Nothing much going on.
I had the radio on during breakfast and they were talking old stuff.
So? Nothing happening. That’s good. We don’t want anything newsworthy to be happening now.
“No news is good news” as the old saying goes.
“A federal court smacked down Planned Parenthood’s attempt to thwart a Texas city from declaring itself a sanctuary for the unborn.
Northern District of Texas judge James Wesley Hendrix dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the nation’s largest abortion provider lacked the jurisdiction to challenge the law. “Because the ability to remedy a plaintiff’s injury through a favorable decision is a prerequisite to a plaintiff’s standing to sue—an ability absent here—the court dismisses the case for lack of jurisdiction,” Hendrix wrote.
On May 17, Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas filed a lawsuit to stop the Lubbock ordinance from going into effect on June 1. It declared that the city would automatically outlaw abortion if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. “It shall be unlawful for any person to procure or perform an abortion of any type and at any stage of pregnancy in the City of Lubbock, Texas,” the ordinance says. Lubbock, with a population north of 250,000 people, is the largest city in Texas to adopt such a ban.
The Lubbock ordinance empowers private citizens to sue any abortion providers suspected of performing abortions after the overturning of Roe. This places the responsibility for enforcing the law in the hands of private citizens, not the local government. Hendrix left open the possibility for further legal review of the ordinance but declined to intervene to stop it from taking effect.
The move opens another front in the war over state laws restricting or expanding access to abortion; 25 other cities in Texas have adopted similar “sanctuary city” ordinances. The ordinances have been modeled after Democrat-run cities that clashed with the Trump administration over becoming sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants. Additionally, 10 states have passed “trigger” bills that will outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. The ruling also comes days after the Texas state legislature passed such a trigger bill.”
They meet once a month on Zoom: a dozen doctors from around the country with distinguished careers in different specialities. They vary in ethnicity, age and sexual orientation. Some work for the best hospitals in the U.S. or teach at top medical schools. Others are dedicated to serving the most vulnerable populations in their communities.
The meetings are largely a support group. The members share their concerns about what’s going on in their hospitals and universities, and strategize about what to do. What is happening, they say, is the rapid spread of a deeply illiberal ideology in the country’s most important medical institutions.
This dogma goes by many imperfect names — wokeness, social justice, critical race theory, anti-racism — but whatever it’s called, the doctors say this ideology is stifling critical thinking and dissent in the name of progress. They say that it’s turning students against their teachers and patients and racializing even the smallest interpersonal interactions. Most concerning, they insist that it is threatening the foundations of patient care, of research, and of medicine itself.
These aren’t secret bigots who long for the “good old days” that were bad for so many. They are largely politically progressive, and they are the first to say that there are inequities in medicine that must be addressed. Sometimes it’s overt racism from colleagues or patients, but more often the problem is deeper, baked into the very systems clinicians use to determine treatment.
“There’s a calculator that people have used for decades that predicts the likelihood of having a successful vaginal delivery after you’ve had a cesarean,” one obstetrician in the Northeast told me. “You put in the age of the person, how much they weigh, and their race. And if they’re black, it calculates that they are less likely to have successful vaginal delivery. That means clinicians are more likely to counsel black patients to get c-sections, a surgery they might not actually need.”
There’s no biological reason for race to be a factor here, which is why the calculator just changed this year. But this is an example of how system-wide bias can harm black mothers, who are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women even when you control for factors like income and education, which often make racial disparities disappear.
But while this obstetrician and others see the problems endemic in their field, they’re also alarmed by the dogma currently spreading throughout medical schools and hospitals.
I’ve heard from doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism.) I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics.
Some of these doctors say that there is a “purge” underway in the world of American medicine: question the current orthodoxy and you will be pushed out. They are so worried about the dangers of speaking out about their concerns that they will not let me identify them except by the region of the country where they work.
“People are afraid to speak honestly,” said a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. “It’s like back to the USSR, where you could only speak to the ones you trust.” If the authorities found out, you could lose your job, your status, you could go to jail or worse. The fear here is not dissimilar.
When doctors do speak out, shared another, “the reaction is savage. And you better be tenured and you better have very thick skin.”
