Border Crisis Is About to Get a Lot Worse

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Rewrite America’s Past.”

In 2021, the migrant surge at the southern border hit its highest point in two decades.

But as bad as things are currently, the situation at the border may get even worse.

President Donald Trump’s administration created the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order Title 42 to allow immediate deportation of illegal immigrants coming from countries where there was a widespread communicable disease.

It was a commonsense measure to protect public health during a time of pandemic. Even the Biden administration kept the rule in place.

That could soon change.

Pressure from activists and the reduction of COVID-19 restrictions has, according to multiple reports, led the administration to reconsider Title 42.

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It’s noteworthy that the same activist groups and politicians that insisted on the most restrictive COVID-19 policies at home have been most vocal about ending a rule that would allow border officials to do the bare minimum to preserve the health and safety of Americans during a pandemic.

Ending Title 42 could have serious consequences at a time when the overall picture at the border is grim.

Even before President Joe Biden took office it was clear that he would take a different approach to the border than his predecessor. Once in office, he worked quickly to ensure it would be more difficult to arrest, detain, and deport illegal immigrants.

In the months after Biden became president, illegal border crossings soared.

The administration and its media allies initially dismissed this as a temporary, “seasonal” problem.

It wasn’t.

The number of July border arrests, in a hot month that typically sees lower border crossing numbers, went over 200,000. This is the highest number seen in any single month in over 21 years.

The trend hasn’t abated in 2022. In February, there were 164,973 encounters between Border Patrol and illegal immigrants at the southern border. This is a threefold increase from February 2020 and marks a yearlong streak of over 150,000 border apprehensions per month.

As the New York Post noted, there have been over 2 million border encounters since Biden became president and an estimated half-million additional illegal border crossers who’ve avoided Border Patrol.

What we have at the border is already an epic crisis that requires a serious rethinking of policies and rhetoric coming from the White House. Biden, you may remember, maligned Border Patrol in September by accusing agents of abusing migrants.

The story of agents “whipping” migrants was debunked, but Biden never apologized. It is now six months into the official investigation and no report has been released.

So not only is Border Patrol besieged by the very serious task of dealing with a historic migrant surge, it’s also been thrown under the bus from the top.

It’s in the context of this environment that the administration is set to make the border control problem significantly more challenging.

Even two Democratic senators from Arizona, a border state at the forefront of the crisis, insisted that Title 42 remain in place.

Democratic Arizona Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly sent a letter to Biden expressing their concern. They wrote:

Given the impacts that changes to Title 42 could have on border communities, border security, and migrants, we urge your administration not to make any changes to Title 42 implementation until you are completely ready to execute and coordinate a comprehensive plan that ensures a secure, orderly, and humane process at the border.

Former acting Commissioner of Customs and Border Protection Mark Morgan blasted the idea of removing Title 42 as one that “defies logic and common sense.”

In an interview with The National Desk, he explained how it would overload an already taxed system.

“The facilities are already dangerously overcrowded,” Morgan said. “And when we start seeing those numbers, which we’ve already started to see flow in, it’s going to be crushing. There’s going to be nothing for them to be able to do except release individuals as fast as possible. Many of these individuals we’re not going to know anything about. We are not going to know who they are. It’s simply going to endanger America, and it’s going to cost lives.”

The border crisis is getting worse, not better. One of the primary jobs of the federal government is to maintain the border and uphold the laws that the American people have put in place to do so.

What we have now is a border that in a short amount of time has become a sieve and an administration apparently unwilling to change course or stand up to the most extreme left-wing activists.

It’s the same tack we’ve seen from Democrats and the “defund the police” movement. Again and again they cave to the most extreme voices on the left and the country pays the consequences.

Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the url or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.

When ‘Emperors’ Preaching ESG Purport to Represent Millions of Us, a Lot Can Go Wrong

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The misappropriation of the economic freedom of millions of mom-and-pop investors by BlackRock Inc. CEO Larry Fink has unintended consequences.

“We have a new bunch of emperors, and they’re the people who vote the shares in the index funds,” Charlie Munger, business partner of philanthropist Warren Buffett and a big proponent of index fund investing, recently said.

“I think the world of Larry Fink, but I’m not sure I want him to be my emperor,” Munger said.

Fink runs BlackRock, a leading investment management company that sells stock index funds to investors. BlackRock currently holds many trillions of dollars in corporate stocks in these index funds.

Fink is powerful. He has benefited perhaps more than anyone else from the prevalence of index fund investing. He also is a big proponent of what is called Environmental, Social, Governance investing, or ESG.

