Today is Lincoln’s birthday

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited version of a previous post.]

His actual birthday, that is.

When I was a child, Lincoln had a birthday all his own. Nowadays he’s lumped in with other presidents. And who knows where he’ll be in the future?

When I was a child, Lincoln also fascinated me more than any other president. One reason was a superficial one: he was just about the strangest-looking president ever (see this). Another was his eloquence, and a third was his sense of humor.

Which brings us to a series of Lincoln quotes. This first one seems especially apropos today:

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

More:

Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new after all.

Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

It’s not me who can’t keep a secret. It’s the people I tell that can’t.

I hope this prediction is correct:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

And of course, one of the most famous:

If you once forfeit the confidence of your fellow citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. It is true that you may fool all of the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all of the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

This is how the media writes propaganda: about deportations or anything else

The New Neo Posted on by

A textbook example is from CBS. In particular, the headline is misleading. There’s no question in my mind that this is purposely so, and perhaps the most important part of the game. The headline is often either the only thing people read, or the headline and the first paragraph or two, and articles are shaped by people who are well aware of that. Even if a person does read the whole thing, the headline tends to shape that person’s perceptions.

The headline of this particular article is, “Less than 14% of those arrested by ICE in Trump’s 1st year back in office had violent criminal records, document shows.” Wow, the reader is meant to think, I guess the right is lying when it says the focus right now is on criminals. How many people read articles with such a jaundiced eye that they’re aware of the trap there, the words “violent criminal records” and especially the definition of the word “violent”? Most of those who do read the headline with skepticism are probably not going to be Democrat voters and/or Trump haters, because of the phenomenon of confirmation bias.

I read all articles with skepticism, but that’s only because I have to write about them and need to try my best to get it right, and have learned over and over and over again how much of what we read is propaganda. It happens on both left and right, but more often on the left, and of course most of the MSM is on the left.

That’s why I immediately realized the key word there was “violent.”

Let’s get to the article. The first three paragraphs – again, that would be all most people would read – set up the premise that Trump and company are lying:

Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in President Trump’s first year back in the White House had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document obtained by CBS News.

The official statistics contained in the DHS document, which had not been previously reported publicly, provide the most detailed look yet into who ICE has arrested during the Trump administration’s far-reaching deportation operations across the U.S.

The internal DHS figures undermine frequent assertions by the Trump administration that its crackdown on illegal immigration is primarily targeting dangerous and violent criminals living in the U.S. illegally, people Mr. Trump and his lieutenants have regularly called the “worst of the worst.”

It’s only in paragraph four that the reader might get a whiff of what’s going on, and by then a lot of people have either dropped out or have made up their minds that Trump has been lying:

Nearly 60% of ICE arrestees over the past year had criminal charges or convictions, the document indicates. But among that population, the majority of the criminal charges or convictions are not for violent crimes.

But Trump et al never said they were all murderers or rapists, just that many were and that most (not all) have some sort of criminal past. The article goes on; you can read it for yourself. It isn’t till paragraph 9 that you can read this:

Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, said in a statement after this story was published that “Drug trafficking, Distribution of child pornography, burglary, fraud, DUI, embezzlement, solicitation of a minor, human smuggling are all categorized as ‘nonviolent crimes.'”

I don’t think anyone got the idea that all the deportees are murderers or rapists. But those who’ve committed the above crimes are people most citizens don’t want here and would be in favor of deporting.

When you look at the actual figures, it becomes even more clear:

The figures below illustrate the categories of criminal charges or convictions among the individuals arrested by ICE between Jan. 21, 2025 and Jan. 31, 2026 who had criminal records. The DHS document says it listed the most serious charges or convictions at the time of arrest.
All Other
117,987
Assault
42,847
DWI / DUI
29,929
Dangerous Drugs
22,555
Weapons Offenses
6,146
Sexual Assault
5,365
Burglary
5,053
Robbery
2,725
Homicide
2,107
Kidnapping
1,116
Arson
346

The document also says ICE arrested 22,600 individuals with charges or convictions involving dangerous drugs, while another 6,100 had weapons offenses on their records. Nearly 30,000 of those arrested by ICE had been charged with or convicted with driving while under influence or intoxicated. Another 5,000 arrestees had burglary charges or convictions.