“We’re afraid of what’s happening to other people happening to us,” a doctor on the West Coast told me. “We are seeing people being fired. We are seeing people’s reputations being sullied. There are members of our group who say, ‘I will be asked to leave a board. I will endanger the work of the nonprofit that I lead if this comes out.’ People are at risk of being totally marginalized and having to leave their institutions.”
While the hyper focus on identity is seen by many proponents of social justice ideology as a necessary corrective to America’s past sins, some people working in medicine are deeply concerned by what “justice” and “equity” actually look like in practice.
“The intellectual foundation for this movement is the Marxist view of the world, but stripped of economics and replaced with race determinism,” one psychologist explained. “Because you have a huge group of people, mostly people of color, who have been underserved, it was inevitable that this model was going to be applied to the world of medicine. And it has been.”
“Earlier today Bari Weiss published the first in a series of stories about the spread of woke ideology in the field of medicine. The piece was written by reporter Katie Herzog who co-hosts a podcast with Jesse Singal, another critic of cancel culture. The piece opens exactly the way some previous pieces on this topic have opened, with a group of about a dozen people who meet regularly on Zoom to discuss what they see happening in their own workplaces. The only difference is that these people are doctors.
As Herzog describes it, none of these people would be mistaken for political conservatives. They are generally progressive and believe that racism has created problems within their field, both in the past and in the present. And yet, they are concerned by the illiberal ideology they see taking over the field.”
—-
“If you recall the hoax on grievance study journals perpetrated a few years ago by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, then you probably won’t be shocked to learn that some dubious social justice medial research is already appearing in medical journals.
“Wokeness feels like an existential threat,” a doctor from the Northwest said. “In health care, innovation depends on open, objective inquiry into complex problems, but that’s now undermined by this simplistic and racialized worldview where racism is seen as the cause of all disparities, despite robust data showing it’s not that simple.”
“It’s some of the most shoddy, methodologically flawed research we’ve ever seen published in these journals,” the doctor in the Zoom meeting said, “with sensational conclusions that seem totally unjustified from the results of the study.”
In particular, he was referring to a study which was widely reported last year. But anti-racism goes beyond research and sometimes impacts how the younger generation of doctors practice medicine. For instance, the group White Coats for Black Lives has chapters all over the country which, among other things, demand that hospitals cut off all connections with police. Then there are the doctors themselves:”
“an ER doctor on the West Coast said he sees providers, particularly younger ones, applying antiracist principles in choosing how they allocate their time and which patients they choose to work with. “I’ve heard examples of Covid-19 cases in the emergency department where providers go, ‘I’m not going to go treat that white guy, I’m going to treat the person of color instead because whatever happened to the white guy, he probably deserves it.’”
A Middle Class Rebellion Against Progressives Is Gaining Steam | Opinion
~ … And this new middle-class rebellion is being bolstered by a wide-ranging intellectual rebellion by traditional liberals against the Left’s dogmatism and intolerance. Indeed, what we’re about to see has the potential to reprise the great shift among old liberals that had them embracing Reagan in reaction to the Left’s excesses of that generation.
In a way, this should not be surprising. After all, the progressive base is limited: According to a survey conducted by the non-partisan group More in Common, progressives constitute barely eight percent of the electorate. The report also found that fully 80 percent of all Americans believe that “political correctness is a problem,” including large majorities of millennials and racial minorities….
… Biden is similarly losing the middle class on immigration. Already many Latinos, particularly in Texas and Arizona, fear the loss of border control that accompanied the shift from Trump to Biden administrations. The crisis at the border has the potential to overwhelm the economies, health and welfare systems in heavily Hispanic border communities, which is sparking alarm among border state Democrats. …
… But it’s climate policy that may prove the most damaging aspect of the Biden agenda, and the one most likely to inspire a significant backlash. Policies pushing massive electrification are likely to accelerate the current surge in energy prices, and these will hit the household bottom line long after the stimulus checks have stopped coming. And this despite the fact that relatively few Americans—barely three percent, Gallup found— view climate as their primary concern and, according to one recent survey, barely one in ten registered voters would spend $100 a month on climate mitigation.