Here’s how it works: Millions of investors buy a BlackRock index fund because they basically want to own the stock index. Instead of being owners of one company or a few companies, when they buy the iShares S&P 500 Index Fund, for example, they own a fraction of every single stock in the S&P 500, in the same percentage in the stock index at the time they buy.

Index funds earn the return of the index they represent; the return on an index fund investment, then, is equivalent to the return of the stock index itself for however long an investor owns it before subtracting BlackRock’s management fees.

BlackRock in turn buys shares of every company in the index in proportion to the money its customers spend on its index funds. The investment management giant then sells them when its customers sell the index funds, to pay the customer.

The stock market rises over the long run, so index funds are a safer investment than speculating on stocks because individual stocks frequently underperform their indexes and because individual companies can go bankrupt, wiping out investments.

When millions of people buy trillions of dollars of BlackRock’s index funds, the company ends up holding in its accounts an equivalent amount of every stock in the stock index. This is called passive investing, as opposed to active investing, because no one is picking certain stocks as investments on which to earn a gain; instead, investors are simply buying or selling every stock in an index.

As of Dec. 31, 2021, Blackrock held an amount equal to over 28% of the U.S. gross domestic product in passive investments in the company’s accounts for its index fund holders.

Nothing is wrong with index funds. Investments in index funds mimic the returns of the overall stock market because by acquiring an index fund, one owns a tiny fraction of every company in a stock index, such as the S&P 500, or the MSCI World Index of global stocks.

A problem exists, however, with Fink, who votes the stock holdings in BlackRock’s index funds at shareholder meetings as if he is the investor who owns many trillions of dollars of stocks—which he is not.

As of Dec. 31, according to BlackRock’s annual report, Fink, through his company’s index funds, was voting the shares of $6.45 trillion in stock.

Talking heads on television and in the financial press, along with finance professors in colleges and universities, long have preached the merits of index fund investing based on a theory called the efficient-market hypothesis. That theory says that the value of a stock at a given time is closely reflected in its current stock price, making it unfeasible for someone to consistently beat the stock market index by picking individual stocks.

The efficient-market hypothesis is true for the average investor. The success of Wall Street titans such as Buffett and Carl Icahn disproves it as the one-size-fits-all, best option for everyone, as does the success of an untold number of anonymous investors who have made large fortunes but aren’t included in the research findings on the returns of mutual funds.  But that is beside the point.

New York Post columnist Charlie Gasparino recently explained what Fink’s ESG advocacy means, writing that the BlackRock CEO

is known for pushing for something called stakeholder capitalism (which I’ve criticized)—a squishy concept in which corporations look to better the human race as opposed to churning out profits for shareholders. And his embrace of some woke policies through the investment fad known as ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) standards.

In its 2020 annual report, BlackRock states:

We invest our clients’ money in companies of all types and sizes, in every region of the world. These investments provide capital for companies to grow and create jobs, which, in turn, enables economies and societies to prosper. We use our voice as shareholders to urge companies to focus on important issues that will also impact the value of their investments, like climate change, the fair treatment of workers and equality. We are also working through the BlackRock Foundation to expand financial security for low income groups who face barriers to economic participation and may be vulnerable to disruption from climate change.

That focus on climate change is why BlackRock, as ExxonMobil’s second-biggest shareholder, sided with a group of shareholders who owned just 0.02% of ExxonMobil in voting to replace board members with new ones who believe that:

ExxonMobil’s lack of any serious diversification efforts and aggressive spending predicated on heavy long-term oil and gas demand for decades to come, risks massive continued long-term value destruction in a world intent on reducing all emissions …

Is it really for Fink, commanding the votes of millions of shares purchased by other investors, to decide whether a large oil company should reduce its investments in oil and gas that people rely on to survive?

What a bully tactic by a bully who is voting his agenda with billions of dollars of shareholders’ voting rights purchased by others who bought Fink’s index funds. They did so to earn a return on their investment portfolio equal to that of the overall stock market, not so that Fink could pretend he was them at shareholders meetings of virtually every company in the world and vote their shares.

Such interference by Fink and other index fund company chief executives because they presume to know what is good for the planet can have unintended and drastic consequences.

Right now, the average cost of gasoline is spiraling upward. And big oil and gas companies have not been investing in new exploration in recent years, partly because Fink, other ESG advocates, and now President Joe Biden’s administration have been lurking over their shoulders and stigmatizing the fuel we all need to drive our cars and heat our homes.

