On May 5, the US Department of Homeland Security announced that immigrants in the US can use a smartphone app to claim free plane tickets and $1,000 payments if they’re willing to “self-deport.”

During her Senate confirmation hearing for the position of DHS secretary, Kristi Noem promised that “on day one, CBP One will be shut down.”

CBP One was (and is), a phone app used by immigrants to interact with US Customs and Border Protection [sic]. By “shut down,” it turns out she meant “re-named CBP Home and tilted  toward encouraging immigrant ‘self-deportation’ rather than facilitating asylum claims.”

Since changing the app’s name, the woman popularly referred to as “ICE Barbie,” and not in a flattering way, has promoted it in television commercials:

“If you are here illegally [sic] … you will be fined nearly $1,000 a day, imprisoned, and deported. You will never return. But if you register using our CBP Home app and leave now, you could be allowed to return legally.”

So in the space of a couple of months, it’s gone from a $1,000 per day fine to $1,000 in pocket money and a free plane ticket.  What’s not to like, other than the idiotic idea that it’s a GOOD thing for productive workers to flee the United States, let alone get paid to do so?

Well, there’s this:

Who on Earth would trust the US government, Donald Trump, or Kristi Noem with their location and other information, or believe that the supposed future path to “return legally,” or even that the plane ticket and thousand bucks would actually happen?

If I’m an immigrant in the US who doesn’t possess one of those Very Special Magical Important Permission Slips to travel to, move to, or work at anywhere I please, I doubt I’d be inclined to tell Trump, Noem, CBP or ICE where to find me. They’re simply not trustworthy.

And why the sudden honey to hide the smell of the vinegar?

Well, Trump’s vaunted “mass deportation” program doesn’t seem to be going very well. According to the Migration Policy Institute, the administration is only on track to deport half its goal of one million immigrants this year (and every year after).

If anything, the early number in “mass deportation” should run well ahead of, rather than behind, future numbers. It’s “easy pickins'” right now. As time goes on, immigrants will get better, not worse, at hiding from Trump’s roving gangs of “immigration enforcement” thugs.

Of course, we’re used to presidents over-promising and under-delivering. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1954 “Operation Wetback” program claimed to have deported 1.1 million immigrants, but the more likely number was about 300,000 — and “Operation Wetback” was accompanied by a credible, and fulfilled, promise that many of those deported would be able to return with work visas under the “Bracero” program, rather than the non-credible Trumpian “maybe” claim.

The current “mass deportation” effort is evil, ugly, and incredibly damaging to the US economy. Fortunately, it seems to be failing. So now you know why they’re offering those plane tickets and payouts.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Warren Buffett’s father should have changed Radical Son David Horowitz’s red diapers.

At first glance, Horowitz’s vehement rejection of his card-carrying Communist Party upbringing to become an equally unwavering Grand Old Party loyalist, from voting for Ronald Reagan’s re-election right up until his passing on April 29, would seem the mirror opposite of the path to Buffett’s retirement a week later.  Six decades after inheriting the Berkshire Hathaway he would nurture into a trillion-dollar conglomerate from a Republican congressman deemed “arch‐conservative” in his New York Times obituary, Howard Homan Buffett’s son had become the sort of capitalist who could not only be commended by Times guest essayist Roger Lowenstein for having “long stood out on Wall Street because he eschewed its frequent chicanery, self-dealing and greed” (“Taking the Measure of Warren Buffett,” May 5), but gladly cited as a role model by It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism author Bernie Sanders.

Yet the Times acknowledged that the “arch-conservative” had urged “curbs … on the United States military leadership,” anticipating Dwight Eisenhower’s better-remembered caution to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex.”  E. J. Dionne, Jr. observed in Why Americans Hate Politics that “New Left scholars … took a much more favorable view of the old isolationists such as Robert A. Taft” and Buffett “than liberal scholarship ever had” — and that Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby had quoted Buffett on how “we cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.”

Dionne’s caveat that “the New Left’s attack on large corporations was not a cause to which conservatives repaired” is hard to maintain when a devoted Ayn Rand fan like Roy A. Childs, Jr. could note in the May 1972 issue of Libertarian Forum not only the validity of “students’ reactions to Dow Chemical’s presence on campuses across the U.S., at the time when Dow’s own napalm was being used to zap Vietnamese peasants” but that law-and-order dismissals ignored how “so-called ‘private’ universities … seize land from its rightful owners by aligning with the State’s power of eminent domain.”

One of those “New Left scholars” was none other than David Horowitz.  The back cover of Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism includes a blurb from the Horowitz who would later coedit The Anti-Chomsky Reader lauding its “understanding of the imperial dynamics of America’s postwar course” underneath Noam Chomsky lamenting “how much has been lost by narrowing the spectrum of debate” when such a “critique of … the centralization of state power was perceptive at the time, and has much to offer to us today.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

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Donald Trump wants Americans to start having more babies and, the New York Times reports, is mulling possible financial incentives (like $5,000 government checks for mothers upon childbirth) and “educational” initiatives (i.e. classes to help women figure out when they’re ovulating so they can get pregnant more easily) to achieve the goal.

But the US government has encouraged and subsidized having kids for decades.

Child/dependent tax credits.

Tax deductions for buying homes to house the kids.

Welfare programs like WIC to help feed the kids.

Spreading the costs of “public education” around to non-parents so that parents don’t have to cover those costs themselves.

If subsidizing kids got the job done, we wouldn’t be seeing the birthrate decline we’re seeing — and there’s no particular reason to believe that boosting the subsidies even higher will change the fact that in ever more prosperous societies, people choose to have ever fewer children.

And if that whole program that sounds like a bad fit with Trump’s policy of trying to deport millions of foreign-born residents (who are seemingly more inclined to have the children he wants had), and even the native-born children of those residents, it is.

If you want a higher birth rate, throwing out the people who have kids makes zero sense.

Unless, that is, you couple the “demographic decline” panic with a “Great Replacement” theory positing that people who come to the United States and have kids are being “imported” for the express purpose of changing American politics and culture in particular and negative ways.

If you can successfully sell those claims as a pair, then you can justify both the deportations and the birth incentives.

To be fair, Trump is fairly good at selling silly ideas to gullible buyers. It’s how he built his “brand” in business. His various cons didn’t make him as much money as he’d have made from investing his inheritance in an S&P 500  indexed mutual fund, but they did make him more famous, and he seems to value the adoration of his marks more than he loves money.

But even Trump should have trouble putting over this double con.

“The Great Replacement” is real in the sense that people move and cultures change. But here’s the evidence that this particular cycle of movement and change, in this country, is part of an intentional conspiracy to create Democratic voters, corrupt our precious bodily fluids, etc.:

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America looks almost nothing like it looked 250 years ago, 150 years ago, or even 100 years ago, and almost nothing like it will probably look 100 years from now, because people move and cultures change.

Neither subsidizing childbirth nor deporting immigrants will magically freeze America at some “perfect” point in Donald Trump’s memory or imagination (Studio 54 in the late 1970s, maybe?).

Trump’s demand that you sacrifice your freedom and prosperity to such a project and start having more babies because REASONS has only one guaranteed result, in the now rather than in the future: Less of that freedom and prosperity.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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