First, quickly: In last night’s party leader debate on the energy crisis, Conservative party leader Søren Pape Poulsen actually mentioned the importance of the Tyra Gas Field. I felt like I should mention that, given that yesterday’s post was about our public servants’ unwillingness to address the supply side of the current energy crisis. Credit where it’s due. However, Pernille Vermund of Nye Borgerlige was the only party leader to make the case for total reliable energy independence, even going so far as to urge a reversal of Denmark’s ban on nuclear power.
The best exchange of the debate came when Vermund was asked rather snippily by an agitated Pia Olsen Dyhr of the Socialistisk Folkeparti where, if Denmark should resume nuclear power, we should put the nuclear waste.
“I’d take the first year’s waste in my basement,” Vermund volunteered without blinking.
“Oh,” Dyhr sniffed, “so northern Sjælland.”
On with the show.
My favorite news story of the year finally made it to Denmark. Unfortunately it’s been handled by Mikkel Danielsen.
DeSantis leased two planes. Then he flew immigrants into Obama’s backyard.
Stunts like that can make him president
Mikkel Danielsen, Berlingske.dk, Sept 21
Let’s go through the entire article, line by line, and see if it brings us any closer to an understanding of Mikkel Danielsen’s very particular view of America. (Narrator voice: “It won’t.”)
We’ll start with the headline, which is mostly accurate but missing one very important word: illegal.
DeSantis flew illegal immigrants into Obama’s backyard.
Calling an illegal immigrant an “immigrant” is like calling a shoplifter a “shopper.” It’s technically correct but misses the point.
There’s a discipline that the Republicans call owning the libs—mocking the left.
It’s about provoking, exposing, and arousing the Democrats.
It’s true. Republicans actually invented the idea of ridiculing their political adversaries.
Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, is the American champion in the discipline.
And this past week he has outdone himself.
Analysis: true.
And glorious.
The governor has used Florida tax dollars to charter two planes, pick up 50 migrants in Texas, fly them to Florida and then 1,000 kilometers north to the island of Martha’s Vineyard.
Important omission: what the governor used was tax dollars that the Florida legislature had earmarked in the budget for the transportation of illegal immigrants. Which is to say, DeSantis used the money for its intended purpose—based on a budget that Florida’s Democrats signed off on.
And the “migrants” are still illegal immigrants.
It’s not just any vineyard, but a luxury island off Massachusetts. Here the Obama family owns a villa worth approximately DKK 90 million, and here the Clinton family, Oprah Winfrey, and the rest of the liberal super-elite like to holiday in million-dollar villas.
All true.
The migrant planes landed on the island with an unequivocal message: If you rich Democrats want open borders, then you can take care of the immigrants yourselves. Here they are.
The illegal migrant planes.
And you can take care of the illegal immigrants yourselves.
Another omission:
That’s a poster one can find all over Martha’s Vineyard. And as I’ve noted repeatedly in previous posts, Massachusetts declared itself a sanctuary state. A safe haven for illegal immigrants.
It isn’t just that rich Democrats have been insisting on open borders: it’s also that they’ve been more or less inviting immigrants.
It’s important to point that out because nowhere in Danielsen’s article are sanctuary states even mentioned. That’s a hell of an omission, given that DeSantis himself tweeted: “In Florida, we take what is happening at the southern border seriously. We are not a sanctuary state, and we will gladly facilitate the transport of illegal immigrants to sanctuary jurisdictions.”
Two million migrants have crossed the US southern border illegally in the past 11 months—more than ever before—and Republicans are blaming Joe Biden and the Democrats’ lax border policy.
Not just Republicans. American polling consistently shows that a sizeable percentage of independents and Democrats also hold Biden responsible for the border crisis. Which stands to reason, in that illegal immigration actually slowed during the Trump administration.
But DeSantis wanted to set an example, and so 50 Venezuelan migrants suddenly landed on a holiday island where no one knew they were coming.
“But?”
How about, “Therefore?”
And again, for clarity: 50 illegal Venezuelan migrants.
And perhaps Danielsen is unaware of the 64 migrants Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot shipped out to a conservative suburb (Burr Ridge) of her city, also without warning, just a week prior to DeSantis’s “stunt.” Was she “owning the cons?” Is she running for president? Was she trying to set an example?
We have only Danielsen’s silence to guide us.
The same silence he bestows upon the secretive plane flights used by the Biden administration to distribute immigrants around the country.
It is still unclear whether the 50 migrants were even aware of where they were being flown to and whether they were lured on board with false promises.
The fifty illegal migrants, he means. The fifty foreign nationals who snuck into America illegally. The fifty lawbreakers. The fifty criminals.
As Danielsen notes, it is still unclear whether they were lured with false promises (unless along the lines of, “they say all are welcome there!”)… but I’m also not sure how much I care whether fifty people who snuck illegally into our country were misled by anyone. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I suppose if they were American citizens, the eighth amendment of the Constitution might have prevented their transport to Martha’s Vineyard on the grounds of its being cruel and unusual punishment.
