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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   23021 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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It might be of interest to add some more context to recent habbenings involving Morocco.

There is more at stake in this part of the world than two Spanish towns on the coast.

It all hinges on Western Sahara.

What is this Colorado sized thing with weirdly drawn borders?

It is disputed land and the dispute has two sides.

Tl;DR explanation of 56 years old unresolved problem you probably never heard about:

Side A:

This patch of desert is ancient Moroccan land, stolen by infidel colonizers and justly returned. The people living there are Moroccans, who are thanking God every day that they were reunited with their homeland. Everything is fine, everyone except gaggle of grumpy terrorists is happy, no reason for anyone to complain.

This position is hold by Morocco, US and Israel, all alone against the world.

Side B:

This patch of desert is country of Western Sahara, the people living there are ancient Western Saharan nation, dialect they are speaking is separate language. The country is illegally occupied by Morocco, and deserves their self determination.

This position is hold by UN and the whole international community.

Overall, it is issue about #1234 in importance, and the international community is fine with not doing more than ocassionally sending strongly worded protest letter.

Excepting Algeria. Algeria and Morocco are neighbors, and not happy neighbors. Western Saharan problem is still a problem because Algeria supports Western Saharan freedom fighters to such degree that Morocco was forced to build biggest and most beautiful wall in the world to defend this territory.

Morocco-Algeria relations were bad for a long time and are getting worse. OSINT nerds consider this part of the world as top hot spot where another big war, war between two professional state armies, not rag bands on pickup trucks, can erupt at any moment, make the current times yet more spicy and take the world by surprise.

So it is another national honor thing, you might be thinking. Arab Muslim brothers killing each other over useless desert, many such cases.

Not so. This is one of few wars in the world that make economic sense, where Marxist analysis is applicable, together with the infamous Mexican troubles.

We all, except advanced breatharians, need eating regularly, our food comes from plants (whether directly or with animal in between) and plants crave fertilizer. And crucially important are fertilizers containing phosphorus.

Phosphate fertilizer comes from phosphate rocks and these are not renewable resources.

And Morocco, including Western Sahara, is one of world's top producers. Excepting China, the top producer. Looking at proven phosphate resources, the situation is even more lopsided.

So this whole situation is even more important than it looks, and deserves monitoring. Watch Algeria–Morocco border, put your eyes off Rafah and off Hormuz, put them all on Bou Craa. So when in some possible future timeline you will be monitoring empty plate on your dining table, you will know why it happened.

edit: links

Side A:

This patch of desert is ancient Moroccan land, stolen by infidel colonizers and justly returned. The people living there are Moroccans, who are thanking God every day that they were reunited with their homeland. Everything is fine, everyone except gaggle of grumpy terrorists is happy, no reason for anyone to complain.

This position is hold by Morocco, US and Israel, all alone against the world.

This is certainly an interesting framing, given that 120 countries reportedly supported Morocco's proposal of the western sahara under Moroccon sovereign control in the distant long past of... current year.

Truly, a mere 60% of the nations of the Untied Nations on board during contemporarily international negotiations is such lonely, and jewish, company.

Side B:

This patch of desert is country of Western Sahara, the people living there are ancient Western Saharan nation, dialect they are speaking is separate language. The country is illegally occupied by Morocco, and deserves their self determination.

This position is hold by UN and the whole international community.

This is also an interesting framing, given not just the aforementioned UN nations apparently outside the international community, but African nations supporting Morocco in nparticular.

Normally I'd be inclined to snark about Europeans conflating European diplomatic consensus with the world, except the recent Morocco proposal is backed by such notable American vassals / puppet states / your pejorative of choice, as France and Spain.

Instead, I'm inclined to note the historical context that the historical high point of UN and international community support for Western Sahara was back during the Cold War, with a relative silence in the two and a half decades since then. This not so coincidentally coincided with how Morocco's chief opponent on the Western Sahara issue, Algeria, was a major beneficiary of Soviet sponsorship, while Morocco generally aligned with the western block. In turn, Soviet sponsorship included much of the sort of military aid that Algeria provided to the Polisario Front, one of the major western saharan freedom fighter groups you refer to. As was normal in those time, as the Soviet Union freedom fighter aid went, so did the diplomatic votes of the soviet block, especially in the global south where the pro-Algerian position was the anti-imperialist / anti-western thematic vote as well.

Once the Soviet sponsorship and anti-capitalist politics faded with the Soviet Union, so to did international support for Algeria and western sahara as a cold war proxy issue. Which might be why more than half of the UN states had withdrawn their recognition of the Sarhawi Arab Democratic Republic during the 2000s and 2010s.

Which is not normally something the whole of the international community does... if you consider 80-odd states (which is 40 less than 120, I might add) 'the whole international community.'

If Palestine was either getting wrecked by a larger more advanced Islamic state instead of a Jewish one or the population didn't identify as Muslim it'd be getting substantially less support as a flashpoint.

Yeah, sure, but the same can be said about the Holocaust. (How much sleep did people lose over the Khmer Rouge, or Stalin's mass starvation campaigns?)

The Bolsheviks and Khmer Rouge were both flash points, but they represent separate instances where genocidaires either won a temporary victory or won a longer-term victory. People tried to stop them. They lost.

The Holocaust would be spoke of differently if the Allies lost WWII only for the Third Reich to collapse several decades later.

I also noticed this surprisingly major border dispute a few years ago. Growing up in the United States, this was never mentioned in school. Occasionally we had maps with a dotted line through Morocco and small-font text that said "Western Sahara", but this was never remarked on in class.

Interesting... I did a little looking into this. Turns out we need 3 kinds of fertilizer nitrogen (Haber-Bosch process, energy intensive but can be done anywhere with natural gas), phosphate fertilizers (mined in Morocco) and potash/potassium fertilizers (mined in Russia). They do different things for the plants, not interchangeable.

But I think we can get along without them? Sanctions on Russian fertilizer caused price impacts certainly but that mostly hit poor countries? I say 'mined in Morocco' and 'mined in Russia' but other countries do produce them, just with fewer reserves. It could be that phosphate recycling and exploration could kick into high gear in the event of a shortage.

Also Morocco would be an easy country to knock over, Western Sahara moreso. Morocco and Algeria aren't serious countries, they aren't that populous, don't produce weapons and are positioned such that they have no great powers nearby that could back them up if US or Europe came knocking. No amount of imported Russian or American weapons are a substitute for having a real military-industrial base.

These are the kind of countries that a couple of carrier groups could deal with straightforwardly, if it came to it. It looks like Morocco is in the US camp and Algeria is in the Russian camp but they're practically encircled by Europe and far away from Russia.

If there is a war and if that does endanger phosphate shipments and if that actually matters then Europe or the US would be able to quickly sort it out.

It looks like Morocco is in the US camp

Morocco was the first country to recognize the United States of America (1777), and has the longest continuous treaty relationship with the US (since 1836). Of Arabic-speaking nations, it's historically one of the most US-friendly in international relations.

potash/potassium fertilizers (mined in Russia).

Canada produces about 1.5x as much as Russia, with around 1/4 of the global total.

The problem with food staples is that demand is extremely inelastic and poor people are extremely sensitive to and hurt by price increases. Even small increases in the inputs or decrease in outputs could lead to great social troubles.

Filing this under nothing ever happens. Algeria might be funding seperatists but they have zero cassis belli to do a direct invasion. And victory condition would be actual invasion of heavily defended territory.

Just shows that it doesn't take being white to be able to colonize

It’s casus belli, but cassis belli would be a good cocktail name.

Popping filter bubbles and picking up the Tuna Cans.

None of these stories on their own really warrant a top level post but taken together I feel like they both illustrate a trend and serve as a coda to my January post on "Tuna Cans" and how the Trump administration might be able to more effectively deliver on it's campaign promise to combat Immigration.

Last week the Trump administration announced that it would be rescinding a 2022 rule that prohibited US Customs and Immigration Services from considering an immigrant's use of Medicaid and other public benefits when deciding whether or not to renew their visa or grant them legal resident status. The usual suspects at NBC, CNN, the New York Times, Et Al are trotting out their usual tripe about "women and minorities hardest hit" but to me the most galling thing is that this rule existed in the first place, and that it wasn't quashed a year and a half ago. That said, while the best time to plant a tree (or repeal a bad law) is 20 years ago, doing it now is still something worthy of praise.

In the wake of Nick Shirley's expeditions to Minneapolis and LA, the Department of Health and Human Services has that announced that 199 million dollars a year allocated to the state of Minnesota and 860 million dollars a year allocated to the state of California has been frozen pending those states provide positive evidence that individuals and business originally slated to receive those funds actually exist and are not just a PO-box in a strip mall somewhere.

At the same time Vice President JD Vance and Interim Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling announced a "crack-down" on H1B visa fraud four days after Microsoft announced that it would be laying off 4,800 employees while simultaneously applying for permission to import over 2,000 foreign workers.

Meanwhile Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy continues to quietly do his job, announcing that the audit started back in January has resulted in the revocation of 28,000 commercial drivers licences and that nearly 200,000 drivers more could be effected by the reinstitution of English language proficiency requirements that had been relaxed by Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx under Obama back in 2016. The American Trucking Association is naturally angry about this complaining that the constricting workforce coupled with proposed crack-downs on "chameleon carriers" and rulings like Montgomery v. Caribe Transport is driving up costs for brokers and bulk carriers, but I think I speak for a lot of voters when I say "maybe that's a good thing".

Again I reiterate my position that more often than not it isn't the big headline grabbing stories that have the greatest impact but rather the things that happen quietly behind the scenes and that is why I feel obliged to signal-boost these sorts of stories.

driving up costs for brokers and bulk carriers, but I think I speak for a lot of voters when I say "maybe that's a good thing".

Yes, because we don't need immigrants to work our jobs. We have no shortage of Americans willing to work. What we do have a shortage of are Americans who are willing to be underpaid, which is why companies love foreign labor so much. They are willing to be treated like slaves.

One wonders how one could advocate for workers' rights and treating employees fairly, and yet also support the importation of a workforce to be exploited by employers for the sole purpose of reducing costs.

Yes, because we don't need immigrants to work our jobs. We have no shortage of Americans willing to work. What we do have a shortage of are Americans who are willing to be underpaid, which is why companies love foreign labor so much. They are willing to be treated like slaves.

Then where exactly is this mass of currently non working American citizens with no employment prospects who are perfectly happy and able to start any work again, yet alone backbreaking labor like dealing with farms in the south, and how are they currently living without any pay? The main groups out of the work force are either old, in college (and thus entering soon!), disabled, or in between employment because layover/hiring cycles means there's always some left just like how housing vacancies will (and should) always exist.