The document says another 118,000 detainees had criminal charges or convictions for “other” crimes. Those could include immigration-related crimes, like entering the U.S. illegally, a misdemeanor for the first-time offense, or re-entering the country after being deported, a felony.

A lovely bunch of “neighbors.”

Often news is reported and the slant is what’s left out. This article is typical of a different and not-uncommon approach, which is to report more or less correctly but towards the latter part of an article, after the propaganda message has been driven home.

I said the article is more or less correct, but as far as I can see it does leave something out, which is the fact that some of the deportees have criminal convictions at home but not in the US.

The CBS article also reports the following, which is almost certainly a result of slanted coverage like this or worse:

A CBS News poll last month found that Americans’ support for Mr. Trump’s deportation efforts had fallen to 46%, down from 59% at the start of his second term.

Bravo, CBS. Mission accomplished!

NOTE: It turns out that one of those people with criminal convictions at home but not here is a person I wrote about two days ago, Irish national Seamus Culleton, who overstayed a visa for about two decades and has been complaining about his detention as a “concentration camp” and yet refuses to go back to Ireland although that’s been offered. Well, guess what? Turns out he’s wanted in Ireland on various charges:

McLaughlin said that he was offered the chance to be “instantly removed to Ireland” but that he “chose to stay in ICE custody” and took steps to “remain in detention”.

She said that being in detention “is a choice” and that the department encourages people in this position to “take control of their departure”.

McLaughlin added that the US is offering “illegal aliens” $2,600 (€2,000) and a free flight to self-deport.

It comes amid confirmation that Culleton had a number of charges against him before he left Ireland in 2009.

The Journal has established, via multiple sources familiar with his interactions with gardaí, that Culleton had a number of interactions with the justice system in Ireland before he moved to the US.

One incident involved the alleged possession for sale or supply of MDMA (ecstasy) and an attempt to get rid of the drugs when being searched by gardaí in 2008.

Culleton was charged with obstruction but did not appear in court and a bench warrant was issued for his arrest in April 2009, after he had moved to the US. …

On another occasion, Culleton was arrested for his own safety while drunk in Glenmore in 2007.

Separately, another bench warrant was issued for Culleton’s arrest after he failed to appear in court when facing criminal damage charges in September 2007.

Speaking during a press conference yesterday, Culleton’s lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye, who is representing him in his fight to be released from detention, said she had not heard about her client’s charges until this week.

“This is the first time that we’re hearing about that,” Okoye said yesterday. “I can’t speak to a warrant.

“Mr Culleton will not be aware of any warrant that happened after he came to the United States.

“A warrant is not a conviction, a warrant is not a criminal entry, so I will leave it at that until I understand the specific facts of the case.”

So he apparently failed to tell his lawyer about those warrants – at least some of which (and perhaps all of which) occurred before he came to the US and are probably why he left Ireland as well as why he doesn’t want to return. Fancy that.

DC grand jury refuses to indict Democrat legislators who advised military members to disobey orders

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the story:

A Washington, DC, grand jury refused to indict Democratic lawmakers who made a video urging military and intelligence agency members to disobey illegal orders, according to numerous outlets.

The government and courts did not reveal the charges or which members were named in the indictment.

Please read the whole thing.

This was one of those judgment calls in terms of whether the accused are actually guilty of seditious conspiracy. But I think it was madness to think a DC grand jury would ever indict them. Pick your battles. This result was a gimme to the left, which can self-righteously claim persecution and vindication.

On the other hand, I think it is highly likely that if the facts were all the same but it was Republicans who had made the statements, and Republicans facing a DC grand jury, they would have been indicted and then probably convicted.

[NOTE: Kelly may fall under military jurisdiction, but the others do not.]

School shooting in Canada – perp is alleged to have been trans

The New Neo Posted on by

The terrible tragedy occurred in a small town in British Columbia, with at least seven victims dead at the school, and many more injured.

Initial reports were coy:

Authorities have only identified the shooter as a ‘female in a dress’.

But the later story is that the perp was 18-year-old Jesse Strang, “a biological male who identifies as a woman named Jess.” As with some other mass killers, he apparently started out by murdering two family members – his mother and a brother – went on to kill at least seven people at the school, and then killed himself.

