With the week we’re having in America, this could easily have been a 50 Quick Things instead of the regular-ole 5QT that it is.
And yes, I expect thanks from you for my brevity and restraint. A simple subscription to this fine publication will do nicely in that regard.
Anyway, let’s get this started so I can begin some Friday semi-loafing:
1. Who’s Really Guilty Down in Texas?
Something awful happened in the Rio Grande, just like something awful happens all the time there. Namely, people drowned as they tried to swim a river in order to break the law and invade what’s supposed to be the most powerful nation on earth (which in a sane world you’d think would be regarded as one of the most unwise moves anybody could make, but naturally…).
And it’s being blamed on Greg Abbott because of a barrier he put in the river:
Mexican authorities are trying to identify two bodies found in the Rio Grande, including one along the floating barrier that Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had installed recently in the river, across from Eagle Pass, Texas.
Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department first reported that a body was found along the buoys between Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras, Mexico, on Wednesday evening, and immediately connected it to the risks Mexico had warned of before the barrier was installed. Hours later it said another body had been found 3 miles (5 kilometers) upstream in an area where there are no buoys.
Both bodies were recovered by Mexican authorities, and the Coahuila state prosecutor’s office was working to identify them and determine the cause of death.
Mexico said the Texas Department of Public Safety had advised its consulate of the body along the floating barrier. Texas said it notified Mexico after receiving a report of a body upriver from the barrier Wednesday. It was unclear if that was the body that ultimately ended up lodged against the buoys.
“Preliminary information suggests this individual drowned upstream from the marine barrier and floated into the buoys,” said Steve McCraw, the DPS director. “There are personnel posted at the marine barrier at all times in case any migrants try to cross.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection was asked by an email and a phone call for comment on the situation, but had not responded.
Mexico and others have warned about the risks posed by the bright orange, wrecking ball-sized buoys put on the Rio Grande in an effort to make it more difficult for migrants to cross to the U.S. The Foreign Relations Department also contends the barrier violates treaties regarding the use of the river and Mexico’s sovereignty.
“We made clear our concern about the impact on migrants’ safety and human rights that these state policies would have,” the department said in its statement Wednesday night.
The level of cognitive dissonance here is bizarre, though perhaps it no longer amazes.
Consider:
- It’s illegal to swim that river for the purpose of immigration into the United States. There are rules for how to enter this country and swimming the Rio Grande is not permitted in those rules.
- The state of Texas bears the brunt of this massive wave of illegals. For example, the city of San Antonio has a population of some 1.8 million and now it has an additional estimated 400,000 people thanks to illegal immigration. This can’t be sustained. You’re seeing images of homeless camps on the streets of New York City because that place is overwhelmed with a tiny fraction of the wave of illegals.
- So Abbott installs a river barrier that, yes, does make it more dangerous to swim across the river. And why? Because he’d like to send a strong signal that swimming the Rio Grande shouldn’t be done.
Assuming that it was the river barrier that led to these two drownings — and there isn’t a whole lot of reason we should do that, but just for the sake of argument we will — is it Abbott’s responsibility that these people drowned?
Or is it the responsibility of the drowned?
You do not have the right to come to this country uninvited. When barriers are put up to keep you from coming here and you kill yourself attempting to cross those barriers, it is YOUR fault. Not the fault of the people putting up the barriers.
But the Mexican government, which is in league with the cartels who profit off this all-out invasion, wants to make Greg Abbott the bad guy here. And naturally, the Associated Press gleefully regurgitates their narratives.
Enemies. I don’t know about you, but all I see is enemies.
2. Tucker Carlson’s Other Major Scoop (And Screw You, Fox News)
You’ve probably seen the Tucker on Twitter (or is it Tucker on X now? That’s a title that isn’t going to work at all) interview of Devon Archer this week. That’s a must-watch even though Archer can’t uncover the entire picture of the Biden bribes. He can’t tell you that Joe and Hunter Biden were directly shaking down the people Archer was attempting to land as investors for his private equity fund, but he certainly can supply enough context as to make it very obvious what was happening.