These players have created a large deal of uncertainty about what the future will be for energy exploration and drilling. In the case of Biden, he put huge restrictions on oil and gas drilling on his first day in office and also canceled the Keystone XL pipeline.

BlackRock’s claim in its annual report that “low income groups . . . may be vulnerable to disruption from climate change” is not worth the paper it is printed on. High gasoline prices hurt the poor the most, and those in cold climates sometimes freeze to death if they cannot live in heated homes, as happened recently in Ukraine.

There is nothing wrong with index funds. Larry Fink is not millions of people who hold index funds, though. Their interests vary widely and are not somehow lined up together, much less with his interests.

Fink and the CEOs at other companies that sell index funds shouldn’t vote trillions of dollars of index fund shareholdings at every meeting of shareholders in the world. They should save the planet in some other way.

By Patrick Tyrell on The Daily Signal

Florida Law Is Pro-Freedom, Not Anti-LGBTQ

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The distorted rhetoric—should I say lies?—labeling Florida’s legislation about parental rights in public schools as “Don’t say gay” demonstrates the hypocrisy of LGBTQ activism.

I say hypocrisy because this movement has always showcased itself as being about freedom, rights, and social justice.

But the reality is that LGBTQ activism is not at all about freedom and rights. It is about advancing its particular agenda at the expense of alternative ways of viewing the world.

The Florida legislation, which defines itself at the outset as about parental rights, has 163 lines, out of which a total of five address sex education.

Those few lines simply say that “instruction” in “sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.”

That’s it. Anyone who wants to publicize this as “Don’t say gay” should also publicize it as saying “Don’t say straight.”

Because that’s what it’s about. Removing discussion about sexual orientation from classrooms of toddlers.

But for LGBTQ activists, anything not actively promoting their agenda is taken as opposition. Therefore, for them, freedom, and the tolerance and neutrality that it requires, is by definition anti-LGBTQ.

As a Christian, my view is that denial of the reality of man and woman, sexual activity outside the framework of traditional marriage, is sinful and destructive behavior.

But I recognize, as do most Christian parents with children in public schools, that our biblical point of view is not going to show up in public schools.

America is a diverse country with many points of view.

I recognize that keeping public schools neutral regarding sex education is the only possible approach in a heterogeneous diverse country.

When the state of Florida enacts legislation to keep discussion about sexual orientation out of toddlers’ classrooms, I don’t see this as anti-LGBTQ or anti-Christian, but pro-freedom.

The headline of an opinion piece in USA Today reads: “Young people in Florida are being told their sexuality or gender identity is so wrong it can’t even be mentioned.”

No. Young people in Florida are being told that they live in a free, diverse country. So, matters of sexuality should be handled by parents at home, and public schools should teach kids how to read and do math.

It helps these young people to become responsible adults, respectful of others with different opinions.

A number of years ago, I mentioned in a TV interview that I had stayed in a hotel that, along with other flags, was flying an LGBTQ rainbow flag. I said that the rainbow flag offended me as a Christian woman as the Confederate flag offends me as a black woman.

My office in Washington was shut down by the tsunami of threatening calls that this comment evoked. And I had to move out of my home because of threats.

I didn’t say these folks should not be allowed to live as they choose. I said, essentially, that just as hotels have removed the Bibles that we used to find in hotel rooms, this shouldn’t be replaced by flying the rainbow flag.

I think this is a big factor on why school choice is only promoted on the right.

Those on the left are opposed because they know that school choice takes away their platform for promoting their social agenda in public schools.

Look at the websites of the two big teachers unions—the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Both promote actively the LGBTQ agenda.

The new Florida law was passed to deal with this problem. Public schools should provide a platform to educate children with knowledge and skills to succeed in a free country. Other agendas should be left to parents at home.

By Star Parker

Repent

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Luke 13:1-5 At that time, some people came and reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. And He responded to them, “Do you think these Galileans were more sinful than all the other Galileans because they suffered these things? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as well. Or those eighteen that the tower in Siloam fell on and killed, do you think they were more sinful than all the other people who live in Jerusalem? No I tell; but unless you repent, you shall all perish as well.” 

Many Will be Deceived

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Matthew 24:3-5 While He was sitting on the Mount of Olives, the disciples approached Him privately and said “Tell us, when will these things happen? And what is the sign of your coming and the end of the age?” Jesus replied to them: “Watch out that no one deceives you. For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Messiah,’ and they will deceive many.

Don't be one of those that are deceived, open that Bible, pray and ask Him to open His word to you so that you are not deceived.