Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be windy with morning snow and a high of 21. Sunrise is 7:18 and sunset is 4:55, for 9 hours, 37 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 42.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

There is a Lakes Advisory Committee meeting at 4:30 PM and the Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1968, the Apollo Program‘s Apollo 5 lifts off carrying the first lunar module into space:

Once the craft reached orbit and the LM separated from the S-IVB booster, the program of orbital testing began, but a planned burn was aborted automatically when the Apollo Guidance Computer detected the craft was not going as fast as planned. Flight Director Gene Kranz and his team at Mission Control in Houston quickly decided on an alternate mission, during which the mission’s goals of testing LM-1 were accomplished. The mission was successful enough that a contemplated second uncrewed mission to test the LM was cancelled, advancing NASA‘s plans to land an astronaut on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

For today, a few points: national, state, and local. In February, I’ll split national topics into a new site, with state and local topics staying here at FREE WHITEWATER. Regrettably, national topics may intrude into Whitewater’s life for the worst of reasons (as they have in the past), and so one ordinary person’s preferred distinctions may understandably again yield to imposed circumstances.

In Whitewater, the national has become local. National attention over immigration in Whitewater is at best an interference with the natural growth and development of this city, and at worst would be an inhumane displacement that no majority within this city has (or ever will) support¹.

A campaign of shock and awe only works on those who are susceptible of being shocked and awed². Anyone who watched the 2024 presidential campaign would have expected all of this. Expectation and patient preparation in reply to what one heard and saw leaves one neither shocked nor awed. All of this was easily predictable.

The particular demands of national, state, or local governments should not, and must not, trump fundamental individual liberties. That’s a genuine libertarian view; no one should expect anything different from a genuine libertarian.

All populism, whether of the left (Revolutionary France) or right (America today), assumes strength in its members and weakness in its opponents. Sometimes that’s true, but other times false. Populists, soaked in their own fervor, cannot discern the character of others until conflict begins. Roosevelt was right of the American commitment to liberal democratic traditions, that no one should mistake out kindness for weakness.

There’s much to dispute and doubt, from this libertarian’s viewpoint, with the views of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. On some fundamentals, however, she’s right, as with her contention that those within the American tradition should reject both the Confederates and the Nazis. No one is lawfully required to reject those malevolent ideologies, yet failure to do so places one outside the liberal democratic³ paradigm. (Her manner of presentation is skillful, although of a style from the generation after my own. Ocasio-Cortez is our children’s age, and she speaks in the easy, familiar manner of a social media generation.)

Of course Elon Musk’s gestures (twice) at an inauguration event were Nazi sieg heil salutes. He knew what he was doing, and people of normal discernment knew what they saw. He likely practiced in front of a mirror, and crafted an implausible denial beforehand. Musk, a supporter of Germany’s racist AfD party, wouldn’t be the first fascist to practice in front of a mirror.

Wisconsin has now joined other states in opposing Trump’s attempt to rewrite through a mere executive order the United States Constitution’s express provision of birthright citizenship:

President Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday that will end automatic citizenship for children whose parents are foreign nationals, whether they’re here legally or not.

On Tuesday, a coalition of 18 states sued Trump and federal agencies in U.S. District Court in Massachussetts, claiming the order violates the Constitution. The ACLU filed a separate legal challenge in New Hampshire on behalf of immigrant advocacy organizations on similar grounds.

It would, they said, upend a foundational aspect of the United States of America: that anyone born here is from here.

The executive order, called “Protecting the Value and Meaning of American Citizenship, would prevent federal agencies from issuing Social Security cards, passports or welfare benefits to U.S.-born children in a sweeping reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the United States.

….

Its first sentence sums up the citizenship right guaranteed at birth: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

A court case soon tested whether the amendment also afforded birthright citizenship to children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents. In United States v. Wong Kim Ark, a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents challenged the government’s claim that he wasn’t a citizen.

The Supreme Court decided in 1898 that “children born in the U.S. to immigrant parents are citizens, regardless of their parents’ immigration status,” according to the American Immigration Council.

See Lauren Villagran, Trump executive order restricts birthright citizenship; states sue, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, January 21, 2025.

Trump’s birthright order — by which he alone presumptuously claims to rewrite the law — is also incoherent as an attempt to do so. Josh Marshall explains:

But if you accept that place of birth isn’t controlling, everyone’s citizenship becomes at least uncertain or not clearly documented — and for many whose parents or grandparents immigrated, the uncertainty becomes very real. If any court takes this seriously, they’ll have to untangle that and possibly end up with tens of millions of Americans who may need to prove that they’re actually citizens. Even if you accept the false claim that birthright citizenship can be abolished by anything other than a constitutional amendment, there’s no way that everyone’s citizenship — and I mean everyone’s — will now rest going forward on the claims made in an executive order.

See Josh Marshall, Day Two, Talking Points Memo, January 21, 2025.

Finally, a few remarks about the prayer service at the National Cathedral yesterday. (The National Cathedral is a private Episcopal church in Washington, D.C. The name national does not mean public ownership.) The Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, speaking from the pulpit, addressed Trump and others in attendance. She called for mercy (a virtue) toward gays, lesbians, and migrants. Trump, predictably, did not like these remarks, and wants an apology.

He deserves nothing of the kind. He’s weak, easily insulted by gentle words, and lashes out in response to his own narcissistic injury.

Some Americans, I included among them, worship with Episcopal congregations much like the one at the National Cathedral⁴. Our beliefs don’t come from Trump, won’t yield to Trump, or any of the populists who insist that God is as they last learned about Him at a political rally.

One more point about these loud and proud nativists: they lack long-term memories. One will hear that they’ve been here for a few generations, and so that entitles them to precedence. Someone else could say that his families on both sides, of German & French ancestry, came to this continent before the Revolution, and so he should have precedence⁵. Then again, someone could say that his forebears came to this continent in bondage even earlier. Finally, another person could rightly say that his forebears were here thousands of years earlier.

It is enough that people are here now as our neighbors.

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1. As I discussed with residents last night in multiple conversations, no one in this city — other than residents who may be personally affected — wants national immigration policy to disrupt life in this city less than I do. There’s only loss in all of this. ↩︎
2. As a military strategy, shock and awe is overrated. ↩︎
3. Honest to goodness, for the thousandth time, the liberal democratic paradigm describes preservation of individual rights (liberal) in a society of majority decision (democratic). It doesn’t mean liberal as a partisan affiliation. Both, not either. ↩︎
4. Not all Episcopal parishes are the same, in liturgy or political affiliation of members. There are probably about four or five different forms of worship among Episcopal congregations, and their membership runs from progressive to conservative depending on the community. In my case, the congregation with whom I worship is Anglo-Catholic in liturgy and progressive in members’ secular views (more progressive than mine — free markets are both moral and efficient). ↩︎
5. I’m not ignorant or selfish enough to advance this claim this: all these ancestral claims strike me as primitive. My point is only that the nativists aren’t special as they imagine themselves to be. None of us is special in a nativist way. ↩︎