Even if we want to discuss the relatively few working age NEETs or mentally ill homeless addicts or whatever, I don't think they're gonna start picking up a hoe because you pay them a little more.

  • -12

Prime age male employment rate is only 86% now. It use to be 95% or higher doing economic expansions. So we have millions of men not working right now in America.

There are a lot of ways to live without pay today. Military disability (which is mostly fraud now), food stamps, housing vouchers etc. If you quit subsidizing unemployment you would get more workers.

Prime age male employment rate is only 86% now.

Same as 1990s levels. You've got to really far back to post war economic booms to get the higher levels you're citing.

There are a lot of ways to live without pay today. Military disability (which is mostly fraud now), food stamps, housing vouchers etc. If you quit subsidizing unemployment you would get more workers.

Sure, we could count all those but those aren't really "people who are looking for a job and can't get one", they're people who don't want a job and won't be happy if you cut them off from what they currently got. The military man with a 3k a month disability check is happy where he is, even if he is a parasite.

These are not examples of the supposed hordes of men wanting work that can't get any because the jobs are stolen.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S

The data doesn’t agree.

Oh yeah sorry, I was thinking of the general prime age labor rate which is at 90s levels, males have gone down a little.

However, we know the reasons why and we know that they don't want jobs and their problems are not because jobs are lacking

https://www.mercatus.org/research/research-papers/whats-behind-declining-male-labor-force-participation

While many observers assume that increasing inactivity rates reflect more men “dropping out” of the labor force out of frustration with the job market, relatively few prime-age inactive men fit the picture. Just 3 percent meet the official federal definition of a “discouraged worker,” and in 2014 just 7 percent of prime-age men inactive the entire preceding year said their reason for not working was that they could not find a job. The increase in their ranks accounted for just 9 percent of the rise in full-year inactivity from 1968 to 2014.

Few inactive men say they want a job in a typical week, and most of the increase in inactivity has involved men who do not want a job. This study estimates that only about one in four inactive men in 2014 wanted a job, and only about 25 percent of the increase in inactivity in a typical week from 1969 to 2014 involved men who wanted a job. Less than one-third of non-disabled inactive men want a job.

Again there is not a horde of American citizens who want jobs but can not find them. These inactive men do not want jobs, because they're disabled or caretaking or whatever.

Of the few who do have trouble finding it, well they're mostly just shit and that's why they can't. If you've ever done hiring for any lower level position you might have seen a few of them yourself, the people who you will simply never hire. Lazy addicted losers who won't show up on time or pay attention to their work no matter what you do, the type of person who gets themselves fired from fast food or door dashing. The dregs of society are the bottomfeeders not because of the 1% wealthy or immigrants or whatever other scapegoats, but because they're shit and can't even tear themselves away from drugs long enough to hold an interview.

Am I taking crazy pills - “7% of men saying they aren’t in the labor market is because they can’t find a job”. That’s a huge amount of men.

The job market sucks. I’ve worked for prop trading firms and they can pay extremely well. And I went thru a period of burn out or perhaps something like YIPs in baseball. I couldn’t hit a fastball anymore and make money and needed a break. So I looked for opportunities. Even with solid degrees (Ivy engineering + M-7 MBA and prior top performer) no one would even interview me.

Now I’ve rebuilt a solid 3 year track record and it seems like I can hit a fastball again. So I guess that’s better than taking a job, but I would still consider the right opportunity at a reasonable salary for economic security. In my experience the anecdotes are true and I have zero idea how I could add more valuable traits. The traits I have are elite. The anecdotes of a lot of people saying the job market sucks appears to be true.

Am I taking crazy pills - “7% of men saying they aren’t in the labor market is because they can’t find a job”. That’s a huge amount of men.

Not 7% of all men. 7% of those not in the labor force. Almost all men who want to work can get jobs, of those without jobs they don't want to work to begin with.

More comments

Then where exactly is this mass of currently non working American citizen

In the case that you are actually asking this question seriously, and not as a half-assed attempt at a rhetorical dunk, they're in the Appalachians. I have some family and old acquaintances in ${UNDISCLOSED}. One of the largest employers in the area has historically been a prepared food facility, which recently came under new management. This new executive team has been doing rolling waves of layoffs, and regularly furloughing workers who they retain an attempt to force them to quit. For the last year, both a relative and a friend have repeatedly noted that despite the rolling layoffs, the overall workforce at the plant has not decreased. It has, however, started to feature an increasingly large number of five foot tall Guatemalan men in their 20s who don't speak English, but present work papers claiming that they're John Billings from Madison, Wisconsin. It's agonizingly obvious that they're hiring people with stolen identities.

My cousin got laid off recently, and he's looking at trying to file some sort of suit against the company. I doubt it will go anywhere. He has placed upwards of thirty job applications in the fields of construction, municipal maintenance work, security, and HVAC. He hasn't heard a damned thing back from any of them. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that he has a felony drug charge on his record from 20 years ago, but in that area, that's not really uncommon.

You're welcome to pretend this is all about "jobs nobody wants to do", but believe me when I tell you it's climbing up the food chain.

In the case that you are actually asking this question seriously, and not as a half-assed attempt at a rhetorical dunk, they're in the Appalachians. I have some family and old acquaintances in ${UNDISCLOSED}.

As another commentator pointed out, unemployment rates don't match and if you go back historically they've never really matched, unemployment has never been all that high except for temporary disruptions with obvious causes like Covid or the recession. Maybe your family and old acquaintances are unlucky anecdotes, but they are absolutely not representative of the general economy in any way.

This ain't a conversation to be had with individual anecdotes but with data and statistics, and what those suggest is that there isn't some massive amount of capable American job seekers who are unable to find employment.

He has placed upwards of thirty job applications in the fields of construction, municipal maintenance work, security, and HVAC. He hasn't heard a damned thing back from any of them. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that he has a felony drug charge on his record from 20 years ago, but in that area, that's not really uncommon.

Maybe it is the drug charges, maybe it's more than just the drug charges. Sometimes terrible employees do exist and they will obviously lose out to better alternatives. It's what happens.

I will not hire a bad employee in my department simply because I feel bad for them, and no one else will either. Businesses want efficient and lean workplaces so we can compete for customers, we are not charities.

  • -12

It’s impossible to get a job now. I had some business failings a few years ago. Tried to find a reasonable pivot to survive and not blow my savings. With 2 Ivy equivalent degrees I did the apply to anything on LinkedIn and think I submitted 5k applications. Maybe 3 interviews. Luckily business is now going well but it’s basically impossible to get a job.

It’s why there is a huge increase in left the labor market that isn’t showing up in the official statistics. I have no idea how to get a job in this environment especially if you need to do any kind of career pivot. It actually scares me a lot if business goes bad again that I would be able to find something to survive on. I guess I could work at McDonalds.

Let me repeat myself here

This ain't a conversation to be had with individual anecdotes but with data and statistics

Sorry you can't find something, but the problem is probably with you. Often what I see from people who "can't find a job" is what they actually mean is "I can't find a high paying office email job", which if that's the case it means you probably need to accept reality and lower your standards for what you apply to.

I guess I could work at McDonalds.

Yes. If you aren't good enough to compete and win the high paying email jobs, then you work at McDonald's or whatever else. If ego and actual ability don't match, you either lower your ego or raise your ability. The former is way easier.

Dude I’ve been paid 7 figures multiple times. It’s not a skills issue. They don’t even interview or phone call white men.

And the statistics agree with me. Labor market participation rate is crashing.

And as Bezos says when the anecdotes and the data disagrees trust the anecdotes. But the data also agrees with me.

Sometimes terrible employees do exist and they will obviously lose out to better alternatives. It's what happens.

I will not hire a bad employee in my department simply because I feel bad for them, and no one else will either.

Are you claiming that @birb_cromble's cousin is (or would be) a terrible employee, apropos of nothing besides the fact that he's sent out thirty job applications with no success?

A person who gets fired and then can't find another job of any sort within a few months typically has something going on with them. Maybe he's too picky and trying to get a job he's not qualified for, or maybe he's just really bad at doing interviews, or whatever. I don't know.

But basically everyone else manages to get employment. Long term unemployment doesn't really happen unless you either choose it or have something going on with you.

I know it's not the point of your post, but I just want to say that I've always found the whole "jobs nobody wants to do" argument infuriatingly obtuse and borderline offensive.

While nobody (that I am aware of) literally follows the argument up with "...and that's why the abolition of slavery was a bad thing" that is kind of what they are implying. What they are saying in effect is that people who do {dirty job} do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job} voluntarily because {dirty job} is sub-human.

What they are saying in effect is that people who do {dirty job} do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job}

I don't think this is is quite a fair summary; the implication is that it is impossible to compensate someone enough that they will work {dirty job} - either literally impossible, or at the very least economically infeasible to do at scale.

A reasonable point, but at the same time my reply to you would closely mirror your reply to @SophisticatedHillbilly about socially necessary jobs.

Some jobs are just naturally undesirable, and by extension "low status". There are a lot of people who will object to a "low status" (undesirable) job paying more than a "high status" (desirable) job on basic principle because in their minds money is a proxy for status. That in turn feeds into the question of whether you can hire a sufficient number of sanitation workers in a world you are neither willing to pay them a middle class salary nor are you willing to shoot and/or starve them.

Yeah no doubt people will object to that, I just think the market will override their objections barring infinite cheap foreign labor. People will pay out before they’ll go without running water.

That doesn’t really make sense though. There is always a wage people will take to do dirty jobs (I would do them instead of my profession if the dirty jobs paid better) so leaving that aside is the economy argument. Your argument is basically an argument against paying any job a high wage. Trucking simply must be done. The economy must bear whatever labor (or automation when that becomes fully viable) cost is required to make the trucks move. If that is $100/hour for entry level truckers, then goods will become more expensive and that cost will be distributed across the economy accordingly. This will make all other people in the economy poorer, and it will make truckers or whatever other dirty-job-doers richer. It would also increase the quality of talent in those positions, resulting in efficiency gains (but probably somewhat lower gains than the cost increase). I think the reality is people just don’t want to see meatpackers and truckers making significantly more than they make with an email job and a degree .

That’s how any high paid job works. Doctor is a difficult-to-fill position, and so is paid highly, which makes all other people in the economy marginally poorer by increasing their expenses. If doctors were willing to work for 20$/hour, everyone else would be better off. They don’t do that, but maybe they would if we imported 1,000,000 foreign doctors and put them to work.