California provides a precursor for the emerging climate regime. Our state’s fixation on renewable energy, along with the closure of natural gas and nuclear plants, has helped drive the cost of electricity and gas to the highest in the continental U.S. It has also systematically undermined key blue collar industries like energy, construction and manufacturing, which have stagnated or shrunk, while regulations designed for climate reasons have helped boost home prices to the nation’s highest.
Attempts to squelch fracking could also cause even more havoc in places like the Rockies, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma. …
… Without a Trump to unite them, the Democrats, led by a radical fringe unrepresentative even of their own party, may find themselves increasingly isolated. Only then, when reality asserts itself, can sensible alternatives, social democratic or conservative, again gain currency. ~
“In April, a ten-year-old boy from Nicaragua made international news as he was rescued by U.S. Border Patrol agents. He was all alone, crying, and begging for help. The video of his rescue went viral as it was impossible to watch him in such distress without feeling empathy for the little boy. He has now been reunited with his mother in Texas. It sounds like a happy ending kind of story but it has some really dark undertones to it.
Wilton Obregon was abandoned by smugglers as he crossed the southern border. A Border Patrol agent’s bodycam filmed his encounter with Wilton.
Wilton was discovered wandering on his own on April 1 in the dusty barren landscape near La Grulla, Texas, by a Border Patrol agent on his way home from a shift.
Crying and shaking as he approached the officer’s vehicle, he begged in Spanish: ‘Can you help me? I was coming with group and they abandoned me. I don’t know where they are.’
When asked if he had been told to ask for help, Wilton replied between sobs: ‘No, I came because if not, where am I supposed to go?
‘Somebody could abduct me, kidnap me. I am scared,’ he added.
The boy was rightfully afraid of being abducted. Wilton and his mother were kidnapped by a cartel after they tried to cross the southern border in March. With Title 42 in effect, the two were returned back over the Texas-Mexico border. This is where the story takes a turn. His mother’s brother, Wilton’s uncle, who has lived in Miami for five years, says he could only pay the ransom for one of them ($5,000) so young Wilton was taken across the border for a second time. The human smugglers left him alone there. Wilton was taken to a shelter run by the US Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of Health and Human Services.
About two weeks later, Wilton’s mother, Meylin, was released by the cartel and she again crossed the border. She turned herself into Border Patrol agents and requested asylum. She was transferred to a migrant center in Texas. She was able to visit Wilton at a center sheltering unaccompanied minors after Wilton had been there for two months.”
EXCLUSIVE: Nicaraguan boy, 10, seen sobbing in video after being abandoned by smugglers is reunited with his mother https://t.co/CeeUUkOzUf
“The reaction from people may have backfired on the warm and fuzzy narrative of a mother and child reunion. (Cue Paul Simon.) People questioned Meylin’s ability to care for her young son. She endangered his life while doing the same of her own and it led to some dire consequences for the boy. At one point the Nicaraguan government sought custody of the boy. They urged the U.S. government to return Wilton to his family home in an isolated mountain region of the country. His father, Lazaro Gutierrez lives there with other family members. The Nicaraguan government dropped its request for Wilton’s return when his father decided that the boy would be better off in the U.S. with his mother. His father is described as a cattle farmer.
There are some red flags that we can see from Meylin’s brother, Wilton’s uncle, Misael Obregon. He is a construction worker in Miami who planned to take Meylin and Wilton in after their release as they wait for their asylum process to work through the system. Did Misael suddenly find the extra ransom money to secure the release of his sister? What is his role in the whole cartel scenario? He has twin 15-year-old sons who recently crossed the border and are waiting on their asylum claims to be processed. This looks like a family pattern, certainly not behavior that should be encouraged by the United States government.”
