The Border Czar Illusion
Plus: Government wellness farms, death doulas, and more...
It was all a dream: "President [Joe] Biden is putting Vice President [Kamala] Harris in charge of addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border, senior administration officials announced on Wednesday," Axios reported in March 2021.
Now that Harris is running for president—and that the border is a mess, with migrant encounters hitting a record high at the end of last year and Biden implementing strict asylum restrictions last month to attempt to curb them—a lot of this reporting has been memory holed. It's embarrassing to Harris, and we can't have that, now, can we?
"Harris border confusion haunts her new campaign," reads the new Axios headline from yesterday, published by the same reporter who penned the March 2021 piece. Actually, she says, "in early 2021, President Biden enlisted Vice President Kamala Harris to help with a slice of the migration issue" including "lead[ing] the administration's coordination with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which were key sources of migration to the border."
But now, "in the past few days, the Trump campaign and Republicans have tagged Harris repeatedly with the 'border czar' title—which she never actually had," reports Axios. At the end of the piece is an asterisk mentioning that Axios was among the publications using the "border czar" moniker in error. The fact-checkers quickly endorsed the new party line. The New York Times chimed in with its own corrective pinning blame for the "border czar" title on Republicans. Mother Jones called Harris serving as the administration's border czar a "myth." I mean, the experts even said she wasn't, so how could anyone possibly disagree?
It's all technically true: Border czar is not a formal title. It's what we, in American politics and media, call…the person in a presidential administration who runs point on immigration and the border. Which is, in part, what Harris was told to do.
Interestingly, the fact that Harris was tasked with addressing the root causes of the border crisis appears to be meant as an exculpatory fact, something the White House dreamed up to distance Harris from the mess at the border, when in reality, she's clearly failed to make any headway on the root causes issue. Regardless of what her role was—or what it is convenient to portray her role as—she doesn't appear to have been very good at it (something several swing state voters interviewed by MSNBC have tapped into).
If she had, in fact, succeeded at this, publications would surely be giving her credit for her competence, using the "border czar" title.
As for the media side of this scandal, I'm of the old-fashioned belief that when politicians have unsavory records, it's totally permissible for journalists to report on them. One could even argue that it's part of the job.
Don't make me send you to the government wellness farm! Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is running for president and polling around 9 percent, has unveiled his plan for how to overhaul addiction treatment in this country. He'll create "wellness farms" for patients to get off of opiates, SSRIs, Adderall, benzodiazepines, and the like—any drug they're addicted to, legal or illegal—and, once there, they'll "get reparented" (?) over the course of three to four years.
"They're going to grow their own food—organic food, high-quality food, because a lot of the behavioral issues are food related, a lot of the illnesses are food-related," he says. "There won't be any cellphones, there won't be any screens."
Deep within his bones, Kennedy is an L.A. man. He won't be winning over many Deep South voters with his organic wellness farm talk. This sounds like something Gwyneth Paltrow might manifest into existence after too much time spent yoni sunning and one too many turmeric shots, not an actual policy proposal. But it's also telling in a deeper way: Like so many of Kennedy's proposals, it sounds absolutely lovely for this type of thing to exist. He is correct that people could do to detox from drugs and phones and build a sense of meaning through work. But any expectation that the government could successfully administer a program like this well betrays a certain upper-crust naiveté about how government services actually function.
How to fund these government wellness farms? A tax on cannabis, says Kennedy. (Federally administered, you might ask? Cannabis is already taxed highly, which has in some states led to users shifting back to black markets.) How to select people for the government wellness farms? "I'm going to make it so people can go, if you're convicted of a drug offense, or if you have a drug problem, you can go to one of these places for free," he says. OK. So addicts and people who just got arrested for drug issues would make up the majority of the government wellness farm population, which is surely a recipe for success.
"We're going to re-parent people and restore connection to community," Kennedy adds. But government is not your parent, nor is the dreadlocked 20-year-old wellness farm employee ripping a bong behind the turnip patch. Building a truly helpful, enduring community is not something that routinely happens via tax dollars and bureaucrats, nor is it something that you can will into existence. Kennedy's ingenuity and fascinating (possibly even semi-true!) diagnoses of what ails us never fail to entertain. But like so many of his proposals, he seems confused. This is not, and can never be, the realm of government.
Sayonara, Joe! Last night, Biden delivered a speech that failed to address the entire reason for delivering the speech: The fact that he had stepped down from running for president due to cognitive decline issues; the fact that he had done so in the most suspicious and low-effort way possible—via a letter posted on X—leading people to wonder whether he was hiding his true condition; the fact that supporters and detractors alike expected some introspection as to how we got to this place.
Instead, Biden kept the focus on "saving democracy," by which he seems to actually mean opposing former President Donald Trump. Never mind the undemocratic situation he's foisted on his own party: Electors who had been planning to vote for him at the convention, to transmit the will of the people in their states, will no longer be able to do so, and an open convention with a robust nominating process to judge the best replacement candidate for president will not be pursued, with Biden instead endorsing his vice president, who ran a failed presidential campaign once before. At one point, he claimed it was time to "pass the torch to a new generation"—an idea he had, up until this past weekend, not bought into.
Elsewhere in the speech, he made clear he'd not just be serving out the end of his term, but also attempting to push through "Supreme Court reform" in the form of term limits and a code of ethics that's binding and enforceable. So this cognitively declining elderly Democrat who hid his condition from the people for months if not years, putting his party in a terrible bind, and has failed to own up to what he did will attempt to use his last gasps to hem in a highly controversial Court currently occupied by mostly conservatives. What could possibly go wrong?
Scenes from New York: America's pastime!
QUICK HITS
- "The Fed may be two meetings away from a policy mistake," writes Bloomberg's Mohamed A. El-Erian.
- Inside American Compass, the right-wing D.C. think tank that's anti-globalization, favoring trade restrictions, and is skeptical of tax cuts.
- The death doulas of Ukraine.
- Same:
Me normally: the Pledge of Allegiance is cringe! Fuck the Fed! Become ungovernable!
Me when I see a bunch of pompous jackasses burning the flag: https://t.co/oQxDfynEl0 pic.twitter.com/dHcUf9RmQN
— Neurotic Quixotic—One Love and Four Lights (@jabelincoln) July 24, 2024
