A basic grounding in events is vital if young people are to realise the power and privilege of the ballot box
I was heartened and terrified to read David Mitchell’s article (“Here’s a shock, gen Z: democracy isn’t perfect
”, New Review). What made his article resonate particularly was the sentence, “Did nobody tell them about Stalin?”
As a history A-level student, it serves as a reminder of one of the many reasons I chose to study it: having even a vague awareness of the past horrors of authoritarianism can help fight its present stirrings.
SWANNANOA, NORTH CAROLINA—Four months after Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem
says the federal government will continue to provide support but also needs to get “out of the way” of recovery efforts and cut much of the red tape involved in getting assistance.
“I think that the federal government would do a much better job, much like [President Donald Trump] does, if we got out of the way,” Noem said to Wanda Harvey and her mother as they spoke outside what used to be the Harvey’s home in Swannanoa, 10 miles east of Asheville, on Saturday.
Noem was in western North Carolina to see the progress of the recovery efforts and the damage that still remained from Helene.
Rev. Franklin Graham, president of the Christian humanitarian aid organization Samaritan’s Purse
stood beside the secretary as she spoke with Harvey. Samaritan’s Purse continues to provide help and assistance to hurricane victims in the region.
DHS Secretary Noem is in Asheville today meeting with hurricane Helene victims alongside Franklin Graham. pic.twitter.com/99r68Ni9Tw
Standing on the cement slab by the little single-story house that was flooded during the September hurricane
, Harvey told Noem that dealing with the paperwork after the hurricane was a “nightmare”— a common refrain that Noem told press she heard from multiple hurricane victims during her visit Saturday.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency “can often be slow and confusing and a lot of paperwork,” Noem said, pledging, “We’re going to fix that.”
The response structure to natural disasters includes state and federal resources, but begins with local officials, the secretary said. “They know their communities, they know the help that is necessary.”
Noem visited one such effort—The Blessing Project,
a small nonprofit that is providing food, clothing, furniture, and other necessities to hurricane victims in Buncombe County.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem tours The Blessing Barn, a resource center for hurricane victims in Swannanoa, North Carolina, on Feb. 8, 2025. (Virginia Allen/The Daily Signal)
The secretary spoke with a young family at The Blessing Barn, a resource center of The Blessing Project, who lost almost everything in the hurricane. Mere feet away, the Army Corps of Engineers worked heavy machinery to pull out debris that had been swept into the river during the hurricane
.
After one of the equipment operators pulled a load of logs, sticks, and other debris from the river, Noem donned a vest and hardhat and hopped into the machine with him as he explained how it worked. A former rancher, Noem appeared quite at ease in the large machine.
Cameron Hamilton, FEMA’s acting administrator, accompanied Noem on her visit to western North Carolina and told the media that FEMA is “dissecting every avenue to ensure that the response” to disasters is “faster [and] more efficient” than it has been.
Under the Trump administration, FEMA “is taking a new approach on ensuring that everything we do comes from the survivor perspective,” Hamilton said. “Everything and every effort that we engage in has to have that focus at the forefront.”
FEMA, an agency
within the Department of Homeland Security, received intense criticism for its response to Hurricane Helene, including for at least one report that FEMA workers were directed by a supervisor to avoid homes with political signs supporting Trump.
“I promise you one thing,” Noem said, “President Trump
has committed, and I’m committed with him, to bringing FEMA into the 21st century, to becoming a people’s agency.”
On Jan. 24, Trump signed an executive order establishing the Federal Emergency Management Agency Review Council to review FEMA’s effectiveness in responding to natural disasters and to recommend needed changes to the agency.
Trump wants to “streamline” the work of FEMA, Noem told the press. “He wants it to be much less bureaucratic,” adding that Trump has made comments that he might even discontinue the agency and instead have “a process where the federal government sends block grants, or sends the dollars, to the state or to the local communities, and they decide how it’s spent so that the federal government can get out of the way of picking and choosing winners and losers and how those processes go.”
“We’ve always found a lot of times government is not the best solution,” the secretary said, noting that victims of disasters like Hurricane Helene require help and “the federal government should help, but it shouldn’t get in the way and slow that help down.”