Some of them have told NPR they thought they were being flown to Boston. Others have told USA Today that they were promised jobs and housing when they arrived.
Indeed. Others have told the New York Post they are grateful to Governor DeSantis. Strange that Danielsen neglected to mention that.
A local church let them spend the night until they were transported to a military camp on the mainland.
“Transported.”
Within 44 hours of their arrival on the island they were apprehended by military personnel, loaded on buses, and driven (via ferry) to a military installation on Cape Cod. Which is how Martha’s Vineyard, playground of the very rich and liberal, in the sanctuary state of Massachusetts, shows that immigrants are “welcome” there: welcome to leave—under military escort.
Ron DeSantis has borrowed the idea from the governors of the border states of Texas and Arizona, which in recent months have transported illegal migrants on buses to the left-leaning cities of Washington, DC and New York.
Only here for the first time do we have the word illegal modifying the noun migrants. Due its previous omissions, Danielsen’s readers could be forgiven for believing his “stunt” involved legal migrants.
Error? Or purpose?
Maybe Danielsen was just distracted because he was too focused on omitting the phrase “sanctuary cities” from his description of the cities targeted by Texas and Arizona.
It’s “kidnapping”, says a lawyer
The story of DeSantis’ migrant plane is America’s biggest news story right now.The outrage is enormous. Not least because the governor picked up the migrants in a state other than his own to carry out the political stunt.
A lawyer on Martha’s Vineyard accuses Ron DeSantis of “kidnapping.” A philosophy professor in Massachusetts calls it a “mini ethnic cleansing.” Joe Biden accuses the governor of “playing politics with people.”
The governor picked up the illegal immigrants.
As usual, Danielsen gets a lot of quotes from leftists. Standard Danielsen operating procedure whenever writing about an American conservative.
Also whenever writing about an American leftist.
Whenever writing about anything.
Did the conservative governor of a conservative state just sign a piece of conservative legislation passed by the conservative legislature? Danielsen will let the New York Times explain it all to his readers. Because no one understands conservatism like the hysterical liberals of midtown Manhattan.
An un-named lawyer on Martha’s vineyard, an unnamed Massachusetts philosophy professor, and Joe Biden. Are you shocked, shocked that they’d be critical of something done by Florida’s popular Republican governor?
It never seems to dawn on Danielsen that readers might benefit from hearing from both sides. Maybe offset Biden with a high-profile Republican (Ted Cruz? Rand Paul? Jim Jordan?); offset the Martha’s Vineyard lawyer with one from a Texas border town; offset the Bay State “philosophy professor” with, say, Jordan Peterson. Just to balance things out. To let Danes see that there are two political sides in America. Here as elsewhere, I’m not suggesting the leftists be muzzled; only that voices from the right be given equal representation.
But the outrage is precisely Ron DeSantis’ strategy.
Ya think?
“The moment just a small fraction of what the border towns suffer with every single day is brought to their front door, they suddenly go berserk,” said the governor about the Democrats’ reaction—owning the libs.
Sure, that’s one way of phrasing it. He “owned the libs.”
Another way of phrasing it would be: “illustrating the gulf between northern liberals’ words and actions.”
Ron DeSantis got just what he was after: the nation’s attention.
Correct.
The Democrats see a villain. Many conservatives see a folk hero.
Also correct.
Danielsen’s on a roll!
President DeSantis?
In a divided America, the mental distance between the red and blue states is widening.On issues of guns, abortion, the right to vote and immigration, laws and attitudes can be so different from California to Mississippi that it can be difficult to understand that we are talking about the same country.
He forgot to add: “…as the nation’s founders intended.”
But the differences can indeed be extreme. Danish readers might find it interesting that at one point, for example, the Democratic states of the south actually allowed slavery! Fortunately the Republican president “owned the libs” and that was the end of slavery.
The states end up in conflict more often, and “there are echoes of the disputes between the Southern and Northern states,” wrote The Economist a couple of weeks ago—and at the same time noting that a new civil war is not imminent.
Odd to pull a quote saying there are echoes of that North-South conflict of the 1860s but that there’s no looming threat of civil war. Odd of the Economist to have made that self-effacing comparison in the first place. It’s like saying, “It reminds me of the Apollo mission, only without any rockets.”
Or: “There are echoes of Nagasaki, but without the atomic bomb.”
In the growing conflict between red and blue states, Ron DeSantis increasingly looks like the front man of the reds—the Republican states.
He sure does.
He takes the topics the Fox News hosts talk about and turns them into real politics—and token politics—in Florida.
That’s a very convoluted way of saying, “he enacts conservative policies,” isn’t it?
One could just as easily say that Governer Newsom of California takes the topics talked about on MSNBC, CNN, PBS, and NPR, or written about in the New York Times or Washington Post, or promoted on Facebook and Twitter, and turns them into real or token politics.
Hell, one could say the same thing about Joe Biden nationally.
But one doesn’t.
