FREE WHITEWATER

Nativism

Daily Bread for 3.17.25: Nativism Will Rationalize Anything for the Cause

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be windy with a high of 49. Sunrise is 7:02 and sunset is 7:04, for 12 hours, 1 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 90.4 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater School Board’s Policy Review Committee meets at 5:30 PM, and the full board goes into closed session shortly after 6 PM, returning into open session at 7 PM. Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1776, the British Army evacuates Boston, ending the Siege of Boston, after George Washington and Henry Knox place artillery in positions overlooking the city.


Lauren Villagran reports This Wisconsin man voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center:

Bradley Bartell and Camila Muñoz had a familiar small-town love story, before they collided with immigration politics.

They met through mutual friends, had a first date at the local steakhouse, married after two years and were saving to buy a house and have kids. Muñoz was already caring for Bartell’s now 12-year-old son as her own.

But last month, on their way home to Wisconsin after honeymooning in Puerto Rico, an immigration agent pulled Muñoz aside in the airport.

“Are you an American citizen?” asked the agent. She answered no, she wasn’t. She’s from Peru. But she and her husband had taken the legal steps so that one day she might get U.S. citizenship.

….

Before agents led her away, Muñoz pulled off her wedding ring, afraid it might get confiscated. She shoved it into her backpack and handed it to Bartell.

He shook as he watched her disappear. He thought, “What the f— do I do?”

Bartell, however, still supports Trump’s overall immigration policy, while his wife is held in detention:

The money the couple saved for a down payment on a home has evaporated into attorneys fees and savings to pay a bond for her release, if she’s given that chance.Both of them have been thinking a lot about Bartell’s vote for Trump.

“I knew they were cracking down,” he said. “I guess I didn’t know how it was going down.”

He imagined the administration would target people who snuck over the border and weren’t vetted.

But his wife, “they know who she is and where she came from,” he said. “They need to get the vetting done and not keep these people locked up. It doesn’t make any sense.”

See Lauren Villagran, This Wisconsin man voted for Trump. Now his wife sits in an ICE detention center, USA Today, March 16, 2025.

Take a Wisconsin nativist’s new bride, hold her detention in Louisiana (for four weeks so far), in a room with eighty others, and let him talk to her by phone now and again.

How does Bartell feel about all this?

“They need to get the vetting done.”

Bradley Bartell is still supportive of Trumpism, while futilely describing a vetting process that now means nothing to the second Trump Administration. Bartell might simply have said that he wants to see his wife again, and said no more. Instead, he endorsed the general deportation policy.

Nativism will rationalize anything for the cause.

Daily Bread for 1.22.25: National, State, and Local Topics

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.

___________

  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. ↩︎

Daily Bread for 1.21.25: The Executive Order on Realigning The United States Refugee Admissions Program

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will be sunny and cold with a high of 0. Sunrise is 7:19 and sunset is 4:54, for 9 hours, 35 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 51.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

The Whitewater Common Council meets at 6:30 PM.

On this day in 1968, a B-52 bomber crashes near Thule Air Base, contaminating the area after its nuclear payload ruptures. One of the four bombs remains unaccounted for after the cleanup operation is complete.


Whitewater has received considerable attention, mostly lies and scapegoating, for the arrival of immigrants into this community. Yesterday, via executive order, Whitewater received yet more. Our city received mention in Section 1, first paragraph:

Section 1.  Purpose.  Over the last 4 years, the United States has been inundated with record levels of migration, including through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program (USRAP).  Cities and small towns alike, from Charleroi, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Ohio, to Whitewater, Wisconsin, have seen significant influxes of migrants.  Even major urban centers such as New York City, Chicago, and Denver have sought Federal aid to manage the burden of new arrivals.  Some jurisdictions, like New York and Massachusetts, have even recently declared states of emergency because of increased migration.

There’s no surprise in this — I’ve an archive of hundreds of stories about Whitewater’s immigrants that I’ve collected methodically and patiently over these months. The archive is a partial one; it’s likely there have been thousands of stories, most of which repeated the same hysterical claim that this small town had somehow been invaded.

This national attention in a nativist media environment was predictable; Whitewater’s place in a 1.20.25 executive order, however ill-fitting, was predictable. The use of immigrants as a justification for staffing increases in Whitewater, when those staffing increases were justifiable regardless, was a fundamental failing. This libertarian blogger (and others) advised against this course, having denounced the so-called press conference that preceded it. We were ignored, not to our disadvantage, but the disadvantage of newcomers, and of the entire community.

One cannot be certain where this leads, although nativist scapegoating of Whitewater now set loose across an entire nation shows a momentum all its own.

Updated, afternoon of 1.21.25, see below memoranda from the City of Whitewater in English and Spanish in reply to the 1.20.25 federal executive order. So many years ago, FREE WHITEWATER expressly began after immigration controversies in this city. My own views on this matter have been clear since that beginning in 2007. They remain unchanged as they are by received tradition unchanging.

It’s likely an understatement that, given all possibilities, few today would want to be in our present, divided politics.

One acts in the present and on the margin. It is, in fairness to all, the best that anyone can do.

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Daily Bread for 5.2.24: Did Trump’s Waukesha Visit Include a Mention of Whitewater? No

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be cloudy with a high of 78. Sunrise is 5:45 and sunset 7:57 for 14h 12m 18s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 37.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 2000, President Clinton announces that accurate GPS access would no longer be restricted to the United States military.