At this point it’s quite clear that there’s a trend in recent school shootings towards perps who identify as trans. What might be going on?

“People who identify as trans” is not a unitary category. To start with, some are biological males and some – actually, the majority – are biological females. But those are hardly the only differences among them. Some – a higher-than-by-chance proportion – have a pre-existing autism or ADHD diagnosis (see this and this, for example). It is highly possible that, because of transgenderism’s recent rise in popularity, it attracts quite a few people with pre-existing problems and gives them an identity and support group.

Then there may be an amplification of problems for any number of reasons: surgical intervention may cause dysfunction and regret (although there’s no indication that any of the trans shooters have had surgery, and surgery is hardly a given within the trans population), social media support that magnifies anger at the world, and the administration of cross-sex hormones and/or puberty blockers. The hormones in particular are suspect, in my opinion. The male body is not meant to take in huge doses of females hormones, nor is the female body meant to be inundated with testosterone. If you look at the literature, however, you’ll see studies that say cross-sex hormone treatment improves mental health, and although of course that may be true for some, there are also many trans individuals who say the hormones messed with their minds and bodies. Many de-transitioners report that phenomenon as the motive for their reverting back to identifying as their biological sex.

School shooters are of course the exception and not the rule. So are trans people – which makes the intersection of the two a very noticeable and disturbing phenomenon.

RIP to the victims.

[NOTE: I am pretty sure that some readers will wonder if SSRIs were involved. I’ve written about the connection between SSRIs and violence in this post. I’ve also written about the connection between school shooters and fatherlessness here. In addition, please see this post about two previous school shooters who identified as trans.]

20-year illegal alien detained – and he’s Irish

The New Neo Posted on by

I could not care less where this guy came from. Here’s the story:

An Irish national who has lived in the United States for more than 20 years has been detained for five months at a federal facility in Texas, where he compared conditions to a “concentration camp” without an end in sight.

In addition to being an illegal alien, he’s a Holocaust appropriator and an ignoramus about history.

More [emphasis mine]:

Seamus Culleton, a native of Glenmore, Ireland, said he’s been held at El Paso Camp East Montana in Texas since being arrested on September 9 despite not having a criminal record, The Irish Times reported Monday.

“Not even a parking ticket,” Culleton, 38, told the outlet during an interview from the facility.

Culleton described brutal conditions at the immigration detention center, which he described as “like a concentration camp, absolute hell,” according to the report.

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin confirmed Tuesday that ICE agents arrested Culleton in early September.

“He entered the United States in 2009 under the visa waiver program, which allows you to stay in the U.S. for 90 days without a visa,” McLaughlin told Newsweek in a statement. “He failed to depart the U.S.. He received full due process and was issued a final order of removal by an immigration judge on September 10, 2025. He was offered the chance to instantly be removed to Ireland but chose to stay in ICE custody, in fact he took affirmative steps to remain in detention.”

And in fact there’s more. From Ace:

The only argument in favor of keeping this guy around is that he 1, applied for a Green Card and is here provisionally while his case is considered and 2, he got married to a US citizen.

But here’s the thing: He only took those two steps when he was about to be deported.

The left, and Nick Gillespie, are claiming “he has a valid work permit.”

But that was only issued on the basis of his sudden application for a green card.

Which he only applied for in 2025, when Trump was about to deport him.

What did he do for the 20 years prior as far as work or money?

Did he work illegally using someone else’s social security number? Did he just sit on welfare for 20 years?

Did he, perhaps, engage in an actual criminal trade?

But we have to pretend his entire record began exactly when he took two desperate, last minute steps to confabulate a fraudulent set of facts to avoid deportation.

From that Newsweek article, just to clarify:

“Being in detention is a choice,” McLaughlin continued. “We encourage all illegal aliens to use the CBP Home app to take control of their departure. The United States is offering illegal aliens $2,600 and a free flight to self-deport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back to the U.S. the right legal way to live the American dream. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return.”

He had – and perhaps still has? – the chance to return to Ireland. And yet he chose to stay in a concentration camp. Go figure.