~ Conspiracy believers don’t believe what the mainstream media tell them. Why would they? Newsrooms are undergoing their own revolution, with woke progressives vs. journalistic traditionalists, advocacy versus old-school news values. It is ideological. “We are here to shape and encourage a new reality.” “No, we are here to find and report the news.” It is generational: The young have the upper hand and the Slack channel. The woke are winning. If a year ago you thought the obvious—maybe the coronavirus that came from Wuhan leaked out of the Wuhan lab where they were studying coronaviruses—you were shut down as racist, bigoted, divisive. The progressives’ great talent is policing, and they are always on patrol. Everyone, even the most unsophisticated news consumer, can kind of tell. ~
“Facebook announced Friday that former President Donald Trump is suspended from its platform for two years.
“We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs for Facebook, said in a blog post.”
““Facebook continues to arbitrarily apply their rules and undermine fundamental American values like free speech. This is Big Tech’s latest betrayal of those values—all while allowing authoritarian leaders to post harmful content without ANY repercussions,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said in a statement.
“Facebook is suspending former President Trump for two years, but continuing to allow CCP propaganda, Assad, and human smugglers to use their platform. That is utter hypocrisy. Facebook must be held accountable,” added Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.).”
Wandering Views 
Nothing much going on.
I had the radio on during breakfast and they were talking old stuff.
So? Nothing happening. That’s good. We don’t want anything newsworthy to be happening now.
“No news is good news” as the old saying goes.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Smells like perjury to me.
——–
LikeLike
Joe Biden built this.
“5-Year Old Migrant Boy Seen Wailing At The Border After Smugglers Abandoned Him…”
LikeLike
TDS is an ugly thing. So are those inflicted with it.
———-
LikeLiked by 1 person
Good.
“Judge Dismisses Planned Parenthood Challenge to Texas Sanctuary City”
https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/judge-dismisses-planned-parenthood-challenge-to-texas-sanctuary-city/
“A federal court smacked down Planned Parenthood’s attempt to thwart a Texas city from declaring itself a sanctuary for the unborn.
Northern District of Texas judge James Wesley Hendrix dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the nation’s largest abortion provider lacked the jurisdiction to challenge the law. “Because the ability to remedy a plaintiff’s injury through a favorable decision is a prerequisite to a plaintiff’s standing to sue—an ability absent here—the court dismisses the case for lack of jurisdiction,” Hendrix wrote.
On May 17, Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas filed a lawsuit to stop the Lubbock ordinance from going into effect on June 1. It declared that the city would automatically outlaw abortion if the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. “It shall be unlawful for any person to procure or perform an abortion of any type and at any stage of pregnancy in the City of Lubbock, Texas,” the ordinance says. Lubbock, with a population north of 250,000 people, is the largest city in Texas to adopt such a ban.
The Lubbock ordinance empowers private citizens to sue any abortion providers suspected of performing abortions after the overturning of Roe. This places the responsibility for enforcing the law in the hands of private citizens, not the local government. Hendrix left open the possibility for further legal review of the ordinance but declined to intervene to stop it from taking effect.
The move opens another front in the war over state laws restricting or expanding access to abortion; 25 other cities in Texas have adopted similar “sanctuary city” ordinances. The ordinances have been modeled after Democrat-run cities that clashed with the Trump administration over becoming sanctuary cities for illegal immigrants. Additionally, 10 states have passed “trigger” bills that will outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned. The ruling also comes days after the Texas state legislature passed such a trigger bill.”
LikeLiked by 2 people
We’re about to find out…..
“What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth?
Whole areas of research are off-limits. Top physicians treat patients based on their race. An ideological ‘purge’ is underway in American medicine.”
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/what-happens-when-doctors-cant-speak
“‘People Are Afraid to Speak Honestly’
They meet once a month on Zoom: a dozen doctors from around the country with distinguished careers in different specialities. They vary in ethnicity, age and sexual orientation. Some work for the best hospitals in the U.S. or teach at top medical schools. Others are dedicated to serving the most vulnerable populations in their communities.
The meetings are largely a support group. The members share their concerns about what’s going on in their hospitals and universities, and strategize about what to do. What is happening, they say, is the rapid spread of a deeply illiberal ideology in the country’s most important medical institutions.
