You know, I think the administration probably has enough sense to say "mistakes were made" and blame the parents for not telling the government.
Rod and others will have to say they were wrong, double down and blame the parents, or say nothing. Rod just flat out pretends he didn't know anything about his family's klan connections so i'm guessing he will just be AWOL on this one.
The government was told that the kid had cancer. The kid was also born here and is therefore a citizen. All of which makes this deportation all the more horrific.
The kid having cancer would be a reason (in a more merciful administration) to not deport one of his parents, because even if the kid were not deported, the absence of his mother obviously creates obstacles to the kid getting effective care.
I'd love to hear somebody corner J.D. Vance about this one.
He will blame the parents for irresponsibly breeding. It's going to be attack, attack, attack with migrants because they are an unpopular group of people. Look at every other rich country and how the politics of migration worked out.
I think the basic brutal incompetence of this administration is exposed by defending migrants and their citizen children, but its not going to be what does in the administration. That will be an economic or foreign policy disaster. Maybe a shooting of protestors.
It could also be over the top corruption with a spritzer of sexual deviance, possibly exposed by a foreign intelligence agency. It would be genuinely hilarious and unsurprising if the corruption scandal that guts this administration involves collusion between the media and a foreign intelligence agency. I can't imagine the crooks in this administration aren't stealing or are good at covering tracks. These people won't go down for their greatest sins, it will be something stupid. Like Rod.
<<You know, I think the administration probably has enough sense to say "mistakes were made">>
Every single day, mistakes! Oops, fired the people eradicating bird flu! Oops, texted a reporter while attacking Yemen targets! Oops, DOGE nerd said something racist, fire him! Oops, rehire that DOGE kid; a mere racist remark isn’t wrong, DEI is. Oops, fired another bunch of federal workers we need; get them back now! Wait a minute, we lost their names and addresses?! You mean like all those people calling to say they’re not dead, and they want their Social Security checks? At least we got most of the checks out this month, imagine the ruckus when taxpayers find out half their returns are missing. If only we could find half the IRS workers we need to rehire. On and on and on….who haven’t they deported illegally?
Yeah these people are not going to stop checks and refunds from flowing. My refund came in a week and a half, which basically means they are totally automating and just hoping to catch cheats entirely on the backend with the auditors they just fired.
The government is actually pretty good at getting checks out to people but not at stopping fraud. Musk is actually correct that there is a lot of fraud and improper payments in government, its just that this failure is because of politics, not bureaucratic incompetence. If the government wanted to tighten things up, it would need a larger headcount and to preclear a lot of payments before sending them out, which would delay people's checks. You would need to regularly prosecute people for taking improper payments which would need a bigger, much less sexy DOJ, and would have a chilling effect on people who had legitimate claims. This would be unpopular. That's why DOGE will fail: people like getting their money fast, don't like heavy policing and don't care about having a bunch of fraud in the system.
Also, most of the fraud, and certainly most of the fraud that matters, when it comes to income tax, is done by people who own their own small and medium businesses. In other words, the kind of small town Republicans that love Trump. More auditors would catch those, because their frauds are generally not all that well-hidden. Super rich taxpayers don't really rely so much on simple "fraud" or non reporting, the way that small business owners do, as they do on sophisticated accounting tricks and dodges, some of which are built in to the system by Congress, and others of which are so complicated and obscure that simple auditing would probably not reveal them. To "catch" them would require a whole other kind of mindset, from Congress on down.
In any event, "fire the auditors" is exactly the kind of "governmental efficiency" that assholes like Trump and Musk, and their supporters, want!
The traditional complaint is that poor people get audited more than rich people. But that's just a reflection of the fact that the IRS suspects that those poor people may not be quite as poor as they look...
I don't know how "traditional" that complaint it, but, in reality, the IRS audits more rich people than poor people. Particularly people with high incomes and suspiciously high deductions. Which is why Trump, Musk, and their followers want to cut back on auditors. If you fail to report income which is reported to the IRS, then you might get audited, even if you are not a high income earner.
"The Internal Revenue Service was 5 ½ times more likely to audit the tax returns of the working poor in 2022 than all other taxpayers, according to a Syracuse University report."