What is infeasible is any one company paying high wages for dirty jobs when there is a pool of cheap labor available due to competition.

Your argument

For the record it's not my argument, just my interpretation - not even much of a steelman - of those people's argument. Overall I'm very much with you on biting the bullet that all sorts of manual jobs should just be paid better, and that there is a degree of snobbery to rejecting that class of solutions to labor shortages.

That being said, I don't think we can dismiss out of hand the idea that there may be some socially-necessary jobs so unpleasant that even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies. Historically, the question didn't really arise; some degree of coercion (whether by force, or simply by threat of starvation) was always on the table. Whether you can in fact hire sufficient quantities of sewage workers etc. in a humane, liberal, affluent society where even if you choose to remain unemployed rather than take the job, you'll get enough to eke out a living - that is not a trivial question. I'm not saying the answer is definitely no - I don't think it's no for truckers, certainly - but it's worth thinking about seriously.

I agree it’s not a trivial question, but I do think the answer is a clear yes. There’s a pretty large portion of the population that isn’t built for knowledge work and loves money. It does have to beat out the living-on-benefits life which is pretty good.

The snobbery is one part, but I suppose there is a degree of understandable anxiety around what a world might look like where the salaries of sanitation workers and knowledge workers get reversed or even reach parity. It is deeply contrary to blue-tribe values I think.

For the record I do not think that "even high salaries would not be sufficient to fill the vacancies" so much as I suspect that there are a lot of people here who would object on principle to the idea of sanitation workers being well-paid.

While nobody (that I am aware of) literally follows the argument up with "...and that's why the abolition of slavery was a bad thing"

Slavery was economically inefficient, as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Bastiat, and many other early capitalist/capitalist aligned thinkers would point out. And therefore anyone who tried to argue "the economy is why the abolition of slavery is a bad thing" would be incorrect from the very start.

A free market of goods and labor however is economically efficient, and therefore any protectionist argument against that has to showcase why any claimed moral gains are worth the economic tradeoffs. There might be some things where that's true, but they aren't the same.

do not deserve to be compensated in such a way that someone would work {dirty job} voluntarily

They are doing it voluntarily. It's just that they are voluntarily doing it for wages that some people believe are too low. It's basically "the myth of consensual employment".

But when a lot of these immigrant subsidies programs come with implied PR or citizenship pathways the work is massively overpaid not underpaid.

If I get a UK care worker from Nigeria at 10k GBP a year below prevailing rate for 5 years, but the government allows them ILR and a potential passport after that 5 years the latter is worth millions of pounds in benefits. Especially if there's any sort of family reunification at play. If anything the majority of foreign low skilled workers in the West are being massively overpaid due to their potential to get citizenship

You know what drives me apeshit? I've worked on a dairy farm, and an orchard. Sure, it's hot, dirty, and uncomfortable work, but it wasn't really any worse than a dinner rush in a commercial kitchen on a Friday night. I really get the impression that a lot of people assume manual labor is worse than the ninth circle of hell.

I don't think that's what they are implying, they mostly see it as a way to imply white people are too lazy, and since those mean right wingers won't let them import hundreds of millions of better, hardworking brown people permanently and legally then they have to settle for bringing them illegally or temporarily. The lack of legal protections afforded to legal residents is only a feature in so far as it enables them to enlist the help of capital for this venture, they don't like it either.

Unemployment in the US is currently at a historic low, but there doesn't need to be a mass of currently unemployed American citizens out there for immigration to depress wages.

As I argued in the comments of the linked post back in January, companies like Amazon and Tyson foods can easily weather things like Tariffs by simply passing the cost on to the consumer, but forcing them to pay American-level wages and provide American-level working conditions is much harder them to shrug off as it provides opportunities for other operators to start competing on cost and/or pick up market share.

It would seem to me that rule of supply and demand is the closest thing that economics has to a natural law. If the supply of labor is constrained relative to the demand, it stands to reason that the market price of labor (IE wages) will go up and vice versa.

Unemployment in the US is currently at a historic low,

Then historically there is a shortage of Americans who are willing to work but currently don't. Which is the claim being made here.

It would seem to me that rule of supply and demand is the closest thing that economics has to a natural law. If the supply of labor is constrained relative to the demand, it stands to reason that the market price of labor (IE wages) will go up and vice versa

Of course it's classic supply and demand, more supply of labor (whether through automation or immigration or whatever) means cheaper labor costs. This also of course can mean products are cheaper and more available to buy as products become easier and cheaper to create. Immigration isn't as strong as automation since immigrants also consume (contribute to demand), but for very specific sectors where they cluster labor prices get driven down.

It's the inverse logic of why unions drive prices up and make stuff less affordable and less accessible to the average American. It's great for the union workers who get to hold the country hostage, it's bad for everyone else. Regulatorally enforced high labor costs benefits those who do labor by taking from those who need the labor done, like with elevators. Maybe it's a tradeoff we want to make, disabled people like the author, apartment dwellers, etc get less elevators in exchange for the elevator union having higher pay, but it is a tradeoff.

Same way that maybe we'd rather prefer American citizen construction workers get paid a lot of money over providing cheaper housing to our youth and our poor, we can make that tradeoff, but it is unavoidably one.

The catch here is that the “our youth and our poor” here would also largely be the people working these construction jobs, and all other jobs that now have the depressed wages. Easier to afford a $300,000 house on 40$/hour than a $200,000 house on $20/hour Not to mention that land is generally the largest price factor in housing, so the labor cost increase wouldn’t do that much anyway.

Easier to afford a $300,000 house on 40$/hour than a $200,000 house on $20/hour

Your numbers are completely fictional though, the change in prices for buyers must be directly equal to the change in price for sellers. If I have a rare trading card and want to sell to a collector, the price is the same for both parties. If I make more, he must spend more. If he spends less, I must make less.

Even subsidizing the buyer just means a third party must take on the burden instead, it doesn't eliminate the problem. The only real world actual fix to have us both win (more than mutual trade already wins) without any losers is increasing productivity efficiency, devising ways to get two out of what previously only made one, like with agricultural science and food, or the economy of scale or ending artificial constraints on efficiency like regulation.

Increasing efficiency is the best way for sure. That’s unlikely to occur when extremely cheap labor is available. Besides, the increase in production would still result in the problem you pointed out: super efficient home building results in lower appreciation for existing homeowners. They lose in your scenario.

The numbers are fictional but the price on any given product would increase by less than the % gain in pay, as pay would not be increasing for the entire buyer-side, but only a portion, benefiting those being paid more at the expense of buyers who did not receive a pay increase. Sellers would win out, as in the made up numbers, but so would the now-better-paid workers.

Regardless yes markets are two sided, but the point here was addressing the “young and the poor.” Both of those groups could afford houses if they were being paid much more. The best houses in the best places? No, but most people don’t live in the 5 trendy metro hubs, and they still wouldn’t.

No, the claim being made here is that the labor shortage and associated rise in wages is a bad thing and I am disagreeing. I find it telling that the all the leisure-class liberals who claim to support labor and be all about "paying people a living wage" immediately change tack when it comes time to actually pay those wages.

I find it telling that the all the leisure-class liberals who claim to support labor and be all about "paying people a living wage" immediately

Those things are bad and distortionary, any hypocrisy aside doesn't change it. This is a tautological statement: "Higher prices means higher prices". If you want labor to be paid more, then it means people who pay for the labor can afford it less easily.

It is unsolvable, just like the housing market or any other. It is literally impossible for the seller of labor/homes/etc to make more money and have the buyer pay less. You must make a tradeoff when meddling.

In the long run the government is typically subsidizing these industries via providing a settlement pathway to foreign workers at the bottom end. A green card or a Western passport is worth considerably more than any tenure of unpleasant work and that cost will eventually be repatriated from taxpayers

If you want labor to be paid more, then it means people who pay for the labor can afford it less easily.

Yes, and?

Are you arguing that supporting labor is bad, or are you arguing that "paying people a living wage" is bad?

Are you arguing that supporting labor is bad, or are you arguing that "paying people a living wage" is bad

The second one, a "living wage" is a meaningless phrase. Especially in the US, where the only thing that can't be easily accessed even the poorest 10% of Americans, housing, is not because of a lack of pay but because of deliberate political decisions to restrict new supply.

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One wonders how one could advocate for workers' rights and treating employees fairly, and yet also support the importation of a workforce to be exploited by employers for the sole purpose of reducing costs.

Traditionally, I believe communists were against mass immigration for this very reason. By all means spread the revolution to the rest of the world, but do not import cheap labor as it only benefits the business owners. Supporting immigration is a relatively new thing, and one that is mostly rooted in the belief that rich countries have a duty to help poor people, whereever they may be. It is the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion. If someone is suffering and we can do something to help, it becomes a moral duty. If it requires sacrifice then so be it. Especially when people are literally drowning trying to reach our shores.

It is the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion.

More like a quarter of the way towards its conclusion. Low-productivity migrants are very expensive: this blog estimates the net lifetime tax contributions of Somalian migrants in Denmark to be around negative $1.4 million USD. Meanwhile, Givewell estimates that preventing a death from malaria costs $3000 to $8000. For the cost of improving the life of a single Somalian by allowing him to migrate, you can outright save the lives of hundreds of other africans who remain in Africa. (Before you object that saving the lives of poor third-worlders just results in more third-worlders who need saving, note that it apparently only costs $36 to a contraception charity per third-world birth prevented.) Poor third-world countries have a lot of low-hanging fruit where small amounts of money go a long way, so it shouldn't be too surprising that helping third-worlders in their own countries is vastly more efficient than letting them migrate.

The drowning child thought experiment says it shouldn't matter if the child is in front of you or in another country, which is quite unlike the instinctual morality that says cheap foreign aid programs saving millions of lives is a minor side-issue that only becomes morally urgent when one of them manages to get closer and throws himself into the water. Sometimes literally, with those ocean-rescue NGOs that transport migrants to Europe if they go out onto international waters and in some cases deliberately sink their own boats. Old 2016 article, I haven't kept up with how the situation has changed since then:

Time: Don't Blame Rescue-at-Sea Organizations for Migrants Coming to Europe

When 22-year-old Mohammad left Libya’s coastline in a decrepit wooden boat headed for Italy in August, he had no illusions about where he would end up.

Unlike many smugglers in Libya who lure clients in with false promises of reaching Europe within hours, his agent was brutally frank. It would take about three hours to reach international waters, he explained. Once there the boat would drift until spotted by one of the humanitarian rescue vessels plying the central Mediterranean, at which point he and his fellow passengers would be taken aboard and transferred to Italy, where they could apply for asylum.

This is the opposite of trying to maximize the most good for the greatest number in a location-insensitive way. It's like a thought-experiment someone invented to show how certain implicit moral premises are incoherent and produces counterproductive results, except that people are doing it for real. As for what actually qualifies as "the drowning child thought experiment brought to its logical conclusion", I suspect it's some longtermist thing where you realize that the number of people in the future is potentially large and helping them by keeping society from collapsing and advancing technology is dramatically more efficient than anything else. That has a lot more uncertainty though, so providing Africa with bednets and contraception is still fairly reasonable, unlike helping them by allowing migration.

How much better are the conditions of the sort of mobile, young, typically-male 'asylum seeker' who has the resources and gumption to chain migrate halfway across the world. There's not that many countries left where there's genuine daily mortal peril, even if there's a lot where the local economy is Ennui and meh.

Morocco is currently in the news for the Spanish invasion. I've been to Morocco, I've got Moroccan friends (albeit heavily filtered to upper class/resources to get to Asia) and like I sympathize with the complaints of the average working class Moroccan 20 year old that they feel minimal hope, corruption is rife and it's hard to work within the domestic system. However, they're also not desperately poor (outside of a few marginal outlying areas where the attempted immigrants are decidedly not coming from), they have food and they have a reasonable life expectancy. They might be way behind in terms of GDP per capita but the difference between $12k PPP and $60k PPP is not a 5x life quality improvement.

Aside from the fact that low skilled workers are considerably less well off than the typical Spaniard.

That too. Going from upper middle of the developing world to being a Deliveroo drone might increase your savings rate but could easily be a short term deterioration in living conditions

If they are literally drowning, that is a risk they took of their own accord and it is entirely their fault. No one's forcing them to do that, and we especially are not forcing them to, so it's not our problem.

Indeed, a self-induced emergency on your (the general “you”) part does not constitute an obligation my my part, especially when saving you from your own emergency means me continuing to payup and get criminalized.

At the end of the day, a majority believes in Newtonian Ethics. People may mostly be indifferent to people dying somewhere in Africa, but they tend to care if the same people try to reach Europe and bother us by drowning close to our shores.

In the case of Mediterranean boat people, nobody cares about the (relatively small number of) drownings except as a legal weapon. Under normal circumstances, it is a crime to put people who do not have permission to come to Italy on a boat and take them to Italy. But if the reason why you put them on the boat is that you were rescuing someone who was in peril at sea, then it isn't.

My understanding is that a lot of work goes into calibrating the number of Mediterranean migrant drownings to the bare minimum needed to keep the people running the migrant-trafficking NGOs out of prison.

A modest proposal to unite the country (against me): Ironclad union laws, and scabs are made illegal... unless the scabs are undocumented immigrants, who will be given visas and (by law) permanently replace the striking workers 1-for-1 on payroll at their jobs if brought on to work.

Because the DSA membership will never, ever, drive a truck, or work construction, or do any blue collar labour at all. They might wait tables, sure. But that's a different social stratum, and one that immigrants aren't super successful in, the way they are in trucking and construction.

One wonders how one could advocate for workers' rights and treating employees fairly, and yet also support the importation of a workforce to be exploited by employers for the sole purpose of reducing costs.

Because the people leading the charge on this are upperclass failsons and failed creatives, perpetual grad students and surplus low-midwit knowledge workers. The immigrants driving UberEats and hanging drywall aren't competing with Mamdami in the rap game, or getting lucrative contracts for shit-tier art that should have gone to his wife.

The common term for such people being "downwardly mobile".

the audit started back in January has resulted in the revocation of 28,000 commercial divers licences

TIL commercial diving is so lucrative for immigrants...

(You have a typo there)

Good eye.

I'm more concerned about the English pruriency requirement...

To be fair, that attitude would help a lot in gaining English proficiency. Just look at weeaboos.

It is notoriously the main way the more trad British public schools motivate the boys to learn Latin. Something like Suetonius' account of Nero's vices can be read in a scholarly translation, but if you want to someone to let you read Catullus as a schoolboy you are probably reading in in the original Latin. Rated "C" for classical.

Not that I ever saw. Reading about cool battles, yes. What are you thinking of?

I dropped Latin before they started reading Catullus, but among his more notable works (all of which were pored over by my classicist friends) were:

  • A Latin translation of Sappho's Greek "lyric poetry" (this is what classicists call it in learned academic journals, but there is a reason why the old-fashioned term for lesbianism is "Sapphic love")
  • His own erotic poetry about his sexual desire for teenagers of both sexes
  • Invective against his political opponents including sexual innuendos. (The modern equivalent of calling your political opponent a pigfucker, but with more poetic description of the physical qualities of the pig).

Suetonius is the primary source for most of the modern stories about sexual perversion in Ancient Rome. The description of Tiberius' BDSM exploits (he was a sexual sadist to the point where I find him sick, and I'm not exactly innocent here) is the most explicit part - the discussion of Caligula and Nero is mostly a list of who he did and where.

I support these things but what mechanism causes the administration not to do them immediately?

For instance, with the English language requirements for the trucking licenses, they were in power from 2017-2021 and could have done it then, and they could have done it last year too. Are they too busy? Do they not know about the regulations until someone brings it to their attention? Is it very difficult to change regulations like these and therefore they wait for an opportune time to do it?

I would say all of the above, plus the fact that non-domiciled CDLs/chameleon carriers were much less of an issue in Trump's first term.

Like many things to do with immigration, it seems that non-domiciled CDL requirements were systematically not enforced by certain states post-2020, resulting in rapid growth of a previously obscure category of license (A non-domiciled CDL is a CDL issued to someone who doesn't live in the issuing state.). Illinois, for example, went from issuing 300 non-domiciled CDLs in the year 2020 to issuing 5,000 of these per year in 2024 and 2025, with non-domiciled licenses comprising 40% of all licenses issued in 2025.

Toss in the vibecession and a handful of viral fatal accidents involving non-domiciled CDL holders and you suddenly have enough people aware of the issue and angry about it to lobby for a crackdown.

I have been banging this drum for a long, long time, and have only got more cynical about the possibility of putting together a Republican policy apparatus that is able to fight the left on scale (what hani calls "incompetence"). But there's more than one way to skin a cat. Every month since Trump came back into power, I'm seeing smart guys I'm in groupchats with go to Washington - sometimes to take a job, sometimes just to talk to someone - and taking meaningful Ws that don't make it into the press, the exact sort of thing that the OP describes. The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people. As such, the real question is less "how long did it take the Admin to roll back some crazy trucking regulatory rule" and more "how long did it take between some anon in the industry noticing this crazy rule and the Admin acting."

Edit: as if to reward me for making this poast, this just crossed my feed - tl;dr the Admin changed the definition of "harm" in the Endangered Species Act such that you're allowed to build things even if it might disturb some rare fruitbat or gecko.

The future of the right may not be building a vast apparatus of company men, but tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people.

I have been wondering: for all the drama going on with frontier AI models in the world of digital security, I have to think there are some interesting red-team/blue-team ways to apply those to laws and regulations. Some of the big lawfare shifts we've seen in the last decade or so ("did you know we could just have all the border crossers say the shibboleth asylum and we have to let them in indefinitely until we can give them a hearing?") seem to have come from novel readings or applications of existing rules. It'd be at least interesting (and I haven't tried) to prompt those same models for what corners of the tax code could be abused --- or in reverse, to provide feedback to Congress and regulatory rulemakers --- to promote less-direct outcomes. It's not hard to imagine "hey Claude, let's figure out the most pathological case to bring to trial to make SCOTUS rule my desired direction" actually working.

The problem is less figuring out the ideas to sue over and more building out the necessary infrastructure and legal precedent to get those ideas before the Court. Believe me, there are many, many lawyers already working around the clock to bring these issues before a historically receptive SCOTUS. The thing is, unless you're a state suing another state, you can't just take your case to SCOTUS. It's a multi-year slog of trials and appeals that you have to successfully complete at least 2-3 times (SCOTUS won't hear a case if there isn't a disagreement between at least two circuit courts of appeal) before you even have a shot of getting on their docket. And even then it's a moonshot, with only a tiny percentage of petitions making it to briefing and argument.

The legal activists have good ideas coming out of their ears, but bringing an issue from Zero to SCOTUS, even with the best lawyers in the world working on it, is a ten-year process involving millions of dollars and dozens of skilled professionals working in perfect sync. And those skilled professionals are already making use of AI at least as aggressively as anyone else in the legal field. Maybe there's still some low-hanging fruit that AI can help them more effectively target, some subtle new way of speaking directly to the concerns of five different justices at the same time, but for the most part the bottlenecks are funding and court capacity, not lack of clever strategems.

I think you're right that legal activists aren't really limited by ideas today. But as an example, how will the APA notice and comment regime survive AI-generated slop comments? My understanding is that a lot of it today ends up as boilerplate copy-and-paste letter campaigns: if every commenter writes a unique letter, review will presumably be more involved. Or actively using AI to generate as many novel arguments for/against a proposed rule as possible to exhaust the review process. I'm sure the government side will start using AI to review comments, but I wouldn't expect them to be ahead of the public on their processes.

Require that people who wish to submit a comment do it in person at any post office. The comment has to be recorded on-site with the government supplied equipment, as audio-video, audio only or typed in on a kiosk-mode computer. It wouldn't stop someone reading or retyping AI slop, but it'd slow it down considerably. It would also have the benefit of cutting down the activist spam by requiring a bigger time investment.

There are guys in the various successors to DOGE working on, shall we say, more prosocial variations of this. The red-teaming is definitely going to happen in the legal field, but it's not going to work unless you have hard-nosed legal realists actually taking those arguments before a court (i.e. deciding which arguments will actually work and which courts will be friendly to them).

tightening the OODA loop, getting faster and leaner, and doing more with fewer people

Interesting to think about.

In some ways, the Left is very fast to react. There's a new cause or outrage of the day, and by the evening everyone knows it's the issue of the day; new ones can replace it whenever it's decided.

But there isn't really a central committee actually deciding what to do, and it's not some highly sophisticated ecosystem of policy or issue entrepreneurs performing decentralized decision making. Instead, it's a strongly centralized coordination mechanism, driven not by people but instead some messy combination of what ideological faction is ascendent and what plays best on social media. People on the ground level might come up with interesting ideas, but they've got to go through a host of different groups' veto points to even have a chance of taking off. E.g. this is why the Left has pretty much given up on having a meaningful platform on any AI policy besides AI bad performativity: a platform requires meaningfully engaging with it and its implications, and, since it will gore all oxes, engagement with it will run into endless vetos. So, most you get are shallow responses of boo AI because of water usage or shredding books or whatever.

The Right, on the other hand, is a madhouse of maniacs of different stripes: there is no central coordinating mechanism, and the only thing most people on it have in common with each other is a hatred of the Left. That means there's no real shared policy plan coming from on high, but it also makes for a much more open space for people to contribute ideas. A smart person on a Left worries about alienating X, Y, and Z before they even start thinking how to approach a social or economic issue; but, on the Right, there is no prescribed golden path, and so individuals can be genuine policy entrepreneurs.

(Musing here on a weakly held idea, but maybe there's something there.)

The way I characterize it is that the "madhouse of maniacs" on right all agree that the left is trying to eat the goose that lays the golden eggs and must be stopped. Sometimes they think the left is trying to do this out of malice, but mostly they think it's just sheer foolishness.

Every time I meet an intelligent person who cares deeply about a particular policy area, I tell them the same thing: go to the right and become their guy. The left (and the GOPe/Tories/etc.) are just not interested - $bad_policy is that way for a reason and many people's jobs depend on it staying that way - but the populist right probably has no idea what they want in $policy_area, and if you can come in, be the man with a plan on $policy_area, and be a team player otherwise, you have a chance utterly unprecedented in living memory to make a change actually happen.

This is kind of what I was getting at with "the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but doing it now is still something worthy of praise" and I'm suddenly wondering if you and I might not be in some of the same group chats.

I wonder how many Mottizens secretly know each other in real life but will never make the connection because none of us are stupid enough to tell our coworkers about the Motte. I'm growing increasingly convinced that I've shared office space or attended happy hours with at least a couple of you.

Wearing a t-shirt that reads “it’s okay to be white,” “Islam is right about women,” or “despite being 13% of the population…” to my next company happy hour to see if any Mottizens approach me. What could go wrong?

No, wear a t-shirt saying 'there is a leviathan shaped hole in the hock'.

If you see me at Butterworth's wearing the secret Mottizen symbol, tap me on the shoulder and I'll get you a drink.

The Pug and Trusty's are more my scene, or at least were when I was spending more time in DC. ;-)

I support these things but what mechanism causes the administration not to do them immediately?

News bandwidth. If Trump did all of these things on day one there's only a limited amount of excitement/liberal tears that it could be milked for. Then you'd spend 3.9 years wondering what those lazy oafs are doing or think the threat is gone and you go longer need radical response.

Dripping it out over four years shows that the enemy is active and that they are fighting the fight.

Don’t underestimate the power of institutional inertia. People get upset when the President can’t do things because he isn’t acting like a monarch, but will quickly decry him as a fascist with kingly aspirations whenever policy diverges from voter preference.

Trump could have pardoned everyone in J6 on his way out of office, and not done it after banking on winning 2024 (of which there was no guarantee) and doing it after taking office again, after those defendants suffered much monetary and jail time punishments. There are so many things Trump could be doing to fulfill his promise of financial access (under the misnomer of fighting against "debanking"). Etc. I agree with the other commenter when I say it's just incompetence.

It genuinely feels like incompetence. Not just on behalf of the administration but the entire right wing.

The conception on the right has been that the government does stuff that's bad, the private sector does stuff that's good, and the civilians are just honest spectators whose souls move at the mercy of the government and the whims of the free market, preferably also under the guidance of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.

The left wing, to use these general terms, has in the meantime tried to integrate all of these things in a single ideological package. The markets, the government, the public perception of reality. It's all constantly being synchronized. You get a single ideological block with its own moral narratives, ingroup/outgroup distinctions and everything else. Which turns into a complete worldview. Call it 'Cultural Marxism', call it 'woke', call it 'the post war consensus' or the liberal moral order. Whatever it is, whatever permutation you come across, it's unapologetic, ruthless and consistently self serving. It knows exactly who is friend and who is enemy. What is right, what is wrong.

There is no such force on the right. The closest we've gotten to synchronization is Musk buying twitter, and Musk and Trump being friends. But that alliance was fragile at best since there is no shared worldview between them. 'Free market good' isn't a worldview. 'Government spending bad' isn't one either. In fact it's at best quaint and at worst stupid when your actual ideological enemies are using the 'free market' to push their worldview. Or using the government to fund and protect their foot soldiers.

The right doesn't know friend from foe. It doesn't know what's right and wrong, good or bad. Right wing media figures sometimes brag that the only active and engaging political and philosophical discourse happening in modernity happens on the right. Claiming that the left has become too insular and self absorbed to afford meaningful discourse. And that might be true, but that's also why the left can win and the right seemingly only lose. And no, calling your activist groups 'feds' isn't a worldview either.

There's no racist dragnet trying to identity non-white scammers, because over half the right thinks racism is evil. So instead of getting a clear and concise picture on the ground from coherent right wing activists or media about all the ways the world is wrong according to a dogmatic right wing worldview, we have to rely on the perfect storm of aspergers and autism to incidentally uncover the racist reality of the Somalian scam economy. Meanwhile, the entire left mobilizes without effort to proclaim that incidental racism is racism nonetheless. And that everyone involved is an evil racist. Except the scammers, of course. Peace be upon them.

The right has no ethos. And despite the smugness from the right, it's a land of those the left kicked out.

Yeah this is why the right can only, cut taxes for the rich, or bomb the middle east. That's literally all they ever do. They are absolutely horrible at using state power and usually deeply unserious or unsystematic.

Let’s be frank, both sides these days only play around the edges. How many people out there can you think of that are there at the fore, trying to come with whole new systems of thought and reimagining the entire political landscape for the 21st century?

Mass Migration (Invasion?) Flashpoint

The biggest news of the week is the ongoing Moroccan invasion of Ceuta, Spain. Ceuta is not on the European mainland but on the North African continent. Most recent estimates put about 60,000 migrants having crossed into Spain's North African territory, and the footage of the invasion is catching worldwide attention.

Given footage of Morocco's Royal Gendarmerie standing by while truckloads of men unload and rush the border, and the lack of any apparent effort by Morocco to prevent or control the situation, the situation seems to have been coordinated with Pedro Sanchez describing the situation as an "attack."

Amid the outrage on Twitter, old tweets resurfaced from Yair Netanyahu calling on Arabs and Muslims to invade Ceuta in 2019:

Dear Arabs and Muslims. Want to free occupied Arab Islamic lands? Here’s a good start!

Let’s make a deal, we won’t fund NGOs in your country calling you to give away Ceuta and Melilla, and you will stop funding NGOs in our country that calls us to give away Judea and Samaria

Spain's left-wing government has been extremely hostile to Israel since 2020, with Netanyahu saying in April that Spain will "pay an immediate price" after Spain denied port to cargo ships containing weaponry for Israel.

Spanish diplomats and political commentators have begun alleging the support of Israel in facilitating the Moroccan "migrant" crisis. Morocco is an ally of Israel and the United States after having signed the Abraham Accords in 2020.

Although on the face this may seems like a stretch, Israeli government officials and the Israeli Foreign Ministry sent out tweets congratulating Morocco for its "Throne Day":

To the Kingdom of Morocco, its leadership and its people, we extend our warmest congratulations on the occasion of the Glorious Throne Day.

And from the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs:

Congratulations to King Mohammed VI of Morocco as he marks the 27th anniversary of his accession to the throne. Under his leadership we are working to further cement the ties between our two countries.

It is quite these officials heap praise on Morroco on that day of all days. Other Israeli officials were more direct in tacitly supporting the attack as a punitive measure against Spain for their opposition to Israel's wars. Israel's Ambassador to the United Nations tweeted:

Spain, which never misses an opportunity to lecture Israel, has declared a state of emergency in Ceuta following the crisis over its immigration policy.

Maybe before it continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa.

And Ben Gvir tweeted:

My congratulations to the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, for his profound commitment to welcoming immigration and "human diversity."
As someone who demonstrates great concern for Hamas and the residents of Gaza, I call on you to translate words into actions: open the doors of Spain and grant refuge to the residents of Gaza who seek to emigrate. This is an excellent opportunity to contribute a little more to Spain's "human diversity."

Aside from the veiled threats and gloating coming from Israel in response to this migrant invasion of Spain, what was most surprising to learn was that this exact situation was proposed and supported by the American Enterprise Institute thinktank earlier this year. Michael Rubin, a Jewish Zionist who was a lecturer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wrote on March 12, 2026 in an article tilted Madrid Bashes Israel, but Spain Is the Colonial Power:

President Donald Trump ended his first term by recognizing Morocco’s sovereignty over the Western Sahara, righting a historical wrong that had chaffed Morocco for decades. As Spain turns against the West and doubles down on anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio should right another historical wrong and formally recognize Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory. Sánchez will not do the right thing voluntarily, but perhaps his legacy nevertheless can become the end of Spanish imperialism in Africa.

You might say, ok that's interesting but it's not like it's an endorsement of what happened yesterday, except Michael Rubin wrote a follow-up article on March 16 2026 titled Morocco Should Send a New Green March into Ceuta and Melilla:

With Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez embracing the language of decolonization, Mohammed VI should reclaim the spirit of the Green March to finalize the expulsion of Spanish colonists from Moroccan soil. Ceuta and Melilla might be relatively tiny towns, but they represent illegitimate beach heads and are home to approximately 170,000 Spanish settlers. They are a weak spot for European security since African migrants regularly rush the fence to claim asylum.

Moroccans should gather, send bulldozers to the border, and then enter Ceuta and Melilla unarmed to raise the flag. Sánchez and the Spanish press bleat, but they have no grounds to act. Nor, for that matter, would NATO, even if Moroccan forces entered the towns to restore order and organize the dispatch of settlers across the Strait of Gibraltar and back to Spain.

...

Sánchez should do the right thing: make good on his anti-colonial rhetoric, and end Spain’s occupation in Africa. Meanwhile, authorities in Cádiz should begin preparations to receive displaced Spanish settlers, whether Madrid acquiesces or not.

With Yair Netanyahu's threat to "fund NGOs in your country calling you to give away Ceuta and Melilla", Michael Rubin as a Zionist operative in the American NGO apparatus has done exactly that.

Gates of Toledo

Both Latin and Arabic sources record that Jews of the city "Opened the Gates of Toledo" in 711 to the Arabs that conquered the city and ultimately began Al-Andalus. Although this comparison is being widely made on Twitter, I think Israeli and American motives here would the multi-fold:

  • Weaken, likely collapse left-wing Spanish government that has been the biggest European thorn in Israel's side.
  • Animate European Nationalism against Islam.
  • In doing so, aim for higher coupling between Israel and European Nationalist movements, posturing both as opposing the same threat.

While the first motive is the clearest with the most immediate tradeoff, I expect greater expressions of solidarity between Israel and European nationalist and even nativist movements, with Islam as the targeted common enemy.

Edit: Telegraph reports Morocco ‘facilitated migrant crossings’ into Spain, noting that "Western intelligence sources" believe the crisis was facilitated by Morocco as "diplomatic punishment" for its diplomacy with Algeria.

Morocco facilitated the sudden influx of 60,000 migrants into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta, Western intelligence sources suspect.

Sources told The Telegraph that the surge could have served as a punishment amid diplomatic frustrations with Spain.

“The displacement of such a large number of people from Morocco to Ceuta could not have taken place without the Moroccan authorities knowing about it in advance or without them allowing such a phenomenon to occur,” Haizam Amirah Fernández, the director of the Centre for Contemporary Arab Studies in Madrid, said.

Zalmay Khalilzad, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, said: “Is it possible that the abrupt, mass movement of young men from Morocco to Ceuta is being engineered or facilitated by Morocco?

“Morocco does not recognise Ceuta as part of Spain. It has referred to it as occupied territory and has in the past used the mechanism of allowing illegal migrant movement into Ceuta as leverage to gain concessions from Madrid.”

The article notes that it was the single biggest day of migrant arrivals in the history of the EU, at least 5xing the highest number of arrivals in a single day at the height of the Greek migrant crisis.

Therefore, it stands to reason diplomatic scheming on the part of Morocco and its allies created the crisis, rather than an organic migration of people who heard about last month's court decision in Spain.

The posters scoffing at your proposed connection should note that this event was predicted in May by a journalist. If it is so far-fetched, then how did someone predict it months before?

”The US — and Israel — could also retaliate by stoking tensions on Spain’s southernmost border, by supporting the independence efforts of the two Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla, which sit on the northern shores of Morocco’s Mediterranean coast. Morocco is closely allied with the US and Israel, both of which supported Morocco’s territorial claims over Western Sahara — in return for Rabat’s official recognition of Israel, in late 2020, as part of the Abraham Accords.”

It’s normal in geopolitics to punish countries that defect against your interests. Spain interfered with Israel’s utilization of American soldiers against Iran. Stoking a migrant crisis has the threefold effect of (1) punishing Spain, (2) boosting the chance of a right wing swing, and (3) reminding Westerners that they don’t want Muslims in their countries either. It’s a very easy maneuver that doesn’t require a lot of planning or costs, because Morocco is currently aligned with Israel. Why wouldn’t they do this? It’s in their interests to do this, and any given motte poster would have thought of this if their job was to plot for Israel all day. Well, there are hundreds or thousands of people who plot for Israel’s benefit all day as their actual occupation, so why would this be a far-fetched idea to them?

As both you and the linked blogpost from May notes, Israelis were already talking about this, and the Zionist Republicans seem to have already prepared for it:

A one paragraph section of a report by the Appropriations Committee describes Ceuta and Melilla as “Spanish-administered” but “located on Moroccan territory” [..] This is the first time a body of the lower house of the US Congress has questioned the Spanishness of the two autonomous cities, notes El Confidencial‘s North African correspondent, Ignacio Cembrero, who was first to break the story.

and

the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee is not alone in suddenly questioning the Spanishness of Ceuta and Melilla. Amine Ayoub, a Morocco-based fellow at the Washington-based, pro-Israel Middle East Forum, wrote in Israel’s Y Net Global that tensions between the US and Spain over Iran and NATO “create an opening for Morocco to press its claims on Ceuta and Melilla, with Israel positioned to back Rabat diplomatically within a US-led alliance”. Similar articles have been published in the American Enterprise Institute as well as in several Israeli newspapers (Times of Israel, Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel Hayom and Jerusalem Post)

I do not have time to add a more insightful comment, but it has been hilarious and expected to see ALL the 2nd gen Arab-Italians that I personally know, all of them perfectly integrated and secular, taking the sides of Morocco despite being certain about the Israeli involvment, only because they by instict take the side of the coethnic against the Europeans they in theory have become part of.

Integration my ass. I will write in the future a comment on how "fake integration" actually works in Europe.

I invite people to spend a couple of minutes looking into the history of Ceuta, including its settlement and control by the Portuguese and Spanish going back to 1415. This predates the colonization of the New World.

I mention this because there's memes floating around on X around calling it an exclave and how there is an ocean separating it from Spain and thus justifying that it belongs to Morocco. How this same attitude to separation would justify an invasion of.. oh lets say Hawaii is left unsaid.

Well yeah, isn't Hawaii one of the most brazen recent examples of conquest-colonialism? The only thing standing in the way of a morally justified reconquest there is that there is no nation that can reasonably claim to stand for the original inhabitants anymore.

About a fifth of the Hawaiian population is native or part native. Thats significantly smaller than the east Asian population. Importing large numbers of outsiders to the point they are a supermajority of the local population prevents any hope of reconquista.

The bulk of the United States is an example of conquest-colonialism, and some of the conquered nations still exist.

How this same attitude to separation would justify an invasion of.. oh lets say Hawaii is left unsaid.

Isn't this basically the same argument Argentina has made for Las Malvinas The Falklands?

Relevantly, literally no Argentinians have ever set foot on the Falklands. They were uninhabited before the British arrived.

There are thousands of Argentine veterans who lived in the Falklands, albeit briefly.

And not short enough it was :P

It seems too me that the Israelis are enjoying the schadenfreude of their enemies getting to deal with rowdy Muslims rather than coordinating anything. Morocco routinely does this when they get annoyed with Spain, it's not a new thing so no need to add the Israelis to it because Morocco has been doing this for ages because they claim Ceuta and have a heated rivalry with Algeria. I feel like your heuristics are a broken here in that you barely mention Algeria, even with the edit and have divided the factions here way to uniformly.

Morocco and Algeria are archrivals Morocco is a conservative monarchy and Algeria is a revolutionary socialist state. What's more Algeria backs and hosts the Polisario Liberation front. Separatists who want Western Sahara to be there own independent country. Spain gets most of their natural gas from Algeria and also has bad relations with Morocco because they claim the two Spanish cities on Morocco's coast Ceuta and Melilla. This web of territorial claims alliances and rivalries explain what is going on much more then "the Jews" the Israelis are certainly happy about this but this is a local conflict that doesn't require their coordination.

I expect greater expressions of solidarity between Israel and European nationalist and even nativist movements, with Islam as the targeted common enemy.

This is a very bad heuristic. Israel doesn't care about Islam. They care about Palestinians Israel's enemies are not Islam but Hamas and various Palestinian groups. This is why they can have good relations with Morocco they don't care about >fighting islam as some eternal enemy. The way you do the Jews, which is good for them because this kind of monomania leads to silly things like you referencing Jews betraying Toledo more than a 1000 years ago as if it has some relevance while mostly ignoring the deep seated rivalries actually driving this.

It seems too me that the Israelis are enjoying the schadenfreude of their enemies getting to deal with rowdy Muslims rather than coordinating anything

Normally what people do in situations like this is attack the current government, and boost the opposition that would be more favorable to them. Engaging in this type schadenfreude is somewhere between stupid and "when people tell you who they are, believe them".

I think saying Israel doesn't care about Islam whatsoever is a bit of a misnomer. They've got obvious reasons to not want hardcore Islamism to get much of a foothold in the region (since Jew purging is always gonna be a top 5 cause for hardcores), but they're also capable of negotiating sensibly with Islamic states that are willing to compromise on Koranic conduct for commercial reasons.

Amid the outrage on Twitter, old tweets resurfaced from Yair Netanyahu calling on Arabs and Muslims to invade Ceuta in 2019:

This seems very Trumpian, similar to Texas bussing migrants to northern cities.

Texas bussed migrants originally for the simple reason that bus tickets are cheaper than taking care of someone indefinitely. Greg Abbott then noticed it was very good for his political profile and started sending migrants deliberately to higher-profile targets, but 'convincing illegal immigrants stuck in a backwater to get on a bus to go to some second tier city conveniently far away so Texas wouldn't have to feed or house them' was the original plan, which worked because these people would mostly rather be hanging out in a home depot parking lot in Columbus to begin with(and Texas has no shortage of government officials who speak Spanish and can explain the plan). It was after this started getting attention that Abbott gave the order that they be sent to non-Texas sanctuary cities specifically to raise his political profile.

Yes, no disagreement there. It raised his political profile and was embarrassing for his political opponents. Seems basically what's going on here, albeit I'm talking more about the social media posting than the sending which I have no reason to believe Israel is actually in charge of.

The biggest news of the week is the ongoing Moroccan invasion of Ceuta, Spain. Ceuta is not on the European mainland but on the North African continent. Most recent estimates put about 60,000 migrants having crossed into Spain's North African territory, and the footage of the invasion is catching worldwide attention.

TIL Ceuta.

Of course, our asylum rules are clear: once they are in Spain they can try to claim asylum, and it will be up to the Spanish government to house and feed them while they are processing the claims, and then deport the ones who do not qualify back to their country of origin (which is presumably not Morocco). These are the same rules which allow us to tell women from Afghanistan that they can not claim asylum within the EU while being outside of it, and also penalizing airlines who transport people without visa to EU soil, with the clear hope that they will give up on trying to come here or at least drown in the process.

Given footage of Morocco's Royal Gendarmerie standing by while truckloads of men unload and rush the border, and the lack of any apparent effort by Morocco to prevent or control the situation, the situation seems to have been coordinated with Pedro Sanchez describing the situation as an "attack."

It is generally not the job of the police of other countries to keep refugees out of your borders, if you care about that kind of thing, you should install fences.

The situation would be different if they had allowed them to launch rockets or shells into Ceuta, because defending from these is pretty hard, so a government which allows such attacks to happen is failing in their international duties. By contrast, intercepting people crossing into your country has been doable since we invented agriculture.

I mean, I imagine the EU has been bribing most countries near its borders to house (or imprison) refugees rather than let them move on towards Europe, but that is at worst a breach of contract.

Isn't Michael Rubin the guy who is constantly writing op-eds advocating for war against Turkey on Israel's behalf?

Yes, and the same guy who wrote AEI commentary on why Trump made a mistake with the MOA and the US has to institute regime change in Iran:

What needs to happen in Iran today is what happened in Cambodia: Those who wish for ideological reasons to fight to the death should have their wish granted.

For Trump, this should mean not waiting for a unified proposal or falling victim to the regime’s usual good cop/bad cop games, but rather, targeting all the remaining hardliners without mercy. It is time to eradicate those who embrace the ideology of Ghalibaf, Vahidi, or Secretaryof the Supreme National Security Council Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr in Iran and Nouri al-Maliki and Hadi al-Ameri in Iraq. If the regime today is more radical than two months ago, then the conclusion is that everyone who remains in it should be a target.

Germany had the Nuremberg Tribunal. Japan had the Tokyo trials. If Iranian regime leaders do not flee by a set deadline to a Russia exile, then it is time to start planning the Tehran Court, with Iran’s last public hangings being the Guardsmen who themselves sent so many to their gallows.

This is the guy who said Morocco should send waves of migrants to create a crisis in Ceuta because Spain doesn't support Israel.

I struggle to see the Israeli angle. Looks like a gleeful twitter reaction to an ongoing migrant crisis than a Israel led Muslim invasion.

Israel did not force Pedro to grant amnesty to 500k immigrants. A perceived openness to illegal migrants leads to more illegal migrants. It's not rocket science. Biden's weak stance on border control prompted the migrant crisis in the US, and Trump's stance led to freeze. In either case, the mechanism of entry and the law did not change. It's perceived incentives......

(I wrote this comment before seeing who wrote the post. I should know better)

It's just strange you struggle to see the angle when the angle is directly laid out by Israeli newspapers, and Israel is even doing directly what the article recommends. Why did ultra-Zionist Michael Rubin, representing influential US policy NGOs, directly recommend this back in April? Do you think Rubin being a Zionist Jew had nothing to do with him calling for Morocco to do exactly what it did yesterday, even though Rubin directly cites Spain's enmity towards Israel as justifying his position?

Or to frame it another way, do you think Morocco was involved in orchestrating the crisis? NYT reports being told by multiple migrants they were directed by Moroccan security forces to cross the border.

Ok, so if you admit Morocco was directly involved in the event, then you think it happened totally independent of their military alliance with Israel and totally independent of the enormous enmity between Spain and Israel?

You are saying that it's just a coincidence that Israel's ally Morocco did the thing Israeli advocates and commentators said Israel should support Morocco doing. It's fine to take that position but weird to say you don't see the angle when the angle is corroborated directly from multiple sources.

Italy has suspended Spain from the Schengen Zone, there is going to be huge blowback to the left-wing Spanish government, with elections upcoming, which has been the sworn enemy of Israel for years. To say you don't see the angle makes no sense to me.

What is it exactly that you're accusing Israel of doing here, and why would Israeli involvement be necessary for an explanation when "Morocco facilitated this for Moroccan policy reasons" suffices?

A lot of people would disagree but I’ve come around from thinking you are crazy to believing you have been fundamentally correct on Jewish influence. Atleast as far as the Holocaust was used as a means of convincing western society that any form of racial identity was bad. Maybe that was even a good thing for a while. Plus my gut says 40% plus or minus 10% of the top .1% of wordcells are Jewish so they tend to win a lot of arguments.

I hope now that you are seeing a possibility of the right and Israel having a lot of shared interests against third worldism that we can work together now.

The problem with Zionism is they seem to have had an interests in both promoting ethnonationalism for Israel and erasing nationalism in western society. In the current world I think Zionism should be seeing a lot of benefits to promoting nationalism globally.

I think Jews are overrepresented in the top echelons of a lot of business and intellectual fields, partly due to intelligence and partly due to a bunch of ingroup factors. However, I've always felt that people assume that these Jews are way more monolithic and unified than they actually are. 'There are Jews who are hardcore zionists who want to drive the Palestinians into the Med' and 'There are Jews who laid the groundwork for a lot of modern international moralizing' are both true but I think the actual overlap is minimal and those groups both don't get on particularly well.

This is further emphasized when you notice how low-functioning people who are simultaneously hardcore Zionists and hardcore SJWs tend to be, as they're often socially oblivious enough to have wandered without noticing into a set of beliefs that's extremely unpopular in both circles of the Venn diagram it's in. Sort of a similar pathology to true TERFs, that is, those who are simultaneously hardcore feminists and hardcore anti-trans.

Hardcore feminist-only feminists are usually antitrans, it's SJWs which hold to feminism along with dozens of other beliefs which aren't.

You might think that the pro-trans SJWs lack the credentials to be proper man-hating feminists for various valid reasons, but they are nonetheless overwhelmingly the center of gravity of political actors who conceive of themselves as proper man-hating feminists today.

However, they do not conceive of themselves as man hating feminists first and foremost. They see themselves as primarily opposed to heteronormativity, of which patriarchy is one manifestation.

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Sort of a similar pathology to true TERFs, that is, those who are simultaneously hardcore feminists and hardcore anti-trans.

How is that at all contradictory? If anything hardcore feminists should be true TERFs and not give a shit about nonsense males wandering into their spaces. Trans stuff being wedged next to Feminism and Sexuality issues (and Islam half the time on top of it) does produce a bunch of contradictory stuff but I don't see how anybody can find TERFs contradictory to Feminism if they can just reject the femininity/possibility of transition.

I'm not pointing to an ideological contradiction, I'm saying that they’re the overlap of groups that barely overlap.

True though the Rowling case seems indicative that TERFs are more likely to die on that hill/be proactively purged even if generally aligned

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The above poster said Jews don’t act as a monolithic but I think when you say there are a group of Zionists who are also SJW that is a strong indicator that most Jews do have a sense of Jewish interests. Being a Zionists and a SJW still fits fine within Jewish interests historically even if some of the ideologies of the two beliefs are inconsistent.

I would probably argue at this point SJW is against Jewish interests but pre-Oct 7 those fault lines hadn’t been exposed.

You will never get 100% agreement in a tribe but I do think the tribe had gut instincts on rough directionality of their interests.

Did they just not notice or are they simply sticking to their principles even though it comes at a cost?

I'm all for sticking to weird unpopular principles; the problem here is that the principles are incoherent and the rhetorical stance is an appeal to popularity.

the rhetorical stance is an appeal to popularity.

I didn't understand this part.

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I hope now that you are seeing a possibility of the right and Israel having a lot of shared interests against third worldism that we can work together now.

It's a tragic relationship, like Jacob and Esau. In an ideal world they would be formidable allies but they are intrinsically not allies, they are foreigners with a chip on their shoulders. They can't be trusted. Both Third Worldism and Israel are the adversary, and I actually wish that were not true but believe it is. The Anglos in their naivete believed in the possibility of such racial cooperation and we are living in the fallout of that.

Nothing needs to last forever. There is no bigger risks to Israel than a third world Muslim Europe. They would be surrounded by enemies in the entire Middle East. And of course Mamdani is already kicking them out of NYC.

Look, despite what people will say, enmity towards Jews is not my goal. If Jews and Israel took serious, serious, serious steps towards a genuine alliance I would be open to it. But right now what I see is Israel bringing the American Empire to the brink in order to take care of its rival Iran. I'm not falling for anti-Islam b8 and pretending it makes us allies because it does not. It is very possible, likely, that both Islam and Israel are threats to America and Europe, and Israel fanning the flames of anti-Islamic sentiment in Europe is not going to move the dial for me. I haven't seen an inkling of genuine attempts at reconciliation, if anything we are at the cusp of seriously harming the global economy on behalf of Israel. Anti-Islam solidarity does not change the situation. Both are a problem and I don't see that changing any time soon.

Israel and Jewish lobbying has a lot to do with the US' actions towards Iran, but saying "Israel bringing the American Empire to the brink in order to take care of its rival Iran" is going too far, I think.

The US foreign policy establishment has strong motives to hate Iran even without Jews/Israel in the picture. They are probably still butt-hurt about what happened in 1979. The CIA and the US military both had people killed in Hezbollah actions in the 1980s. Institutions hold grudges. Iran is also the last major blocker to these institutions' domination of the Middle East.

There is a saying which originated with science that “ideas progress one funeral at a time”. I feel like it would be fair to say that at the current time being butthurt over the Iranian Revolution would be outside of most of the intelligence leadership framework. It was 47 years ago. There would be some graybeards who experience it in the teens and ‘20s but most CIA staff today it would just be something in history books.

This is also assumed to happen in market cycles. And a reason why Aschenbrenner would have an awful concept of risks management. The 2000 tech crash was before he was born.

The counter would be that Trump would still be in the cohort with the memory. And the US does have realpolitik reasons to be involved with Iran.

Anti-Islam bait is not an Israeli psyop in the USA; conservative Americans really do have a sharply negative view of mohammedan savagery.

The US right only has two allies - Israel and Argentina. Israel has well no allies. And as much as you hate it you do know Jews have a lot of power because of their brains and group loyalty.

I would say El Salvador has done a lot more for the US right than Argentina has. But the "US right" shouldn't have any foreign allies at all (and in general nor should any other faction within a democratic country). Your allies are the enemies of your enemies, and the enemy of the US right is the US left. A foreign government who is supporting the US right against the US left is meddling in US domestic politics, which is something foreign governments shouldn't be doing, and something that all US factions who even pretend to be patriotic should be discouraging them from doing.

I think Israel is an ally of the US right, in the sense that Israel does meddle in US domestic politics in a way which is intended to help Republicans and DINOs, but turning support for Israel into a partisan issue doesn't seem to be moving either US public opinion or US policy in a pro-Israeli direction. I also don't think that Netanyahu's explicit, public, partisan-coded opposition to Obama over the JCPOA actually helped Republicans.

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The political class in DC is more akin to a vassal of Israel than the US as an “ally,” of them.

The US right only has two allies - Israel and Argentina. Israel has well no allies.

Portraying Israel as an ally to the US, with the US not reciprocating really is something...

Granting amnesty turned them from illegal migrants into legal ones. If the usual path is long and expensive, and the “be a nuisance” path has less hassle and a greater chance of success, all humans except the WEIRD will take the latter.

"except the WEIRD" is going too far, but does have truth to it. The West has unusually strong norms about conscientiousness. Luckily for us, these norms contribute to evolutionary success in enough ways that their continued existence seems likely.

Even among the WEIRD, an overwhelming majority would take the "be a nuisance" path as soon as the stakes were high enough.

