‘Defense may provide support for the counterdrug activities [including] Construction of roads and fences … to block drug smuggling corridors across international boundaries…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) At a House Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday, Defense Under Secretary John Rood dropped a bombshell in response to questions from Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ga., confirming that U.S. Code permits military support for some civilian activities without requiring a “state of emergency.”

That includes military support for fences and other barriers to combat drug smuggling and organized crime.

In 10 U.S. Code Ch. 15, under “Military Support for Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies” it says, in §284, “The Secretary of Defense may provide support for the counterdrug activities or activities to counter transnational organized crime [including] Construction of roads and fences and installation of lighting to block drug smuggling corridors across international boundaries of the United States (subsection b-7).”

Of course, some may argue that a fence and a wall are two different things—Trump has indicated he would be OK with either so long as it does the job—but Brooks said at the hearing that the semantics didn’t apply.

“If you look it up in the dictionary the word fence includes the word barrier, and the word barrier includes ‘walls made of a wide variety of different materials,'” Brooks said.

Rood said that while the section of code had never before been used to deploy military, Brooks was correct that it would include use for counter-drug barriers.

Brooks then asked if a “national emergency” were needed, to which Rood replied no, and whether the U.S. military would obey such an order if President Donald Trump were to instruct them to build the wall.

“ If we judge it to be a lawful order, yes sir,” Rood said. “And I assume it would be.”

Despite past support, increasingly polarized Democrats have waged a resistance campaign against the wall for largely symbolic reasons to block Trump from fulfilling a major campaign promise.

However, some critics, including Trump, have speculated that illegal immigration also benefits the Left, which hopes a shifting demographic and cultural landscape will, in coming years, entrench its electoral dominance.

Supporters of the wall have countered that whatever the reasons for wanting open borders, they create a considerable public-safety hazard by promoting drug- and human trafficking, and other criminal activity.

….however, for strictly political reasons and because they have been pulled so far left, do NOT want Border Security. They want Open Borders for anyone to come in. This brings large scale crime and disease. Our Southern Border is now Secure and will remain that way…….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 11, 2018

As the clock ticks toward the mid-February expiration of a stop-gap funding measure that last week reopened several government offices following a monthlong partial shutdown, Trump had previously signaled his intention to use the military by declaring a national emergency.

In response, Democrats, including Armed Services chair Adam Smith, D-Wash., had threatened court challenges and legislation that zeroed in on the questions of whether the current border crisis qualified as an emergency.

However, the Defense Department’s interpretation of the code may deflate plans for a costly and time-consuming legal battle that would hinder Trump’s executive order through injunction, instead forcing House Democrats to reach some form of compromise.

As of Friday, numbers from House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., indicated that about a quarter of Democrats signaled some support for a border barrier.

Placed in the indefensible position of opposing national defense, some Democrats have sought to appear open to compromise by supporting a “technological wall,” but while that may be an important component of border security, it would certainly be more costly and less effective in the long run than a physical barrier.

Trump will have yet another opportunity to make his case publicly next Tuesday, when he delivers his State of the Union address before Congress, after the shutdown prompted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., to withdraw an earlier invitation.

‘Blackface is only a glimpse of a larger issue…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Since the 2008 election of President Barack Obama was said to have ushered in America’s post-racial era, perceptions of racial division and conflict, far from vanishing, have undergone complex, often Orwellian transformations.

Where once we celebrated a “melting pot” of diversity, the term “melting pot” may now be considered a micro-aggression intent on belittling identity-rights crusaders.

Even the most progressive of network news anchors is unsafe for having the audacity to suggest that immigrants might win more popular support by trying to assimilate.

And, with the advent of “intersectionality,” a liberal, Hollywood Latina can be destroyed by accusations of racism simply for ignoring black disparities while calling on more opportunities for Latinx actors.

It is within this context that Rashaad Thomas, a restaurant patron in Phoenix, Arizona, recently was triggered upon seeing an old photograph of coal miners, covered in soot, enjoying a pint after work.

Although Thomas’s opinion piece, published on The Arizona Republic‘s website, does not explicitly state the author’s race, it implied that he identifies as black.

“Who determines what’s offensive?” Thomas wrote. “For me, the coal miners disappeared and … [one of] the most racist propaganda films ever, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) surfaces, in which white actors appeared in blackface.”

Thomas acknowledged that there was a correct answer—that fact points to the context of the photograph not being racist originally. Indeed, online research suggests that the miners pictured were not even American but were Welsh workers, possibly during a union strike.

But Thomas maintained that perception was key. More specifically, his perception.

“At the downtown Phoenix restaurant, my concern that the photograph of men in blackface [i.e. the photograph of the coal miners —ed.] was a threat to me and my face and voice were ignored,” Thomas said. “A business’ photograph of men with blackened faces culturally says to me, ‘Whites Only.’ It says people like me are not welcome.”

Revealing himself as an art patron and frequenter of local galleries, Thomas waxed philosophical about the nature of art, something many contemporary artists have said is designed to provoke and challenge people’s perceptions.

Viewed through Thomas’s cultural lense, however, art can reveal only one thing: more racism. Regardless of its intended purpose, a broader social message must needs be superimposed on even the chintziest of wall décor.

“Viewers cannot determine the intention of an artist’s work,” Thomas said. “Art also exposes society’s blind spots. Blackface is only a glimpse of a larger issue. The larger issue is the lack of representation of marginalized people and their voices in Phoenix.”

That issue is one the entire nation has grappled with recently while considering not just art, but also its historical legacy. Many of the Confederate monuments erected by groups such as the Daughters of the Confederacy in a time of active reconciliation, 50 years after the Civil War, are now being reassessed.

Prior to the Obama era, the consensus was that historical impact of such monuments and symbols outweighed the calls to raze and eradicate them. Since then, however, a nationwide initiative to recast and recontextualize its history has opened up entirely different debates, such as the one Thomas alluded to. While doing little to heal and unify, they have succeeded in pushing racial awareness to the forefront.

In Charlottesville, Virginia, efforts to remove monuments and rename two parks honoring Confederate generals spawned two days of violent conflict, directly resulting in the death of one local activist and indirectly leading to two others. The monuments remained standing after court injunctions said the city lacked the necessary authority.

In North Carolina, on the other hand, mobs gathered in 2017 and 2018 to forcibly tear down Confederate statues in the cities of Durham and Chapel Hill, respectively.

A Durham task force recently proposed that the mangled remains of its monument be displayed as-is in a nearby municipal building with a placard commemorating not their history but their destruction.

Opponents said it was a celebration of lawlessness and lynch-mob mentality. “The crumpled metal, like some kind of perverse trophy for illegal behavior, will be ‘contextualized’ with historical inaccuracies and lies about its meaning and origin.”

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While the fate of Chapel Hill’s “Silent Sam” monument remains undetermined, students at the University of North Carolina protested plans to house it on campus. The controversy led the school’s chancellor to unexpectedly announce her resignation earlier in January.

Back in Phoenix, however, far removed from the blight of Civil War history, Thomas said even if the restaurant were to attempt to contextualize the image of the coal miners or otherwise offer justification for their inclusion of it on the wall, the effort would not be enough to placate him.

“The operators of that downtown restaurant can choose to take the photograph down, leave it up or create a title card with an intention statement,” he said. “No matter their decision, I think the photograph should be taken down—sacrificing one image for the greater good.”