Day After Trump Warns of 'Animals' at Border, News Breaks of 'Hezbollah' Member Caught at El Paso - Planned to Build Bomb, Head for NY
For those of you who aren’t the social media butterfly type, you might not be familiar with the “This is Fine” meme.
The meme takes its name from a comic of a smiling cartoon dog sitting with a mug of coffee in a room being consumed by flames. “This is fine,” he says in the second panel.
It’s been around for a while — long enough that the Republican Party was able to use it during Hillary Clinton’s nomination in Philadelphia eight years ago:
Well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ #DemsInPhilly #EnoughClinton pic.twitter.com/qVywJM90Eu
— GOP (@GOP) July 25, 2016
The Democrats and their enablers in the legacy media should have warned us that we hadn’t seen anything yet; during the past three years and change, “This is Fine” has basically become the left’s mantra as President Joe Biden’s supporters let the country burn down around them.
Point that out, of course, and you’re being “dark” and “fiery.” Take The New York Times, which covered presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s campaign appearance at the Dayton International Airport in Vandalia, Ohio, on Saturday as being “a caustic and discursive speech in Ohio” where he “once again doubled down on a doomsday vision of the United States.”
This “doomsday vision” involved saying that some illegal immigrants are “animals” who had been emptied from prisons in Central America and adding, “I don’t know if you call them ‘people.’”
“In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says it’s a terrible thing to say. … These are animals, and we have to stop it. We can’t have another Laken.
“We have so many people being hurt so badly and being killed.”
Trump’s “Laken” reference , of course, was to Laken Riley, the Georgia nursing student who was beaten to death Feb. 22. A Venezuelan man who crossed the border has been charged in her death.
To say her death hasn’t been a big priority for Democrats would be an understatement — they’ve more concerned with the terminology used to describe her alleged killer.
The relevant part of Trump’s speech is below:
Here’s the angry take from the Times, in what was ostensibly supposed to be a straight news piece:
“Border officials, including some who worked in the Trump administration, have said that most migrants who cross the border are members of vulnerable families fleeing violence and poverty, and available data does not support the idea that migrants are spurring increases in crime.”
Yes, unnamed “border officials” support the Times’ outlook on the world, and don’t you dare tell them differently! In completely unrelated news, hours after this speech was made, the cross-town New York Post reported an illegal immigrant from Lebanon who attempted to cross the southern border was captured on March 9 and, two days later, confessed to officials that he was a member of a terrorist organization and planned to build a bomb and detonate it.
Nothing to see here, folks. This is fine.
According to the Post, 22-year-old Basel Bassel Ebbadi was apprehended by the Border Patrol near El Paso, Texas. During interviews with medical staff, he was asked what he planned to do in America.
“I’m going to try to make a bomb,” he said.
However, in a later interview, according to the Post, he backtracked, claiming he was actually trying to escape the terrorist group Hamas because he “didn’t want to kill people.”
“Once you get in, you can never get out,” he said.
Which story do you believe?
“Ebbadi said in a sworn interview after his arrest that he had trained with Hezbollah for seven years and served as an active member guarding weapons locations for another four years,” the Post reported, based on internal Immigration and Customs Enforcement documents they obtained exclusively. “He also admitted to using a fake birthday and name in Sweden, in Ecuador — where he claimed his father resides — and Panama this year.”
A 22 year old illegal Lebanese alien, Basel Bassel Ebbadi, crossed the US border in Texas and was caught.
Ebbadi admitted to being a member of the Islamic terror group Hezbollah and that he hoped to make a bomb in the US.
“I’m going to try to make a bomb,” he said, according to… pic.twitter.com/kG3xBYRD9E
— Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 (@MarinaMedvin) March 17, 2024
He went on to add that he had trained for “jihad” and killing those “that [were] not Muslim.”
The Post added this: “Border agents continue to see a surge in migrants whose names appear on the terror watchlist entering the US illegally as crossings continue at record levels.”
But wait! We were told just hours earlier that “border officials” had avouched to the Times that “most migrants who cross the border are members of vulnerable families fleeing violence and poverty,” and any statements to the contrary were verifiable lies. So which is it?
Well, for one thing, I’m assuming that most people who cross the southern border are not Hezbollah terrorists. For that matter, we don’t have much more than Mr. Ebbadi’s statements to go on thus far — damning though those statements may be — so we can’t even say for sure that he is.
Even if he isn’t, what we do know is that he’s mentally unbalanced enough to be a prima facie threat.
Even if “most migrants” are leaving levels of poverty and violence that are high relative to the United States, that doesn’t mean they meet the “credible fear” standard necessary to seek asylum, nor that they aren’t a credible threat to the United States.
There are plenty of bloodthirsty MS-13 killers, sex traffickers and other criminals in the lot, as well. Branding a crew of murderous thugs as “animals” might not be politically correct, but most normal people understand what Trump was saying.
These individuals are essentially ushered into the country by an administration that created the border crisis in the first place and now puts the blame on Republicans because they won’t pass larded-up, neutered “border security” (there aren’t air-quotes emphatic enough to put around those two words) legislation favored by Democrats.
This is fine, Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself, again) seem to be saying. It’s always been fine. And when it’s not, it’s the Republicans’ fault for not doing what the Democrats say. And if Trump points out the naked truth of the issue, he’s putting forth a “doomsday vision of the United States.”
Americans know it’s not fine, however, and the polls don’t lie on this issue. Border-jumpers like Basel Bassel Ebbadi will come back to haunt Biden and the Democrats this November, and there’s no amount of pearl-clutching about language like “animals” that the New York Times & Co. can do that will change that bedrock fact.
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