Mr. Trump was in Waukesha yesterday.

Did Trump’s Wednesday visit include a mention of Whitewater (as his 4.2.24 Green Bay visit did)?

No. (The Republican National Committee press release announcing Trump’s Waukesha visit, however, did include an express reference to Whitewater. There was, therefore, reason to be attentive to his remarks.)

For now, Wisconsin’s rising nativist sentiment hasn’t brought yet another false, mendacious use of Whitewater’s conditions.

So much the better for this community that Mr. Trump kept the city’s name out of his remarks.

The state & national distortions of last fall & winter would prove slight as against state and national distortions this fall.


May 2024 Skywatching Tips from NASA:

Daily Bread for 5.1.24: Will Trump’s Waukesha Visit Include a Mention of Whitewater?

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 70. Sunrise is 5:46 and sunset 7:56 for 14h 09m 50s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 48.6 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

Whitewater’s Lakes Advisory Committee meets at 4 PM and the Whitewater Common Council meets at 6 PM.

On this day in 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the Asiatic Squadron of the United States Navy destroys the Pacific Squadron of the Spanish Navy after a seven-hour battle. Spain loses all seven of its ships, and 381 Spanish sailors die. There are no American vessel losses or combat deaths.


So, one reads that Mr. Trump will be in Waukesha today. Trump mentioned Whitewater by name while in Green Bay on 4.2.24. If he’s going to keep Whitewater in the headlines, another Wisconsin visit would be a prime opportunity for him to do so.

Will it prove true that Trump again uses Wisconsin’s Rising Nativist Sentiment [to] Keep Whitewater in the News?

Let’s see what happens.


Relocating bees from a Washington, D.C. backyard:

Daily Bread for 4.29.24: Wisconsin’s Rising Nativist Sentiment Will Keep Whitewater in the News

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 69. Sunrise is 5:49 and sunset 7:54 for 14h 04m 51s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 70.2 percent of its visible disk illuminated.

On this day in 1861, Maryland’s House of Delegates votes not to secede, but to remain in the Union.


A nativist position — immigrants out, migrants out, etc. — is easier to hold if one ignores the economic cost of anti-labor-market policies. ‘Get them out’ trips off the tongue; explaining the value of a free-labor market that has made America the most productive nation in all history takes longer. Rob Mentzer reports Central Wisconsin farmers: Immigration crackdown, trade war affect our business (‘Farmers say US trade, immigration policy choices have direct effects on Wisconsin businesses’):

On immigration, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has promised mass deportations of those living in the U.S. without legal status.

Those deportations, if carried out, would likely hit Wisconsin dairy farms hard. Dairy producers rely on immigrant labor, often from Mexico and South America, to operate. While many workers come here with legal status through temporary work visas, that is not the case for all of the workforce.

“It seems foolish to just pretend that foreign-born workers aren’t here and that we don’t need them,” said Hans Breitenmoser, whose dairy farm outside of Merrill has about 460 cows. “We need a means by which their presence here can be legal and sustainable, and also provide them with the dignity that they deserve.”

Recent public opinion polling has shown a turn in favor of the crackdown advocated by Trump. An April 25 survey by Axios and The Harris Poll found a majority of Americans said they would support mass deportations

In Wisconsin, the most recent Marquette Law School Poll found 30 percent of Wisconsinites said undocumented immigrants currently working in the U.S. should be deported — a figure that has nearly doubled in the last two years.

Closer to Whitewater: egg farmers, too, one can guess.

Whitewater, regrettably, may find herself under both a general and a specific immigration focus between now and November. The general focus will be simply as one Wisconsin city among many where an anti-immigration position gains adherents.

A specific focus, made possible because Whitewater’s officials themselves raised immigration as an issue, would name the city expressly in campaign literature and campaign stops. Whitewater has come to the attention of Mr. Trump (or, at least, his campaign aides):

“Does anybody know Whitewater after being inundated with Biden migrants? This tiny town now has a budget shortfall,” Trump said. “Their public schools are straining with hundreds of new migrant students who don’t speak a word of English.”

Earlier this year, Whitewater officials told WPR the influx of immigrants had strained city resources, but they were doing everything they could to help them become integrated into the community. Officials believe the migrants started arriving in early 2022, and didn’t arrive all at once.

Here’s the relationship between general polling and Whitewater as a specific reference: as statewide and national polls show increasing nativist sentiment, then Whitewater will likely be a convenient topic (however misused and falsely described) in statewide and national conversations this fall.


Drone video shows aftermath of deadly Oklahoma tornadoes:

Daily Bread for 9.25.22: Putin Rigs the Vote

Good morning. Sunday in Whitewater will be windy with afternoon thundershowers and a high of 65. Sunrise is 6:46 AM and sunset 6:45 PM for 11h 59m 24s of daytime. The moon is new with 0.1% of its visible disk illuminated.   On this day in 1237, England and Scotland sign the Treaty of York, establishing…

Daily Bread for 5.16.22: Nativism as Intellectual Sloth

Good morning. Monday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 74.  Sunrise is 5:29 AM and sunset 8:12 PM for 14h 42m 29s of daytime.  The moon is full with 99.8% of its visible disk illuminated. wp-svg-icons icon=”checkbox-partial” wrap=”I”] Whitewater’s Library Board meets at 6:30 PM. On this day in 1868,  the United States Senate fails…