Oh, and this guy couldn’t be more wrong:

This is appalling and I hope cuts through to the ‘heritage American’ types who otherwise could care less about due process for immigrants …

Nobody on the right cares that he’s Irish. Also, he’s gotten due process.

Trump dropped a dime on Epstein way back when

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m referring to this:

Newly unsealed Department of Justice documents reveal that in July 2006, then businessman Donald Trump was one of the first to call police to warn them about sex predator Jeffrey Epstein.

The documents include a previously unreported 2019 FBI interview summary with former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter. Trump had contacted the department shortly after reports of Epstein’s criminal sex investigation became public.

The future president contacted Reiter to express relief that authorities were finally acting, suggesting his associates in New York had described Epstein’s behaviors as “disgusting,” and advised investigators to focus on Ghislaine Maxwell, whom he described as “evil.”

The Epstein document dump isn’t working out quite as the left had hoped.

Nor is there evidence of a pedophile sex ring operated by Epstein, or videos of the perps, or blackmail.

Trump, corruption, crypto, and the UAE

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Bauxite” has a question:

Barry Meislin- Nah. If [the Democrats are] smart they’ll impeach [Trump] for this:

The UAE Quietly Poured a Half-Billion Dollars into Trump’s Crypto Venture Four Days Before Inauguration

Of course that means that they’ll probably impeach him for ICE or something stupid and political.

Anyway, I’m curious to know what the regulars think of Trump’s crypto business.

Here’s my response.

Remember when Trump and his family were debanked, during the time that they were also being attacked through lawfare? The left was trying to destroy their lives, including taking away their wealth.

The Trumps are on record as saying they got into crypto because they realized their money wasn’t safe in the banking system. See this:

“Every major banking institution, the people that, two weeks before we were debanked, we could’ve called and gotten a loan in five seconds. They disappeared. We were left high and dry,” he said.

“Basically, during the first term, certainly after the…let’s call it January 6… all the nonsense, it got significantly worse,” he said …

“We weren’t even early crypto guys, but we figured, if they can debank the Trump Organization, if they can debank us, who can’t they go after? And more importantly, who won’t they go after?” he continued.

Trump Jr. said that instead of going home and “go cry in a corner,” they decided to launch World Liberty Financial, which he described as the future of banking.

Read the whole article. One of the most interesting aspects of it is that, although it was written in the summer of 2025 when the facts of J6 were well known, it repeats these lies, including calling the mob on J6 “deadly”:

Five people, including one police officer, died and several more were injured when the pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol building.

The police officer, Sicknick, didn’t “die when the pro-Trump mob breached the Capitol building.” I’ve written many times about what really happened. Another was killed by the deadly Capitol Police, Of the other three, two died of heart attacks and one of those wasn’t ever at the Capitol but merely at the earlier rally. The third person of those three who died, Rosanne Boyland, was reported variously to have been beaten to death by police, to have been trampled in the crowd, and on autopsy to have died of an overdose. So the article is purposely misleading; what else is new?

As for the article you linked, about the UAE – I’m not at all in favor of that sort of thing. At the very least, it gives the appearance of corruption and certainly might be true corruption. However, I also agree with the writer of this comment at the article:

What [Andrew C. McCarthy, the piece’s author] fails to understand is the potential behind WLF. It very well could become the first crypto bank, which is more and more likely to be the future of currency. I’d also add that when you have lots of money to throw around…you throw it around. Maybe it’s for favor later or just to perhaps get lucky and make more money off the next big thing. There are also a lot of assumptions in this piece. For instance, the not naming of the UAE reps. on the board is supposedly for nefarious reasons – to hide them. OR, in typical Trump style, he wants his name on almost everything and doesn’t want others to get the credit. While I say all this, aren’t most big business and political dealings suspect at best? I feel like this is just how the world works these days…

And also this one:

It’s nice to have a leader who wants us to be proud of our country rather than ashamed of our past. I’m not at all surprised that he’s acting as one of the elite. He’s been one of the elite his entire life. He joins the ranks of Pelosi, Omar, Biden (and pretty much every other politician) in enriching himself through his position.