I wonder why?
Remember: the Florida budget prepared by the Florida legislature included “$12 million for the Florida Department of Transportation to remove illegal immigrants from Florida and relocating them.” That little snippet of text is from an article published on April 12.
The location was certainly chosen with eye toward sensationalism, but the act of transport itself was merely the execution of state policy.
He has signed the so-called “Don’t say gay” law, which bans the teaching of homosexuality and gender identities in the lower grades—a law that caused excitement among all the conservatives who believe that woke teachers are indoctrinating their children.
The so-called “don’t say gay” law was only called that by its opponents. And it did not specifically ban the teaching of homosexuality and gender identities” in “the lower grades”: it banned discussions of any sexuality in the classrooms of Florida’s youngest little students.
One could therefore just as easily and accurately say that it banned the teaching of heterosexuality.
The law generated excitement among conservatives because they’re apparently the only ones left in America who don’t think six-year-olds need sexual instruction from their primary school teachers.
When Disney complained about the law, he scrapped some of Disney World’s tax breaks in Florida and sent a strong warning that woke capitalism should not get involved.
The duly elected legislators of Florida passed a law. The duly elected governor signed it. A giant corporation tried to interfere with expressed will of the people of Florida; that corporation therefore had some of its privileges revoked within that state.
Anyone got a problem with that?
In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests, he signed a law exempting drivers from paying damages if they ran over protesters on the road.
That’s a lie.
There was a proposed version of the bill (read it here) that made it a “3rd degree felony to obstruct traffic during an unpermitted protest, demonstration, or violent disorderly assembly” and specified that “driver is NOT liable for injury or death caused if fleeing for safety from a mob.”
That’s a pretty significant “if” clause, isn’t it? It’s also entirely moot: the draft that passed into law did not exempt drivers from anything.
So Mikkel Danielsen is flat out lying here.
Maybe not deliberately: more likely it’s just the by-product of his child-like credulity toward everything his leftist sources tell him.
And for what it’s worth, the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 cost dozens of lives and did billions of dollars in damages. Legislatures and governors across the nation were looking for ways to discourage such mob violence. The Florida legislation was a mere reaction to leftist violence.
If there hadn’t been leftist violence there wouldn’t have been any need for any kind of reaction.
Add to that the fact that in the middle of the corona pandemic he opened Florida’s schools, malls and beer taps while the Democratic states were completely shut down, and outraged CNN hosts shook their heads at his strategy.
Is this guy serious? That’s a criticism? That CNN hosts (like Chris Cuomo? like Brian Stelter?) were outraged and shook their heads because he wasn’t locking people down in their homes for no good reason?
Berlingske has published numerous articles about all the recent studies that have concluded lockdowns had no significant effect on covid mortality: does Mikkel Danielsen read his own paper?
Also: why does he never let us know whether or not outraged Fox News hosts shook their heads over leftist policies? Is their outrage less meaningful? Is their head-shaking unimportant?
Ron DeSantis has understood that conservative America wants a warrior who will fearlessly fight their cause against the woke democratic elite. Only when the Democrats shout at him has the mission been successful.
And yet Ron DeSantis has never once referred to the rank and file voters of his opposition party as a clear and present danger, or as enemies of the state. So he’s sort of a piker compared to Joe Biden.
“Is Ron DeSantis the future of the Republican Party?” asked The New York Times in a headline last week.
One can hope, said Greg Nagan.
Ron DeSantis looks like a 2024 presidential candidate, although he has yet to announce his candidacy.
In the opinion polls where Republican voters are asked who they prefer as presidential candidate, he’s catching up to Donald Trump but is still 20-30 percentage points behind.
At the bookies, however, Ron DeSantis is now the narrow favorite for the Republican nomination ahead of Donald Trump.
This is because Donald Trump’s candidacy risks drowning in lawsuits and chaos before 2024.
And this is due to an expectation that the Republican voters will soon realize that Ron DeSantis has a much better chance of winning the middle voters and thus a presidential election than the deeply unpopular ex-president.
Yes. Ron DeSantis looks like the future of the Republican Party.
Again: one can hope.
That last excerpt is the conclusion of the article. It’s also the only passage that’s mostly on target.
Conservatives are angry about the way Donald Trump was treated—some of them implacably. But a lot of conservatives are just tired of all his baggage and would welcome a candidate with just as much fire in the belly but a better understanding of when to keep his mouth shut.
DeSantis has already started getting the Hitler treatment: that will only increase as the prospects of a presidential run increases.
And should he seek and win the Republican nomination, I can almost guarantee that Mikkel Danielsen will be informing Danish readers that “although Donald Trump was a threat to American democracy, he pales in comparison to the real threat represented by a Ron DeSantis candidacy.”
When Danielsen says that Ron DeSantis is the future of the Republican party, what he’s actually saying is that Danes can now safely discard their Dread Tyrant Trump voodoo dolls.
Because there’s a new Dread Tyrant in town and his name is Ron DeSantis.