitimacy is reliant, in large part, on people’s confidence in the impartiality, independence of that body, and its separation from politics. Well, how’s that working out? Anyone feel real confident in today’s Supreme Court? The one where Trump got to pick Barrett in direct defiance of the supposed rule that prevented Obama from picking Garland? The one where Samuel Alito is being feted by billionaires – organized by Leonard Leo – and by right-wing Catholic special interest legal clinics that have business before the court as a payoff for his reversal of Roe v. Wade? The one where Leonard Leo hooked Clarence Thomas up with a billionaire benefactor to pay off his kid’s private school tuition, buy out his mom’s house, and take him on million-dollar junkets all around the world via yacht and private jet?
The 30-year-long smearing of Clinton won, as did the 40-year effort to turn back the clock on America through the Courts.
I know it’s trendy for many of the same people who hated this woman from the left to mock cries of “vote harder”. Ha ha, so droll. But now is not the time to discount the importance of voting. There was a primary election just this week on the (R) side where a nepo-candidate won by like 20 votes. Votes matter. Votes for Hillary Clinton mattered. Those who spouted foreign and right-wing propaganda to advance a leftist argument against Hillary Clinton are as culpable for this week’s absurdity from the Court as any MAGA voter.
It is time for the Supreme Court to have a mandatory retirement age or a term limit of some sort. It has become an unaccountable junta with zero oversight and zero accountability to anyone – not Congress, not the American people.
I need to return briefly to a theme touched on the post immediately preceding this one. The profound dishonesty of the entire conservative movement is embodied by Justice Samuel Alito and encapsulated by something that happened just last year.
For years, it has been conservative dogma – wholly false – that the Supreme Court should be made up of jurists who “call balls and strikes” and do not allow their policy preferences or ideological beliefs to color how they rule on matters of great import for the citizens of this country. That the court should not “legislate from the bench” and merely interpret the Constitution as its drafters intended.
We can call bullshit on this sort of rhetoric by looking at the Court’s conscience-shocking reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision. It is not “conservative” to ignore stare decisis or to literally use the power of the court to strip women in this country of what had been between 1973 – 2022 a Constitutional right to personal privacy.
The author of the majority’s decision was Samuel Alito, who is also the most likely suspect with respect to the early leaking of that shameful screed, unique in that it shrunk rights for women in this country, rather than expanding them. Alito’s decision was released on June 24, 2022.
Literally a month or so later, Alito gave a speech in Rome, Italy wherein he mocked foreign criticism of the Dobbs decision. That speech was given at an event organized by Notre Dame University Law School’s “Religious Liberty Summit”. I’m sure it was all about religious liberty for Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Buddhists, what with it being a speech by a Catholic justice hosted by a Catholic school in Rome.
It also seems hypocritical for a jurist-for-life who is supposed to be somehow above politics – at least in the fairy tales they told us in school – to opine on matters of current political events. Or to whine so shrilly about criticism leveled at him.
The part that is fundamentally corrupt has to do with the fact that Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative invited Alito and paid for his and his wife’s travel to – and lodging in – Rome. Imagine that! An all-expenses paid trip to the Eternal City! Now, consider that Notre Dame’s Religious Liberty Initiative filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs case, arguing for the outcome that Alito delivered.
This wasn’t a scholarly invite. It was a payoff. It was a transaction.
The Leonard Leo coup has seen its first major success. Gutting affirmative action in college admissions – that’s low-hanging fruit. For decades, movement conservatives have focused their efforts on manufacturing an artifically biased right-wing Supreme Court in order to reach the goals they cannot accomplish through electoral politics.
The movement conservative right-wing Supreme Court – completely out-of-touch (by design) with the people of this country, have today gutted our entire civil rights infrastructure. It is no surprise or accident that at least two of the Court’s right-wing members maintain a level of ethics and good government one might expect from a Russian oligarch. Alito and Thomas – Leonard Leo’s pets.