The UAE is actually one of the best of the Arab countries in terms of reforming the hatred it used to teach, by the way. Also, here’s a not-all-that-bad article in, of all places the Guardian. Excerpt:

Documents seen by the Journal indicate that Tahnoon paid the Trump family and entities affiliated with Steve Witkoff, co-founder of World Liberty and Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, half of the investment up front, with $187m going to Trump entities, and $31m going to Witkoff’s. The payment came from Aryam Investment, a Tahnoon-backed company.

A White House official said the president was “not involved in running his businesses and has turned them over to his children, so these business endeavors do not involve him”.

Claims that the president had breached the constitution’s federal emoluments clause, designed to safeguard against corruption, are “bogus and irrelevant”, the official argued. “Mere appearances of business deals with which he has no involvement plainly cannot violate the Emoluments clause.”

In a statement, the White House counsel, David Warrington, added: “President Trump performs his constitutional duties in an ethically sound manner and to suggest so otherwise is either ill-informed or malicious.”

Government ethics experts have long been alarmed over the way that Trump and his family structured his companies before he started his second term. Typically, a president puts his assets into a blind trust overseen by an independent third party. But Trump handed over control to two of his sons, Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump.

While it’s no different from how Trump structured his companies during his first term, Trump spent the years after he left the White House expanding his family business. Now Trump entities are dabbling in social media, streaming platforms, nuclear fusion, financial services and, through World Liberty, crypto. …

The Guardian has not identified evidence of the president explicitly offering the chip exports in exchange for the investment in his family’s crypto venture.

Richard Briffault, a law professor at Columbia, said while there was no direct allegation of a quid pro quo, “the situation of a major investment by a foreign power in a major company that the president has a major stake in, that creates a structural conflict of interest”.

“The concern is that we can never be sure why certain decisions are being made,” Briffault said. When Trump allowed the UAE to import AI chips, “it could have been a shrewd geopolitical move, or it could have been influenced by the fact that the country has a major investment in a Trump family business. We just can’t know for sure.”

Indeed. That’s why I believe the entire Trump family should have avoided even the appearance of corruption.

But it surprises me not at all that they have plunged into it. It’s one of the things I don’t like about Trump; there are others. But they are overshadowed by how much worse the Democrats are for the country (and the world) as a whole.

Appeals Court rules on the detention of illegal aliens without bond

The New Neo Posted on by

The Trump administration has scored this legal victory:

:A decision on Friday by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, if sustained by the Supreme Court, will allow the Trump Administration to detain pending removal as many illegal aliens arrested by DHS as it has the physical capacity to hold. Currently that capacity is only around 65,000. But DHS is building more detention facilities, and the expectation is to increase that number to 200,000 by the end of 2026.

Until Friday evening, the effort by the Trump administration to engage in “mass removals” of illegal aliens — a Trump campaign promise — has suffered from two primary hampering factors: 1 ) limited bed space in detention facilities that created a bottleneck; and 2) a practice in place for nearly 30 years that illegal aliens arrested in the interior of the country were almost always released back to their lives while being given a Notice to Appear to initiate removal proceedings against them at some time in the future.

A General Accounting Office Report in December 2024 — at the end of the Biden Administration and based on data from the Biden DOJ’s “Executive Office for Immigration Review” (EOIR) — disclosed that 34% of all removal proceedings ended with an “in absentia” removal orders from 2016 to 2023, meaning the illegal alien failed to appear. This meant to carry out the removal, the illegal alien had to be located and arrested a second time.

Further, as of July 2024, there was a backlog of 3.5 million removal cases pending before immigration judges — almost entirely as a result of more than three years of “Open Border” policies during the Biden Administration.

Now the Fifth Circuit has said it’s not a requirement to send them back to the community while waiting deportation. The decision was 2-1.

If you’re interested in the court’s reasoning, please see the opinion.

Basically, the idea is that the government has the authority to do this under statute, even if many previous governments declined to do it. The dissenting judge noted that, “some of the people detained are ‘the spouses, mothers, fathers, and grandparents of American citizens.'” For a substantial portion of that group, that would almost certainly be because their American-citizen children and grandchildren were born here after the parents or grandparents had entered illegally. If Congress wants to exempt the older generations and grandfather (literally) them in to citizenship or amnesty, all Congress has to do is pass a law to that effect.

I assume this ruling will ultimately be appealed to SCOTUS.