The future of FEMA may include “eliminating a lot of what FEMA is at the federal level and giving the authority, the dollars, and the money to the states so that they can deploy that,” the secretary said.
Asheville Mayor Esther Manheimer, a Democrat, gave brief remarks to the media and thanked Noem and Hamilton for their visit.
“It means a lot to us that even as we see an administration change, we’ve already had a visit from our new president here,” Manheimer said, “and that we already have leadership on the ground to be able to see what we’re working with and how our community’s coming together.”
Celebrity Selena Gomez recently posted, and then quickly deleted, a video of herself sobbing uncontrollably over the treatment of illegal immigrants being expelled by the Trump administration.
Gomez was, of course, mercilessly mocked by conservatives across social media
. And there’s really nothing wrong with sympathizing with those trying to escape the deprivation and tyranny of the Third World. Most of us, I assume, would do the same for our families.
The frustration, though, is misplaced.
While I’m also a fan of immigration
for economic and patriotic reasons, dismissing the negative cultural externalities—including violent crimes—that can accompany chaotic mass immigration, illegal or not, does the cause no favors.
The fact is we could build a giant bubble around the entire country right now, and the United States would still reign as the most welcoming place for foreigners that’s ever existed. And if we want that title to remain, championing legal avenues and decrying mass criminality and anarchy is the way to go. Because what’s happening now is only going to turn decent people against legal immigration.
In recent years, American citizenship has been transformed from a sacred privilege bestowed on the lucky, gracious newcomer into a right that’s demanded of us by people who break or circumvent the law.
Moreover, illegal immigration is inhumane—and not only to those swept up in the human trafficking and dangers of the southern border
.
Democrats talk about people living in the shadows. It’s true. Those here illegally will never be integrated into society. Even if they don’t benefit from welfare programs, they inevitably end up relying on taxpayers. This, too, causes resentment.
The Left acts as if we have a sacred oath to accept every refugee, but they have done virtually everything possible to destroy the public’s trust in the system. In 2021, Democrats scrapped the “Remain in Mexico” policy that compelled migrants to wait in that country while their claims were being adjudicated in court (until finally, the administration was forced by a court to reinstate the policy).
As Europe has shown us, accepting unlimited numbers of refugees from the same area at the same time with the same ideas and the same problems leads to ethnic enclaves, poor integration, and reactionary nativist politics.
Though it’s not just refugees or illegal immigrants
who can give immigrants a bad name.
Take the student visa problem. Just because your Gulf state petro-daddy or Chicom apparatchik parents can pay your way doesn’t mean we have any responsibility to host you. Colleges love foreign students because they pay cash for the whole ride, but too many of them are flying terrorist flags and creating havoc on our campuses. The spectacle almost surely makes normies less inclined to see immigration as a societal positive. Understandably so.
Leftists and civil libertarians had a breakdown when President Donald Trump
signed an executive order to revoke student visas from noncitizen college students who participate in pro-Hamas protests.
Listen, I’m a staunch supporter of unfettered speech rights of pro-terrorist noncitizens in their own countries. Everyone has an inalienable right to speak freely, but foreigners do not have an inalienable right to gin up hatred against Americans on the Upper West Side. Protest in Tiananmen Square or in front of the royal residence in Riyadh. A nation has the right to dictate the parameters visitors must follow and then expel those who engage in civil unrest.
When my parents defected from Hungary and came here, they were asked if they were members of the Communist Party because its ideology conflicts with American values. We can’t bore into the souls of would-be citizens or visa-seekers. But we chuck them out if they don’t behave.
People often like to virtue signal, insisting that the United States is a “nation of immigrants” or a nation of “ideas” rather than one of blood and soil. Those are both true statements to some extent. One of the “ideas” we had, though, was to be a sovereign nation that houses a set of norms, traditions, civic institutions, culture, laws, rights, and virtues. We’ve been astoundingly successful at absorbing immigrants on a massive scale because the expectation was everyone would embrace our values.
Does anyone think we’re getting better at assimilating immigrants?
In the end, there are tons of laws we dislike, but the government upholds them anyway. Democrats say we’re a nation of laws, and yet when it comes to illegal aliens, they’re horrified that anyone might uphold them. If they truly cared about the future of immigration, they’d demand order, not feed chaos.
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