This dogma goes by many imperfect names — wokeness, social justice, critical race theory, anti-racism — but whatever it’s called, the doctors say this ideology is stifling critical thinking and dissent in the name of progress. They say that it’s turning students against their teachers and patients and racializing even the smallest interpersonal interactions. Most concerning, they insist that it is threatening the foundations of patient care, of research, and of medicine itself.
These aren’t secret bigots who long for the “good old days” that were bad for so many. They are largely politically progressive, and they are the first to say that there are inequities in medicine that must be addressed. Sometimes it’s overt racism from colleagues or patients, but more often the problem is deeper, baked into the very systems clinicians use to determine treatment.
“There’s a calculator that people have used for decades that predicts the likelihood of having a successful vaginal delivery after you’ve had a cesarean,” one obstetrician in the Northeast told me. “You put in the age of the person, how much they weigh, and their race. And if they’re black, it calculates that they are less likely to have successful vaginal delivery. That means clinicians are more likely to counsel black patients to get c-sections, a surgery they might not actually need.”
There’s no biological reason for race to be a factor here, which is why the calculator just changed this year. But this is an example of how system-wide bias can harm black mothers, who are two to three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women even when you control for factors like income and education, which often make racial disparities disappear.
But while this obstetrician and others see the problems endemic in their field, they’re also alarmed by the dogma currently spreading throughout medical schools and hospitals.
I’ve heard from doctors who’ve been reported to their departments for criticizing residents for being late. (It was seen by their trainees as an act of racism.) I’ve heard from doctors who’ve stopped giving trainees honest feedback for fear of retaliation. I’ve spoken to those who have seen clinicians and residents refuse to treat patients based on their race or their perceived conservative politics.
Some of these doctors say that there is a “purge” underway in the world of American medicine: question the current orthodoxy and you will be pushed out. They are so worried about the dangers of speaking out about their concerns that they will not let me identify them except by the region of the country where they work.
“People are afraid to speak honestly,” said a doctor who immigrated to the U.S. from the Soviet Union. “It’s like back to the USSR, where you could only speak to the ones you trust.” If the authorities found out, you could lose your job, your status, you could go to jail or worse. The fear here is not dissimilar.
When doctors do speak out, shared another, “the reaction is savage. And you better be tenured and you better have very thick skin.”
“We’re afraid of what’s happening to other people happening to us,” a doctor on the West Coast told me. “We are seeing people being fired. We are seeing people’s reputations being sullied. There are members of our group who say, ‘I will be asked to leave a board. I will endanger the work of the nonprofit that I lead if this comes out.’ People are at risk of being totally marginalized and having to leave their institutions.”
While the hyper focus on identity is seen by many proponents of social justice ideology as a necessary corrective to America’s past sins, some people working in medicine are deeply concerned by what “justice” and “equity” actually look like in practice.
“The intellectual foundation for this movement is the Marxist view of the world, but stripped of economics and replaced with race determinism,” one psychologist explained. “Because you have a huge group of people, mostly people of color, who have been underserved, it was inevitable that this model was going to be applied to the world of medicine. And it has been.”
‘Whole Areas of Research Are Off-Limits’”
LikeLiked by 2 people
And another….
“Doctors warn ‘Wokeness feels like an existential threat’ to medicine”
https://hotair.com/john-s-2/2021/06/03/doctors-warn-wokeness-feels-like-an-existential-threat-to-medicine-n394418
“Earlier today Bari Weiss published the first in a series of stories about the spread of woke ideology in the field of medicine. The piece was written by reporter Katie Herzog who co-hosts a podcast with Jesse Singal, another critic of cancel culture. The piece opens exactly the way some previous pieces on this topic have opened, with a group of about a dozen people who meet regularly on Zoom to discuss what they see happening in their own workplaces. The only difference is that these people are doctors.
As Herzog describes it, none of these people would be mistaken for political conservatives. They are generally progressive and believe that racism has created problems within their field, both in the past and in the present. And yet, they are concerned by the illiberal ideology they see taking over the field.”
—-
“If you recall the hoax on grievance study journals perpetrated a few years ago by James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, then you probably won’t be shocked to learn that some dubious social justice medial research is already appearing in medical journals.