But Carlson has something else to offer this week that is more important, even though it isn’t actually him doing the offering. From the National Pulse:
Former President Donald Trump has subpoenaed Fox News in an effort to attain an unaired interview with former U.S. Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund. The interview was originally intended to air as part of then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s investigation into Jan 6 and the more than 40,000 hours of footage he was granted access to. The National Pulse yesterday released parts of the interview, with further clips due on Thursday afternoon.
One item of particular interest to Donald Trump’s legal team is comments that Sund may have made to Carlson regarding the presence of federal agents in the crowd on Jan 6. In an interview with English comedian Russell Brand, Carlson stated that Sund believed federal agents were among the crowds protesting the 2020 Presidential election result:
“I never thought there was a false flag or anything like that. I’m not a conspiracist by temperament… And then I interviewed the chief of the Capitol Police, Steven Sund – in an interview that was never aired on Fox by the way. I was fired before it could air… He was the chief of the Capitol Police on January 6 and he said ‘Oh yeah the crowd was filled with Federal agents.’ He would know of course because he was in charge of security at the site. So the more time that has passed, now it has been two-and-a-half years, it becomes really obvious that core claims they made about January 6 were lies.”
Carlson has said he’s going to re-interview Sund, so Fox News’ suppression of the former Capitol Police chief’s account of Jan. 6 won’t ultimately stand.
The quality of the leaked video isn’t terrific, but it’s good enough to understand what’s said:
Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund on Jan. 6 during an interview with Tucker Carlson that Fox News tried to HIDE: “Everything appears to be a cover up”@TheNatPulse
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) August 3, 2023
Let’s just say that this doesn’t do the modern-day Inspector Javert, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, any favors in his attempts to imprison Donald Trump for, per this week’s sham indictment, attempting to raise questions about the 2020 election.
And if you’re still watching Fox News, why? They kept this information from you for months. Shouldn’t that be punished by the marketplace?
3. The Defamatory Tyranny of the Southern Poverty Law Center
At the Daily Signal, Tyler O’Neil is doing an amazing job of chronicling the inconvenience, if not damage, being inflicted on the conservative parents’ activist group Moms for Liberty by the leftist fraudsters of the Southern Poverty Law Center. That’s an organization that outlived whatever usefulness it might have had a couple of decades ago and is now nothing but a Democrat Party hack squad who specializes in smearing political opponents as racists and bigots and whatever else.
SPLC went after Moms for Liberty essentially because they oppose the twin cultural aggressions of transgenderism and critical race theory, and the implications of that are really something. You either stand by and let people who hate you turn your kid into an unhinged radical, or worse a delusional and emotionally confused basket case committed to a project with a 40 percent attempted suicide rate at its completion, or else you’re a hater. And if you join a group attempting to institutionalize your opposition to these things, that organization is then branded a “hate group” by the digital stormtroopers at the SPLC.
With the effect that Nextdoor banned a Moms for Liberty chapter in Tennessee, using the SPLC’s smears as a justification. And Eventbrite has pulled Moms for Liberty meetings from its offerings for the same reason.
Oh, and so you’ll know (and you know this thanks to O’Neil’s excellent reporting), the SPLC isn’t doing this on its own. They’re doing it because the Biden Justice Department is putting them up to it.
Remember when Trump said, “They’re not after me, they’re after you; I’m just in the way?” Think he’s wrong in light of this?
Outrageous. And you think you live in a free country. That maybe used to be true, but the future belongs to the Beastie Boys.
You gotta fight for your right to party.
4. Wuhan 2.0 in Calif0rnia?
Just what in the hell is this?
The Globe reported Friday on a COVID lab run by a shady Chinese company operating in Reedley, CA in the central San Joaquin Valley. The lab, which was supposed to be an empty building, was discovered by Reedley city code enforcement officers when they saw a garden hose attached to the building and investigated.
What they found was stunning and extremely concerning: investigators discovered that one rooms of the warehouse was used to produce COVID-19 and pregnancy tests. In other rooms, investigators found blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples. They also found thousands of vials that contained unlabeled fluids, the MidValley Times reported.
