FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Of course John's my favorite Beatle,
but George is close behind.
•  I'm unlocking another edition of my newsletter Roy Edroso Breaks It Down (Subscribe! Cheap!), this one a transcipt of Stephen Miller's unheralded appearance before the House Judiciary Committee's White Nationalism hearing. Part of the inspiration was Candace Owens' appearance, which as Stephen A. Crockett Jr. reports was sort of a parody of the conservative attitude toward white nationalism (which is by far the biggest terror threat in the U.S. now) -- let's just get a black lady up there to say that it doesn't exist and you're the Real Racist™! If they can get away with this, I see no reason why Miller can't get away with his own Jew-channeling-Goebbels innovation.

•  One good thing we may be able to salvage from this administration, if we survive it, is permanent damage to the whole stupid idea that evangelicals have anything serious or beneficial to add to the national debate. Remember when Michael Gerson, George W. Bush's evangel whisperer, was the model for such people -- temporizing, pencil-necked, only gently pushing the authority of Our Lord & Savior for conservatism (and then only for the goody-goody parts)? Well, now it's the age of the Savage Messiah, baby, with goons like Franklin Graham excusing Trump's sins and getting Republicans to promote their popcorn propaganda for them in hearings. (I'm not going to see Unplanned, but look forward to the sequel Unplanned 3-D, in which the actors thrust bloody, dismembered fetus parts at the audience. Move over Paul Morrissey!)

I'm sure some Jesus freak has defended Trump's cage-and-boot immigration policy before, but Matthew Schmitz's offering at the godly First Things, "IMMIGRATION IDEALISM: A CASE FOR CHRISTIAN REALISM," strains itself to make it look like the Lord's will. Schmitz starts out lamenting how naive he was as a young man, and how he thought the manly men he worked with who "complained about 'illegals' taking American jobs" were bigots when really they were just expressing common-sense Christianity in earthier terms. Later Schmitz learned that, by applauding hard-working immigrants, "elites" like Barack Obama and Lin-Manuel Miranda "portray working-class Americans as violent, hateful, and incompetent. They revel in their suffering." Gotta choose who to feel sorry for: The whites or the browns. Guess which side Jesus is on? Thus people who want the kids caged and booted are The Real Christians.

Also the liberal elites are like the guys who didn't want to fight Hitler: "Sooner or later, even the most idealistic calls to welcome migrants must contend with hard reality," warns Schmitz. "In the run-up to World War II, men inside and outside the Church invoked the gospel to justify appeasement and pacifism..." We had to fight Hitler's SS, and now we must fight the army of cleaning ladies and day laborers who similarly threaten our country!

The whole thing's nuts, but this may be the keeper:

While advocating realistic and Christian migration policies, the Church must not forget that the most important migration is that of souls into heaven. In Exsul Familia Nazarethana, Pope Pius XII speaks of the need to “provide all possible spiritual care for pilgrims, aliens, exiles and migrants of every kind.” He praises the Church’s long history of care for migrants, including the Catholic colonizers of the New World. (Pius’s view is not easily reconciled with liberal pieties.) According to the Pew Forum, 19 percent of the foreign-born, Hispanic adults living in the United States have given up their Catholic faith—half before they arrived, half after. These are souls lost at sea, spiritual migrants stopped at the border between earth and heaven.

Apparently by letting immigrants into our fallen nation, soft-hearted liberals are causing them to lose their faith, thus condemning them to an eternity in Hell. Who's mean to immigrants now? So when Trump's immigration control people kick over water bottles so immigrants may die of thirst in the desert, they're really just sending them quicker to heaven!

We must never forget what monsters these people are.