RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Barack Obama said Thursday that despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s tie vote, which essentially blocks his immigration plan, the millions of illegal immigrants that he sought to make legal with his executive action will remain a low priority for deportation by his administration.

“Enforcement priorities developed by my administration are not affected by this ruling. This means that the people who might have benefited from the expanded deferred action policies – long-term residents raising children who are Americans or legal residents – they will remain low priorities for enforcement. As long as you have not committed a crime, our limited immigration enforcement resources are not focused on you,” he said.

The tie vote leaves in place the ruling of the federal appeals court in New Orleans, which said the administration lacked the authority to shield up to 4 million immigrants from deportation and allow them to obtain work permits without congressional approval, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

Obama said the decision “is frustrating to those who seek to grow our economy and bring a rationality to our immigration system and to allow people to come out of the shadows and lift this perpetual cloud on them.”

“For more than two decades now, our immigration system – everybody acknowledges – has been broken, and the fact that the Supreme Court wasn’t able to issue a decision today doesn’t just set this system back even further, it takes us further from the country we aspire to be,” the president said.

Obama said that since Congress was unable to pass commonsense comprehensive immigration reform, he was “left with little choice but to take steps within my existing authority to make our immigration system smarter, fairer, and more just.”

“Four years ago, we announced that those who are our lowest priorities for enforcement – diligent, patriotic, young Dreamers, who grew up pledging allegiance to our flag should be able to apply to work here and study here and pay their taxes here. More than 730,000 lives have been changed as a result,” he said.

We don’t have an adult political system. What we do have is a political system in which childish tactics are used to play childish games with adult consequences. As described by Dr. Berne in Games People Play, “games” are dysfunctional strategies that can be used by adults to elicit childish or parental responses. Childish strategies shift responsibility to the “parent” while still claiming power. An adult who acts like a child gets to control what happens without being responsible for it.

(This article uses a very loose adaptation of Berne’s Games People Play as a model.)

When the left shifted from a worker’s movement to a youth movement because dissatisfaction was more likely to be found in the children of the middle and upper classes than among workers, protest strategies often became childish. The classic protesters were self-consciously juvenile outraging sensibilities so to force their establishment opponents to play the role of the sanctimonious parent while they reveled in being the liberated children. “Outrage” is a game that children learn to play at an early age. Some adults never stop playing it, at parties or at family reunions.

The modern campus crybully movement doesn’t seek to outrage sensibilities by being provocative. Instead it’s playing an even more immature childish game. The Yale protest over “offensive” Halloween costumes was the perfect example as a student screamed, “It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students who live in Silliman.” This is the “Bad Parent” game.

Protesters, whether on campus or at #BlackLivesMatter events scream about their pain and how neglected they are. They claim to be traumatized, exhausted, in fear of their lives and unable to go about their daily business because the adults aren’t taking good care of them. They’re bad parents.

The classic protesters were playing children outraging parental sensibilities. The modern protesters claim to be abused children who need safe spaces and protection from bullying. They demand the right to be children while everyone must adopt the role of parents and coddle them. Tears, outbursts and tantrums glorified as “die ins” in which everyone lies on the floor reinforce their childish case.

The “Crybully” is a perfect example of adults using childish behavior to achieve their demands while forcing their opponents into a parental mode. The protesters openly disavow responsibility for their own behavior and demand that administrators, authorities and society stop being bad parents.

“Bad Parent” is a further regression to childhood than “Outrage”. Its origins go back directly to the coddled baby. Crybullies achieve their political goals using a childish strategies in which they use power while claiming to be powerless and demand that those who have power do what they want.

There are two ways to counter this protest style. The adult approach is to insist that the protesters are adults and must be responsible. Rather than falling into the parental style which reproves and plays into the psychodrama, the adult style is to reject the entire dynamic and hold them responsible.

The more familiar way is to meet them on a childish level by taunting and ridiculing their childishness. This can be emotionally satisfying. But it plays into the psychodrama, riling up the crybullies to further cries that they are being picked on. The authorities are pressured to stop being “bad parents” and protect them. Enough taunting may lead the crybullies to overplay their hand, but it is at least as likely to lead to crackdowns on free speech. This already occurred on Twitter.

In September 2014, members of Congress were informed that disgraced former Homeland Security adviser Mohamed Elibiary was being relieved of his duties after a long series of controversies, including the fact that his tweets cheering the inevitability of an Islamic caliphate were used by ISIS supporters for recruiting purposes.

Now Elibiary has gone after Egypt’s Coptic Christian community — again — after a prominent Coptic businessman expressed support for Donald Trump. Elibiary ominously warned in a tweet today that such support would be “not good 4 Copts in Egypt.”

“They should change their dinner’s name then from Coptic Solidarity 2 Coptic Fascism. Trump’ll lose in Nov inshallah. https://twitter.com/walidphares/status/746135994232016896 …

“#PT Where’s wisdom in most prominent #Egypt’n Copt endorsing most anti-Islam Pres candidate in US history? That’s not good 4 Copts in Egypt”

This is not the first time that Elibiary has attacked the persecuted Coptic Christian community.

In September 2013, Elibiary went after the Coptic Christian community for nurturing anti-Islam and anti-Muslim sentiment just a month after Muslim Brotherhood cadres had burned down 70+ Coptic churches in Egypt:

There’s an underappreciated side to the now-infamous New York Times Magazine story about Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s deputy national security advisor for strategic communications. As shallow and self-important as Rhodes comes across in the article, he clearly knows his audience. “The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Rhodes said. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.” Rhodes, like much of the media he spins, is a well-educated member of the upper middle class. He is a product of the same progressive cultural and ideological milieu, and he thus has keen instincts for what he can get away with—and no shame about revealing it.

Rhodes has good reason for such confidence. Surveying America’s elite liberal arts institutions, with a focus on Oberlin College, The New Yorker’s Nathan Heller illustrates just how unhinged most institutions of higher education have become. Schools like Oberlin have for decades rejected the tenets on which they were founded—namely, that exposing young minds to the Western canon would teach them to think critically and yield productive, well-rounded members of society. Instead, Oberlin and many other once-prestigious schools have become cauldrons of radical leftism. Heller describes students who simply refuse to talk with classmates of other races; scholarship students who view the same college that provides them with free world-class educational opportunities as a “tool of capitalist oppression”; and students who feel they are being oppressed because their classwork distracts them from social activism.

Heller’s account confirms what critics of campus environments have been chronicling for years: that “trigger” warnings must be slapped even on the greatest books to protect students from ideas that might upset them, and that “identity” is treated as a kind of knowledge in itself—classic literature, not so much. Students at many of today’s leading institutions no longer study the classics. What do dead white males know about microaggression or cultural appropriation, anyway? At Stanford University, students recently voted down an initiative to institute a two-quarter Western Civilization requirement for undergraduates. Today’s academy replaces the knowledge and wisdom gleaned from Plato, Aristotle, and Herodotus with political correctness, multiculturalism, and infantilization—to devastating effect.

Supposedly liberal and tolerant campuses create “safe spaces” limited to certain identity groups and those of a certain ideological inclination. In reality, safe spaces are safe only from the diversity their inhabitants claim to cherish. Activist students decry institutions based in “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy,” as one group of aggrieved black students at Oberlin described it. One can’t escape the impression that liberal arts schools are more focused on coddling the next generation of community-organizing social-justice warriors than on educating them.