It was not too long ago – 60 years – that the Jim Crow South still had legal, institutionalized segregation in public accommodations. Whites-only water fountains, waiting rooms, means of egress, etc.
The pain and anguish and hard work of the ensuing six decades do not matter one whit to a movement hell-bent on ensuring that white elites maintain their slipping grip on power and institutionalizing one specific subset of Christianist ideology on the entire population.
It’s why today’s Republicans are so busily gutting and weakening voting access and rights in a way that is specifically designed to most adversely affect voters whom they perceive to be friendliest to centrism and Democrats. They are a fundamentally anti-democratic coterie of liars, hypocrites, and charlatans.
It is only thus that a contrived, fake “controversy” over a website for a gay couple that never existed could reach the highest court, and that court would rule that it is ok for places of public accommodation to discriminate against a protected class, so long as the discrimination is arguably based on moral or religious beliefs.
Just think! Soon we may have the benefit of living actual history with storefronts in East Aurora or Williamsville peppered with “no gays” (certainly any such establishment would use a stronger, more offensive epithet), or “trans not allowed” or “interracial couples need not apply.” Perhaps we can usher in a return of the Green Book – digitized for our “modern” era – so that LGBTQ couples and people of color can find which places of nominally public accommodation are welcoming to them.
Run a public opinion poll on that and find out whether normal Americans agree with a return to institutionalized segregation and bigotry.
But this post is the principal reason why the Leo Christianist right are having such a lovely time and a field day – they’re making the right people (namely, “libs”) angry. Owning the libs is the central ideological feature of modern conservatism, and nothing makes these snowflakes happier than making sure that any historically marginalized group from black folks to gay folks are spat upon and treated as dirt. They are fighting the war against “woke!” They are battling something they call the “woke mind virus!”
I am not a Christian of any ilk, so perhaps one of you who is can explain to me – reconcile for me – Christian religious doctrine with a political ideology grounded in hatred and cruelty?
Just wait until someone with a business open to the general public decides that their morality dictates that they not serve white heterosexual couples, or conservatives, or people with tattoos or facial hair.
Certainly religious doctrines deserve to be protected by the Constitution, which is why the Court did not – and cannot – force churches or other places of worship to solemnize same-sex unions, and cannot force a religion to recognize or perform such marriages. That is fine. What this right-wing ideology is doing, however, is giving a place of public accommodation the same treatment as a religious organization or facility.
I guess they were right about the arc of the moral universe and its length. Rest assured that history will view this coup-Court as a national embarrassment and disgrace. Someday.
Welcome to the tyranny of the unelected Christianist dictatorship-for-life.
Bills player Jordan Poyer and his wife, Rachel Bush, are very vocal pro-Trump conservatives, and they are completely free to be exactly that. Literally no one in the world is trying to take away from them their right to be as right-wing and pro-Trump as they wish.
This being a free country, anyone has the right to adhere to just about any other political ideology or faction, and possesses a concomitant right to think that Donald Trump is a proto-fascist idiot buffoon who has done more to divide America and to stoke its most base and disgusting hatreds than any other contemporary mainstream political figure.
Poyer and Bush have the right to give Trump and his family as many of their dollars as they wish.
Others have the right to boycott Trump completely.
This isn’t hard stuff to grasp.
This means that anyone has the right to condemn and to not associate with Trump any more than a Trumper can be compelled to love Hunter Biden. The woke are also free.
Yet Trumpers like Poyer and Bush demand to foist their adherence to that cult on others. When they are confronted with the fact that not everyone thinks in lockstep with them, they throw a predictable tantrum on social media. Like your aunt, who thinks that she has taken away Facebook’s right to use her images by posting some spam she found.
Poyer was set to host at a Trump country club a celebrity golf tournament to benefit the ECMC Foundation – a charity set up to raise funds that benefit the hospital and enable donors to offset some of their tax burden by taking a deduction against their donation.
If the intent was purely charitable – to raise money for an ECMC charitable initiative – then Poyer could have had the self-awareness to recognize (or react to the fact) that many people do not want to in any way be associated with the Trump name – directly or otherwise. For the uninitiated, Trump is currently under arrest and indictment in New York and the federal courts for various and sundry crimes.
Poyer and Bush demand to hurl their Trump support in your face, whether you like it or not, and then to complain wildly when you do not. Poyer took to Instagram to take his ball and go home, and then make-believe he doesn’t get it.
“Am I stressed about it? Not even the slightest bit,” he said. “Am I upset about it? A little, but I’m not even upset about the tournament being canceled. I’m upset about this is where we are in America.”
You’re not upset that you canceled the tournament? Then why the hell are you holding the tournament? Is it about ECMC or about your ego, or your ideology, or your obeisance to Trump? His wife, Rachel Bush, famously maintains an especially aggressively hostile pro-Trump Twitter feed so this feigned ignorance about “where we are in America” is a bit rich.
If raising money for ECMC was the primacy concern, Poyer could have – and certainly would have – been more thoughtful about where he chose to host his tournament. If the aim was purely charitable in nature, then he’d have chosen a course that does not come with obvious political baggage.
People have a right to object to participating in something involving the Trump name. A more cynical person might suggest that the whole point of this being scheduled at a Trump course was specifically to bring about the sort of poor me victimhood we’re seeing. “See, the woke Soros libs did it again.” Yeah, well, the libs detest Trump and don’t want to give him any money or anything else. It’s especially ridiculous, given the ECMC mission, vision, and values, many of which are in complete opposition to everything for which Trump and Trumpism stand. How do Poyer and Bush reconcile their devotion to Trump with their support for a hospital that is a “top performer in LGBTQ health equity“? Geez, who knew these two were so woke?
Poyer complains, seemingly without irony,
“I believe in the universal law that the energy you put out is the energy you get back and we’re not doing that right now. All we do is fight with each other all day. Fight with each other about politics, about religion, about race. The issues that come up are the issues we create. … It blows my mind that we sit here in America today with these issues.”
Yes, Mr. Poyer – it blows my mind, too.
The issues that come up are the issues we create.
The energy you put out is the energy you get back.
It’s helping others. It’s sharing those experiences and about being open about we’re not perfect. Nobody is perfect…. The thing is we need each other. We are we arguing over (stuff) that does not matter?
“It seems like our egos get in the way of being a good human being. (Not) sharing love, sharing conversations, sharing laughter with people who may not believe in the same things that you do, it’s a huge problem in America right now.
Our egos taking over the majority of our lives. A lot of us don’t even know who we are anymore. We’re run by that ego self, run by the materialistic side, run by the things that don’t really matter.
Are Poyer and Bush ignorant, or do they know exactly what they’re doing? Do they really think it is ridiculous that people would object to participating in something involving Trump? Do they think that they are the only people who are permitted publicly to have political beliefs? A charitable person would want to maximize participation and go out of his way to avoid controversy.
But ego and arrogance win. It’s not about the right to love Trump or be a conservative – you have to, too. It’s now a matter of principle for them that next year they will try to do the same thing, having not learned anything from this or listened to anyone about it. For just one second if Poyer and Bush could set their colossal egos aside and consider for just a nanosecond why people object to Trump, maybe their “can’t we all just get along” wouldn’t ring so hollow. Maybe they could learn something and choose a less obviously controversial venue. That is, if they really care about being uniters rather than dividers.
They will frame this as an issue about their rights rather than an issue about public relations, respect, and inclusivity, (lol). Maybe they get a few seconds of airtime on Jesse Watters’ show. Or the Five. Or Gateway Pundit.
But ECMC – whom they misidentify as a sponsor, rather than a grantee – is really only an afterthought, in the end.