“Wokeness feels like an existential threat,” a doctor from the Northwest said. “In health care, innovation depends on open, objective inquiry into complex problems, but that’s now undermined by this simplistic and racialized worldview where racism is seen as the cause of all disparities, despite robust data showing it’s not that simple.”
“It’s some of the most shoddy, methodologically flawed research we’ve ever seen published in these journals,” the doctor in the Zoom meeting said, “with sensational conclusions that seem totally unjustified from the results of the study.”
In particular, he was referring to a study which was widely reported last year. But anti-racism goes beyond research and sometimes impacts how the younger generation of doctors practice medicine. For instance, the group White Coats for Black Lives has chapters all over the country which, among other things, demand that hospitals cut off all connections with police. Then there are the doctors themselves:”
“an ER doctor on the West Coast said he sees providers, particularly younger ones, applying antiracist principles in choosing how they allocate their time and which patients they choose to work with. “I’ve heard examples of Covid-19 cases in the emergency department where providers go, ‘I’m not going to go treat that white guy, I’m going to treat the person of color instead because whatever happened to the white guy, he probably deserves it.’”
LikeLiked by 2 people
Re. 8:13: Aj, do they know what happened with the boy? That is really disturbing…
LikeLike
Yep.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/a-middle-class-rebellion-against-progressives-is-gaining-steam-opinion/ar-AAKGpvT
A Middle Class Rebellion Against Progressives Is Gaining Steam | Opinion
~ … And this new middle-class rebellion is being bolstered by a wide-ranging intellectual rebellion by traditional liberals against the Left’s dogmatism and intolerance. Indeed, what we’re about to see has the potential to reprise the great shift among old liberals that had them embracing Reagan in reaction to the Left’s excesses of that generation.
In a way, this should not be surprising. After all, the progressive base is limited: According to a survey conducted by the non-partisan group More in Common, progressives constitute barely eight percent of the electorate. The report also found that fully 80 percent of all Americans believe that “political correctness is a problem,” including large majorities of millennials and racial minorities….
… Biden is similarly losing the middle class on immigration. Already many Latinos, particularly in Texas and Arizona, fear the loss of border control that accompanied the shift from Trump to Biden administrations. The crisis at the border has the potential to overwhelm the economies, health and welfare systems in heavily Hispanic border communities, which is sparking alarm among border state Democrats. …
… But it’s climate policy that may prove the most damaging aspect of the Biden agenda, and the one most likely to inspire a significant backlash. Policies pushing massive electrification are likely to accelerate the current surge in energy prices, and these will hit the household bottom line long after the stimulus checks have stopped coming. And this despite the fact that relatively few Americans—barely three percent, Gallup found— view climate as their primary concern and, according to one recent survey, barely one in ten registered voters would spend $100 a month on climate mitigation.
California provides a precursor for the emerging climate regime. Our state’s fixation on renewable energy, along with the closure of natural gas and nuclear plants, has helped drive the cost of electricity and gas to the highest in the continental U.S. It has also systematically undermined key blue collar industries like energy, construction and manufacturing, which have stagnated or shrunk, while regulations designed for climate reasons have helped boost home prices to the nation’s highest.
Attempts to squelch fracking could also cause even more havoc in places like the Rockies, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma. …
… Without a Trump to unite them, the Democrats, led by a radical fringe unrepresentative even of their own party, may find themselves increasingly isolated. Only then, when reality asserts itself, can sensible alternatives, social democratic or conservative, again gain currency. ~
LikeLiked by 2 people
Tychicus,
Not yet, but I imagine it will go something like this one, and be a further indictment of Biden policy.
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2021/06/03/nicaraguan-boy-last-seen-in-viral-video-is-reunited-with-mother-but-there-is-a-twist-n394316
“In April, a ten-year-old boy from Nicaragua made international news as he was rescued by U.S. Border Patrol agents. He was all alone, crying, and begging for help. The video of his rescue went viral as it was impossible to watch him in such distress without feeling empathy for the little boy. He has now been reunited with his mother in Texas. It sounds like a happy ending kind of story but it has some really dark undertones to it.