The Globe made public records requests to the City of Reedly and the Fresno County Department of Public Health for information and communications between the all of the state and federal agencies brought in, as well as any documents and materials found at the illegal lab location. The Fresno County DPH responded almost immediately with a bevy of legal documents including the Superior Court Application for Abatement Warrant. But they said since this is an ongoing investigation, there are no additional records available to disclose at this time.
That California Globe piece is definitely worth a full read because how much weird stuff is in it will blow your mind. Among the items found at that warehouse were “potentially infectious agents at the location including both bacterial and viral agents: chlamydia, E. Coli, streptococcus pneumonia, hepatitis B and C, herpes 1 and 5 and rubella. The CDC also found samples of malaria.”
What the hell?
Milt Harris at RVIVR notes that there were 900 COVID-infected rats at that lab. Some 150 were already dead and the rest had to be euthanized.
But whatever. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along. And don’t ask us about the Capitol Police chief who tells you Jan. 6 was a Reichstag fire, Chinese bribes to the current president, or the former president’s cook dropping dead in circumstances similar to those of the previous cook. What are you, a conspiracy theorist?
5. Oppenheimer
I skipped a couple of opportunities to write a review of Christopher Nolan’s epic biography of Robert J. Oppenheimer, though we did discuss the movie in last week’s Spectacle podcast (by the way, we didn’t have an episode of the podcast this week; Melissa had a family thing pop up at our appointed recording time and my week has been so crazy that I couldn’t reschedule).
Anyhow, there have been a bunch of reviews of it, as you’d imagine. It’s not a movie lending itself to a quick take — Nolan packs an awful lot into those three hours.
The Critical Drinker made a good point, which is that practically the whole cast — including Cillian Murphy, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., and Emily Blunt in particular, and I would throw in the cameo appearance by Gary Oldman as President Truman as well — turns in amazing performances that largely save what would otherwise be fairly wooden characters as they’re written. You get more out of those characters from facial expressions and body language than you do from the plot and dialogue.
But of course the main take I have from the movie, which I’ll say I found well worth watching, as are all of Nolan’s movies (other than Tenet, obviously; Tenet abuses the audience like no movie I’ve ever seen), is that I really don’t care all that much about Oppenheimer’s problems.
Obviously, he did a good job of building Fat Man and Little Boy, or more to the point the team he helped assemble and manage did. And Oppenheimer was well rewarded for that; for quite a while after the atomic bomb ended World War II, saving millions of lives — the movie doesn’t waste too much time agonizing over the use of the bomb, thank God — he was regarded as a national hero and rewarded handsomely as such.
Nolan’s film leaves open the question of what Oppenheimer’s true ideological leanings were, which is too generous. He’s presented as a “New Deal Democrat,” but that’s dubious. All of his friends were commies, including the two women he’s featured sleeping with in the film. His wife, Kitty, played brilliantly by Blunt, turned away from that miserable ideology, but she wasn’t really in the majority when it came to Oppenheimer’s circle.
The movie makes a big deal over the fact that Oppenheimer had his security clearance pulled by the Atomic Energy Commission. And frankly, that isn’t a big deal. We know that the Trinity project in Los Alamos was shot through with Soviet spies, so much so that Joe Stalin knew all about what we were doing there practically in real time.
That’s Oppenheimer’s responsibility, and it’s his fault. And when he came out against the development of the hydrogen bomb and then touted information-sharing on atomic energy with a Soviet Union that had already murdered tens of millions of people, the only sane move would have been to put some distance between him and the cutting edge of nuclear technology.
Thanks for everything, Bobby, but we’re moving on. No security clearance for you. And the people who made that call are not villains for making it.
Of course, even if Nolan wanted to make a movie actually critical of the commies of the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood wouldn’t let him. Communists and fellow travelers as victims is one of the core sacraments of the film industry. It doesn’t matter that all of these supposedly persecuted angels, the Dalton Trumbos of the world, were utterly horrible human beings. We’re supposed to be over the Cold War, but clearly they haven’t gotten past it.
Which is why Hollywood probably shouldn’t touch this subject anymore. And as well-produced a film as Oppenheimer is, it probably does more harm than good.
READ MORE: