Tuesday roundup

Who is offering an incisive, perfectly articulated refutation of the idea that there is anything different about the border detention centers now from how they were during the Obama era?

The DHS secretary from that era:

“Chain link barriers, partitions, fences, cages, whatever you want to call them, were not invented on January 20, 2017, okay?" Johnson said during an interview at the Aspen Institute. 

Johnson was asked about a photo taken in 2014. It shows the former Secretary touring a border detention facility in Arizona when the unaccompanied minor and family unit crisis actually began. Most of the media started paying attention to the issue, while expressing outrage over the Trump administration's response to it, only recently.

"The photograph you're referring to was a facility in Arizona. I recognize the photo because Governor Brewer was with me and it was during the spike. We had a lot of unaccompanied kids, we had a lot of family units and under the law one they're apprehended by the Border Patrol, within 72-hours we have to transfer unaccompanied children to HHS and HHS then puts them in a shelter and find placement for them somewhere in the United States," Johnson said. “But during that 72 hour period, when you have something that is a multiple, like four times of what you’re accustomed to in the existing infrastructure, you’ve got to find places quickly to put kids. You cant just dump seven year old kids on the streets of McAllen or El Paso. And so these facilities were erected and that one I think was a large warehouse and they put those chain link partitions up so you could segregate young women from young men, kids from adults, until they were either released or transferred to HHS.”

El Salvador's new president is demonstrating a level of clarity that has long been absent from the immigration discussion:

The new president of El Salvador on Monday took responsibility for the June deaths of a father and daughter who drowned crossing the Rio Grande in a bid to reach the United States, saying the onus is on his government to make the country a safer place -- and one where migration is "an option, not an obligation."

A photograph from the Mexican side of the river showing the body of Oscar Martinez and his daughter, Valeria, lying face down with Valeria's arms still wrapped around her father’s neck shocked the world late last month amid an already heated debate about illegal immigration in the US.

President Nayib Bukele, who took office a month ago with the promise of making El Salvador a safer and better place, told the BBC in an interview published Monday his country is to blame for the deaths. He said his government is responsible for fixing the problems that have forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee in the first place.

“People don’t flee their homes because they want to, people flee their homes because they feel they have to,” Bukele told the BBC. “Why? Because they don’t have a job, because they are being threatened by gangs, because they don’t have basic things like water, education, health.”

He continued: “We can blame any other country but what about our blame? What country did they flee? Did they flee the United States? They fled El Salvador, they fled our country. It is our fault.”

Bukele is one to watch. Born in 1981, when the Salvadoran civil war was red-hot (and was a proxy war in the Cold War), to a Palestinian Muslim father and a Christian mother, he was a rising star in the FMLN (the Marxists in the aforementioned civil war; the "FM" in the acronym stands for Farabundo Marti, a 1930s Salvadoran Communist party leader) until the party ousted him. Not that he holds any affection for ARENA, either. Claims to belong to a "new ideas" movement.

How come Eric Swalwell and Andrew Yang were both able to name Andy Ngo in their condemnations of Ngo's beating, but unable to mention Antifa by name?

This is two and a half years old, but it I just ran across it today on Twitter and found it highly  relevant. It's a Gospel Coalition essay called "What We Need to Learn From the Early Church."  Author Tim Keller points out how subversive the church was in its days as a nascent movement:

The earliest Christians were widely ridiculed, especially by cultural elites, were excluded from circles of influence and business, and were often persecuted and put to death. Hurtado says Roman authorities were uniquely hostile to them, compared to other religious groups.

Why? It was expected that people would have their own gods, but that they’d be willing to show honor to all other gods as well. Nearly every home, every city, every professional guild—including the empire itself—each had its own gods. You couldn’t even go to a meal in a large home or to a public event without being expected to do some ritual to honor the gods of that particular group or place. To not do so was highly insulting, at the least to the house or community. It was also dangerous, since it was thought that such behavior could elicit the anger of the gods. Indeed, it was seen as treason to not honor the gods of the empire, on whose divine authority its legitimacy was based.

Christians, however, saw these rituals and tributes as idolatry. They were committed to worship their God exclusively. While the Jews had the same view, they were generally tolerated since they were a distinct racial group, and their peculiarity was seen as a function of their ethnicity. Yet Christianity spread through all ethnic groups, and most believers were former pagans who suddenly, after conversion, refused to honor the other gods. This refusal created huge social problems, making it disruptive and impossible for Christians to be accepted into most public gatherings. If a family member or a servant became a Christian, they suddenly refused to honor the household’s gods.

Christianity’s spread was seen as subversive to the social order—a threat to the culture’s way of life. Followers of Jesus were thought to be too exclusive to be good citizens.

He says the three reasons Christianity so quickly became a civilizational powerhouse are that Christians were called into a "social project that either offended or attracted people, that it offered a direct relationship - with a foundation of love - between the Creator God and people, and if offered an assurance of eternal life.

The lesson for today? It is that if what you are offering is available from many other sources, you'll become irrelevant:

 If a religion isn’t different from the surrounding culture—if it doesn’t critique and offer an alternative to it—it dies because it’s seen as unnecessary. 

Worthy read at The Other McCain entitled "LGBT Ideology As Pathological Narcissism." Some wild and woolly examples of just how exotic the little pieces of turf claimed by each subgroup within that ideology can get.

In the wake of Nike folding like a cheap card table when vulgar grandstander and race-baiter Colin Kapernick called the just-rolled-out Betsy Ross flag shoes racist, Arizona governor Doug Ducey has said (in essence) to the footwear maker, "Forget that deal we were going to enter into with your cowardly asses."

Josh Hammer at The Daily Wire brings together all the grotesque forms that the Democrat party's exponentially unprecedented leftward lurch has taken of late and concludes, as you will, that the party is fundamentally unfit to lead the country.

Two things going on simultaneously as I write this: Vladimir Putin has cancelled his schedule for today to have an urgent meeting with his defense minister, and, over here in the US, Vice President Pence's plane has turned around and headed back to DC.  Big deals or no? We shall see.