Wilton Obregon was abandoned by smugglers as he crossed the southern border. A Border Patrol agent’s bodycam filmed his encounter with Wilton.
Wilton was discovered wandering on his own on April 1 in the dusty barren landscape near La Grulla, Texas, by a Border Patrol agent on his way home from a shift.
Crying and shaking as he approached the officer’s vehicle, he begged in Spanish: ‘Can you help me? I was coming with group and they abandoned me. I don’t know where they are.’
When asked if he had been told to ask for help, Wilton replied between sobs: ‘No, I came because if not, where am I supposed to go?
‘Somebody could abduct me, kidnap me. I am scared,’ he added.
The boy was rightfully afraid of being abducted. Wilton and his mother were kidnapped by a cartel after they tried to cross the southern border in March. With Title 42 in effect, the two were returned back over the Texas-Mexico border. This is where the story takes a turn. His mother’s brother, Wilton’s uncle, who has lived in Miami for five years, says he could only pay the ransom for one of them ($5,000) so young Wilton was taken across the border for a second time. The human smugglers left him alone there. Wilton was taken to a shelter run by the US Office of Refugee Resettlement, a division of Health and Human Services.
About two weeks later, Wilton’s mother, Meylin, was released by the cartel and she again crossed the border. She turned herself into Border Patrol agents and requested asylum. She was transferred to a migrant center in Texas. She was able to visit Wilton at a center sheltering unaccompanied minors after Wilton had been there for two months.”
“The reaction from people may have backfired on the warm and fuzzy narrative of a mother and child reunion. (Cue Paul Simon.) People questioned Meylin’s ability to care for her young son. She endangered his life while doing the same of her own and it led to some dire consequences for the boy. At one point the Nicaraguan government sought custody of the boy. They urged the U.S. government to return Wilton to his family home in an isolated mountain region of the country. His father, Lazaro Gutierrez lives there with other family members. The Nicaraguan government dropped its request for Wilton’s return when his father decided that the boy would be better off in the U.S. with his mother. His father is described as a cattle farmer.
There are some red flags that we can see from Meylin’s brother, Wilton’s uncle, Misael Obregon. He is a construction worker in Miami who planned to take Meylin and Wilton in after their release as they wait for their asylum process to work through the system. Did Misael suddenly find the extra ransom money to secure the release of his sister? What is his role in the whole cartel scenario? He has twin 15-year-old sons who recently crossed the border and are waiting on their asylum claims to be processed. This looks like a family pattern, certainly not behavior that should be encouraged by the United States government.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
From Peggy Noonan:
~ Conspiracy believers don’t believe what the mainstream media tell them. Why would they? Newsrooms are undergoing their own revolution, with woke progressives vs. journalistic traditionalists, advocacy versus old-school news values. It is ideological. “We are here to shape and encourage a new reality.” “No, we are here to find and report the news.” It is generational: The young have the upper hand and the Slack channel. The woke are winning. If a year ago you thought the obvious—maybe the coronavirus that came from Wuhan leaked out of the Wuhan lab where they were studying coronaviruses—you were shut down as racist, bigoted, divisive. The progressives’ great talent is policing, and they are always on patrol. Everyone, even the most unsophisticated news consumer, can kind of tell. ~
LikeLiked by 2 people
FB has lost millions of users – it’s easy to see why…
Hopefully, it will soon go the way of MySpace.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/mkt_breakingnews/facebook-suspends-trump-for-two-years_3844746.html
“Facebook announced Friday that former President Donald Trump is suspended from its platform for two years.
“We are suspending his accounts for two years, effective from the date of the initial suspension on January 7 this year,” Nick Clegg, vice president of global affairs for Facebook, said in a blog post.”
““Facebook continues to arbitrarily apply their rules and undermine fundamental American values like free speech. This is Big Tech’s latest betrayal of those values—all while allowing authoritarian leaders to post harmful content without ANY repercussions,” Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.) said in a statement.
“Facebook is suspending former President Trump for two years, but continuing to allow CCP propaganda, Assad, and human smugglers to use their platform. That is utter hypocrisy. Facebook must be held accountable,” added Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.).”
LikeLiked by 2 people