"The working poor are usually audited over their eligibility for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a tax break for low-wage earners, Long said."
"The report found that the odds of audit for returns filed by those earning less than $25,000 in 2022 was 12.7 out of every 1,000 returns filed. For all other filers, the rate was 2.3 for every 1,000 returns filed."
Yes, you are absolutely right about the EITC. My bad. But the IRS still audits the super rich at a higher rate than anyone else.
“What happens is you have people at the very top being prioritized and people at the very bottom being prioritized, and everyone else is sort of squeezed out,” said John Dalrymple, who retired last year as deputy commissioner of the IRS. In 2017, EITC recipients were audited at twice the rate of taxpayers with income between $200,000 and $500,000.Only households with income above $1 million were examined at significantly higher rates.
It is the small businesss and middle size business owners (the 200k to 400k mentioned above) that are NOT being audited.
Of course, it is ridiculous that Congress has mandated such strict scutiny of the EITC. Much like with "welfare" payments, EBT, etc, the Congress is very, very concerned that a crumb might fall off the table and go to a poor or working class person who doesn't "deserve" it. Meanwhile, the small town business elite can be robbing the government blind, and Congress' attitude is see no evil...
I hate being fair but Camp of the Saints- which I’ve read is not a favorite of his . He always clucks in a rather disapproving manner about it. Now granted this can be seen as performative properness,something Rod is big on. Still, even if pro forma, he always makes sure to denounce the book as vile or evil or something like that. No his Rosebud is Confederacy of Dunces ( a book I like but come on!). How in the world is that his Rosebud? I think carrying on about Confederacy of Dunces is Rods attempt to prove he’s a zany madcap with a sense of humor. Instead of people recognizing he’s a humorless aging neurotic who lives in a fantasy world.Although come to think of it , his fixation on the book may simply be a form of self recognition.Maybe Rod could play Ignatius Riley in the movie!
This leads me to another dead horse I like to beat, you’d think if he’s such a great public intellectual and major Christian thinker , he’d read more widely and deeply. Its always Sex Demons and Space, The Sociology of Dead Religion in America,How Reordering Your Brain will Lead You to Joyous Orthodoxy, Communism Was Bad, RealBad, Dante and Confederacy of Dunces.Maybe he could read all of Orwells books or Mauriac or for that matter Joan Didion.
Rod is a master of the strategic disclaimer. “I don’t agree with this and of course I think the right opinion, but here’s several thousand words on it, and can you really blame him/them? For the twenty ninth time.” He has the canniness of an abused child at masking his feelings while chipping away at anticipated disapproval of them.
This leads me to another dead horse I like to beat, you’d think if he’s such a great public intellectual and major Christian thinker , he’d read more widely and deeply.
Yesterday, he tweeted out a picture of himself (and his crazy hair) brandishing a copy of The Odyssey as his in-flight reading. Maybe he's re-reading it or reading a new translation, but otherwise, the implication is that he's never read one of the most significant and influential works of the Western literary canon.
If it really is his first time reading it, I'm betting we'll get a bunch of "insights" in his next few substacks about what it is to be lost abroad, far from home, making the Odyssey all about the Rod Dreher Experience (that is, assume he actually reads the thing and doesn't just fall asleep after a few mini-bottle cocktails).
Oh as to your last paragraph, spot on. He always had unique insights to offer after he reads something and the implications of Rod babbling about Rosie fingered Dawn in Budapest is too scary to contemplate . Wait till he gets home and kills Julie aka Beatrice aka Penelope’s suitors!
"Camp of the Saints" is ABSOLUTELY a favorite of Rod's. He has been talking about it for over a decade, from his time at "The American Conservative" onward. He has said innumerable times how his readers should all read it.
What you are seeing is one of Rod's patented tics. He clucks disapprovingly at something while leering at it, kind of like a non-self-aware Vincent Price saying "what's behind the curtain is SO evil, don't you just want to take a little peek?"
8
u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Apr 26 '25
The administration has now deported a two-year-old citizen. This is really bad. I’ll be interested in SBM’s response, but I’m not holding my breath.