Nice piece about Peter Navarro, MAGA Martyr
David Firestone has a nicely sarcastic piece about Peter Navarro—who went directyly from jail to the RNC podium.
In his telling, Navarro stood before his party as a battered political prisoner, sent to a remote gulag for his beliefs by the vitriolic rage of the Biden administration and its “lawfare jackals” in the Justice Department.
“In Trump’s America you didn’t have to worry about being locked up for disagreeing with the government,” he said. “I went to prison so you won’t have to. I am your wake-up call.”
The G.O.P. used to be a law-and-order party, but now it celebrates convicts. (Unless they are the immigrant “murderers and rapists” that Navarro said President Biden had brought to America’s doorstep.) Contempt of Congress isn’t really a crime, in the party’s new legal handbook, and judges, prosecutors and juries who do Biden’s bidding aren’t legitimate legal officers.
To the audience here in Milwaukee, there is no badge of honor more awesome than a conviction for the sacred MAGA cause, and a prison term elevates that conviction to martyrdom. To the cheering crowd, Navarro milked every moment of suffering in the low-security tropical prison (where you can buy butter-pecan ice cream, cocoa butter lotion and an MP3 player in the commissary).
And with that he brought his fiancée, Bonnie, to the podium and kissed her on camera — “This is my beautiful girl, she did the time with me” — and as the crowd became ecstatic, this adult delinquent ascended into the Republican pantheon.
Firestone has another piece on the Republican obsession with fentanyl.
If there’s one word that can instantly unite Republicans on the convention floor here, it’s not freedom or life or even Jesus. Oddly enough, it’s fentanyl.
Over and over, with rising anger in their voices, delegates have told me about friends or family members lost to fentanyl overdoses, and to hear them tell it, it’s as if President Biden personally injected the horribly dangerous substance directly into the veins of their loved ones. The fury over the flow of this drug into this country seems to vastly exceed the passion over high milk prices or Ukraine or mifepristone.
The facts may not matter to cheering Republicans, but the reality is different. Immigrants don’t bring in fentanyl from Mexico; American citizens do, and they don’t wade across the Rio Grande to do so. According to Border Patrol statistics, 93 percent of the fentanyl seized by the government came through legal border crossings, not furtive smuggling routes. Less than 0.01 percent of people arrested for crossing illegally had any fentanyl on them. The Drug Enforcement Administration and intelligence agencies have consistently told Congress that drug cartels use highway routes for transportation and that a large majority of smugglers are U.S. citizens, who arouse less suspicion.
There is a fentanyl crisis, but it has nothing to do with open southern borders or immigration or building a wall. And by the way, its spread became much worse during the Trump administration.