Good morning.
Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of 53. Sunrise is 7:07, and sunset is 6:13, for 11 hours, 5 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous, with 87.9 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Planning & Architectural Review Commission meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1947, Chuck Yeager becomes the first person to exceed the speed of sound.
Whitewater is a beautiful city, there is no better place to live, and I hope that more people of all kinds would join us here.
Some weeks ago, Steve Cortes, a rightwing nativist from far away, mentioned online that he had visited Whitewater.
I thought at the time: what would this tumbledown1 nativist have to contribute to Whitewater?
Well, now we know: a seventeen-minute video entitled Heartland Invasion: Cortes Investigates.
This is the Curious Case of the Invasion that Didn’t Bark in the Night.
In Arthur Conan Doyle’s story from his Sherlock Holmes series, Silver Blaze2, Holmes discerns a critical clue in the disappearance of racehorse Silver Blaze:
[Inspector Gregory] “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
[Sherlock Holmes] “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
[Gregory] “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
[Holmes] “That was the curious incident,” remarked Sherlock Holmes.
The dog’s silence tells Holmes something significant about the scene.
Cortes, in seventeen minutes3, describes Whitewater’s situation as “turned upside down by globalism,” and that Whitewater might as well be “on banks of the freaking Rio Grande River,” etc.
If all this were true, as an invasion, more than one woman in her out-of-city house, two men at a picnic table, and one man in a bar would have been visible in protest for these many years. That hasn’t happened here.
One would have to believe that Whitewater’s fifteen-thousand residents, excited and demonstrative over Warhawks and Packers, over the Fourth of July and dozens of community gatherings, didn’t care enough about their own physical safety for several years.
The concern about whether the police force is overworked (fair enough, that can be fixed with hiring) is separate from the lie that Whitewater is dangerous place from immigrants (it’s not). The serious misunderstanding was thinking that entreaties as crafted at the time to increase staffing would not be exploited by out-of-the-city nativists exaggerating and lying about dangers from newcomers4.
As one began, so one concludes: Whitewater is a beautiful city, there is no better place to live, and I hope that more people of all kinds would join us here.
A palate cleanser with something better than Cortes will ever produce. Silver Blaze: A Classic Sherlock Holmes Mystery – Full Audiobook:
- Cortes’s career arc points downward: CNBC, Fox, Newsmax, Trumpist, then a DeSantis man, then Trump again when DeSantis went bust, and now a would-be leader of a laughable ‘labor group’ that has only a few as members. ↩︎
- Silver Blaze is one the of best of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries. ↩︎
- The video is lightweight and overwrought. An editorial in WhitewaterWise aptly describes it as a political infomercial rather than a documentary. Yes, certainly so. See WhitewaterWise Our Take: You are what you digest; Left or right, it’s important to consume with clarity. ↩︎
- On the Johnson-Steil press conference see The Local Press Conference that Was Neither Local Nor a Press Conference. On advice from FREE WHITEWATER to consider staffing after the 2024 election to avoid politicization (posted 12.4.23) see More on the 11.21 Council Session (“There’s sure to be a desire, from city staff and the department, to address all of this now. Choosing among justifications, however, has political implications. How to present a referendum is a matter that can be addressed when the city is closer to a vote (likely spring 2025). 2025 may seem close, but there’s plenty of time.”) There should have been no doubt whatever that the residents of this city would and will support a referendum for additional officers. I have been a sometime critic of past policing in this city, and yet I would support (and can see that my fellow residents would support) a staffing referendum to boost headcount. See also In Support of Whitewater’s Fire & EMS Referendum and Fire & Rescue, Whitewater’s Most Important Public Policy Accomplishment of the Last Generation. ↩︎
Hello from Campus.
This is very shrewd. A genuine physical invasion would have produced more concern than this from people who live here. The Cortes video is really thin gruel.
That’s it? He’s standing safe in town talking about mayhem.
It is not the case that we are all reckless except for these people on the video.
Are you going to believe him or your own lying eyes?
The Sherlock Holmes story is cleverly deployed.
Nice work!
Thanks very much. The video is ill-conceived and underwhelming, where ill-conceived and underwhelming mean wildly distorted. Daily activities here have not only continued but flourished. Adding a bit more: Silver Blaze is a fine story. Enjoyable and memorable.
best part is how you begin and end with “Whitewater is a beautiful city, there is no better place to live, and I hope that more people of all kinds would join us here”
lots of good things are happening in whitewater.
Truly and truly: no better place to live.
Turning the temperature up high was a bad idea. I like the plan in the footnote better than what has happened with all the antimigrant rhetoric we got.
What’s done is done; it’s the best we can hope that there’s a consistent and broad rejection of nativism.
In last year we have been in the news huge number of times over immigrants. You’re completely right that the external focus does not match the internal concern. We are not a war zone or an invaded town. But the publicity that shines on us treats it like that.
It’s a controversy this city and her residents, immigrants and all others, did not deserve.
Look at the pattern, they don’t like students except for rent and they don’t like immigrants. Landlords are MAGA. It’s a caveman clique holding Whitewater back.