This seems like a straightforward case of the Spanish and European elites getting more of what they have been actively rewarding.

Why are Moroccans flooding into Spanish Ceuta?

Is it because the Spain:

  • makes it hard to remove them
  • gives them all citizenship and money
  • is generally a much nicer place than Morocco

OR

Is it because:

  • a bunch of random jews post things on twitter
  • jews in 711 betrayed Toledo to invading Arabs

Jeez, I don't know!

Especially when the forces in Spain that are prompting them to have conflicts with Israel have high overlap with the forces around 'no human is illegal' and the policies thereof.

If you had managed to build up as much hate for Der Ewige Jude as Mr. SS has done, you would have sniffed out the correct conclusion, no matter how unlikely it seemed on the surface.

If you want to have some fun at his expense for being monothematic, fine.

If you want to act like "tee hee, this is all purely organic, no further explanation necessary", that's deranged. Take Israel out of the picture for a moment, do you think when thousands of Iraqis were trying to cross to the EU by way of Belarus, that was also completely organic, no further explanation necessary, or does the sudden appearance of multitudes of migrants from the middle east in one of the most authoritarian countries in the world imply that there was a certain amount of dark scheming (on the part of Belarus and Russia) to screw over Europe? Similarly, do you think that people being shipped by literal truckloads might imply some amount of dark scheming on the part of Morocco?

monothematic

I think "monomaniacal" would be more apt.

I am sure there is much scheming on the parts of Morocco and Belarus, I don't think that's really contested by anyone. So I don't really get what point you're trying to make.

Ok, so if we agree that there probably is scheming on the part of Morocco, I understand if this won't be enough to convince you, but is it really so hard to understand why some people might believe that countries with think thanks openly writing articles about precisely how something like this could be done, might have dropped a few helpful hints for Morocco's scheme?

is it really so hard to understand why some people might believe that countries with think thanks openly writing articles about precisely how something like this could be done, might have dropped a few helpful hints for Morocco's scheme?

The evidence Israel is behind this a 7 year old troll tweet from Yair Netanyahu.

If the tweet was more recent, would you find it more convincing? Because I'm pretty sure in this thread alone people linked to a few. Also news and think tank articles (though I suppose the latter points more to the US than Israel).

Where are these news and think tank articles with evidence that Israel is funding NGOs to convince Morocco to invade Ceuta? I have yet to see any.

How much money did Israel give? To what think tanks? How is it known that the money was for this purpose and not some other? How is it known that such and such NGO or think tank convinced the Moroccan government to act?

Why does a tweet from Yair convince you? Do you believe everything people say on twitter?

Somewhat off-topic, but my brain was getting tickled trying to remember some culture war adjacent story involving Ceuta from a few years ago and I just remembered it and it's a hilarious one. After Spain passed a self identification gender identity law, tons of soldiers and police and others in Ceuta immediately started identifying as women (without making any sort of effort to pass etc.) to get better pay/benefits/special treatment:

https://nypost.com/2024/03/06/world-news/spanish-soldiers-changing-gender-to-female-for-added-benefits/

Yeah I don't think it's anything related to the jews. It's self inflicted exactly like Joe Biden invited 10 million illegals to flood the border.

End the amnesty and deport 100% of the crossers. Then they will stop coming. More hardcore, and of course impossible in the west: a single man with a belt fed machine gun could have stopped this entire incident if given the permission to use it.

Is this event the closest the world has ever come to a real life Camp of the Saints?

When I first heard about this, my first thought was that the author would be feeling very smug if he'd lived to see it.

Jean Raspail did live to see 'Wir Schaffen Das'. That was way more than this, it was millions of people. I wonder what he must have thought.

Isn't a simpler theory that Spain's left wing government has pissed off lots of people; Morocco saw an opportunity; took it; and then the pissed off people are gloating?

What did the Jews even do to make this happen? I don't think lots of money is necessary for this: it's a cheap invasionary force, as far as these things go, and already funded anyway by Morocco and, uh, the EU.

first paragraph

He’s done it! He’s found a new hobby!

second

No way this is real…

third

Oh, there it is.

What’s your creative process for a post like this? Do you start by following Jews on Twitter, then looking for sequelae? Or do you see a modern habbening and start tearing up the floorboards?

Imagine finding a new hobby when the Jews are out there causing all the evils of the world. SMH my head.

Your reaction was mine as well. I thought “refreshing something not about the je….awe shucks”

It's fascinating. I'd love to observe a day in the life of such a person.

It's really not that interesting. The sort of white guy who reads black supremacist agitprop to stay up to date on the Jews is surprisingly normie, this stuff is just a substitute for football to him. One of them once gifted me a history of the world poster that's 20 feet of conspiracy theories going back to Atlantean crystal power somehow. Mostly talks about the weather and clipping coupons in person.

This story reminds me of the old joke about the the two old Jewish guys sitting on a park bench -- one of is shocked to notice that the other is reading White Supremacist literature and asks why. The response: "Where else can I read that Jews control the world and the Holocaust never happened?"

But seriously, it would probably be a good idea for Israel to retaliate against these Leftist-run European countries who are constantly trying to stick their noses into Israel's business and drum up hatred. That being said, the evidence that Israel behind this is rather weak.

But seriously, it would probably be a good idea for Israel to retaliate against these Leftist-run European countries who are constantly trying to stick their noses into Israel's business and drum up hatred. That being said, the evidence that Israel behind this is rather weak.

it never happened, it was exaggerated, and they deserved it anyway

it never happened, it was exaggerated, and they deserved it anyway

I'm not sure what your point is here. Would you mind stating it plainly?

Plainly: in one paragraph you managed both "the evidence Israel did this is weak" and "Israel should retaliate against these countries anyway."

That's the classic guilty-party three-step, didn't happen, was exaggerated, they deserved it, except you compressed it into two sentences, which I admit is efficient.

Pick one: either they didn't do it, or they were justified in doing it.

Arguing both at once is just telling on yourself.

That's the classic guilty-party three-step,

Thanks for the clarification. However I am certainly not claiming that Israel didn't do this. Since I am not a member of the Israeli government, I do not know. My position -- which is correct -- is that the evidence is weak. And you don't seem to dispute this.

Nor am I claiming that the situation has been exaggerated.

Pick one: either they didn't do it, or they were justified in doing it.

Why should I pick one? There's no contradiction.

Arguing both at once is just telling on yourself.

Dude, I'm not Bibi Netanyahu. I'm just a random guy on the internet who's not a representative of any government, let alone the Israeli one.

The fact is that (1) the evidence of Israel's involvement is weak; and (2) it would have been a good idea for Israel to do something like this. My pointing these facts out does not inculpate the Israeli government. How could it? As mentioned above, I don't speak for Israel or any other country.

He’s done it! He’s found a new hobby!

My thoughts too! Like cool anti-immigration, makes sense for a rightward shuffle, I get his bias but hey its progress!!

But then came the "Jews are at fault"... I suppose it can be interesting to read about current affairs from a one-track poster, I would never have heard about this otherwise, my media diet doesn't include much of southern Europe happenings.

Has this not been reported at all in US media?

Over here in the Netherlands it's like frontpage news in mainstream media and it creates a lot of commotion on more European heavy parts of social media as well as far as I can tell. Obviously happenings in Spain will be a bit more relevant for other European countries than in the US, but I would think a seemingly orchestrated event where 50 thousand migrants storm a border and cross illegally into a Western country would get at least a little bit of attention in the US.

The AP version is the top story on google news for me.

It was front and center as “breaking news” on the NYT mobile app when the surge started and is still highlighted as a major item with its own section-header, “Migrant Surge into Spanish Territory” (just checked). Mainstream US news definitely considers it a big deal.

When I checked El Pais yesterday, it didn't seem to be on the front page of the US (Spanish-language) edition but it was the entire front page of the Spain edition. Today it's on the front page of El Pais in the US and all over our English-language media.

I mean slight mea culpa, I don't really read the news much these days. I used to use reddit as my news aggregation source, but I've shed that, now I use themotte.org. As you can imagine we don't exactly get a balanced spread but its honestly more informative than the mainstream, and condensed enough that I don't need to spend hours reading through a gaggle of substacks.

On the front pages of US-based news websites:

CBS: Spain sends over 25,000 migrants back to Morocco from Ceuta; dozens dead

Implying that Spain is the cause of the deaths rather than drownings during the invasion.

I can't hate them any more, I'm already hating as hard as I can.

Implying that Spain is the cause of the deaths rather than drownings during the invasion.

If Spain leaned in to this narrative they might get fewer trying this. They should report 1800 dead.

They don't want the support of people who would be happy at such a report.

What’s your creative process for a post like this? Do you start by following Jews on Twitter, then looking for sequelae? Or do you see a modern habbening and start tearing up the floorboards?

At least on /pol/ in the last 24 hours, most of the threads about this have brought up the various Jewish connections. Both the extremely tenuous/schizo ones like "Israel tweeted out something about a Morrocan holiday it means they're behind it!" as well as some that could theoretically have something of substance behind them. So I wouldn't doubt it if @SecureSignals isn't effectively outsourcing a lot of the research for posts like these to /pol/ and certain corners of Twitter.

Alternatively, he is the one posting these schizo theories on pol and the like.

At the very least, I'd imagine there is a lot of connection between the various lunatics seeing the Jews in every shadow

There's a lot of different(and very different from each other) people who use antisemitic conspiracy theories as a substitute for following sports. Similar hobbyhorses don't mean anything.

My thoughts on this turn in two main directions right now:

This is one of the most important issues in the world, if not the single-most. There is an infinite supply of "asylum" seekers ready come to the first-world from the third. It can overwhelm governments, social services, law and order, middle class citizens, the basic functioning of society. It will fundamentally transform the West, which would mean the end of the kinds of lives we are all used to living.

It will not be allowed to happen.

I think there are a lot of well-meaning Westerners who are abetting this destruction. I think this is functionally identical to mainstream Democrat policies, such as the huge border surge that happened under Biden. I think there are a lot of posters here who endorse these outcomes, or who would allow them to happen out of a fear that the alternatives are worse. I think I have a lot of friends who think that e.g. this might be bad, but also it's more important that we stop Donald Trump or pay attention to train policy.

I really want to gently implore a lot of people to take a serious look at Ceuta and consider how to stop this. I think this is the result of policies that are totally mainstream, certainly endorsed by the leftist government currently running Spain. Because if moderates and leftists can't answer this problem, the result won't be simply more Donald Trumps. It will be people far, far more extreme taking power to do whatever they feel is necessary. It will involve a lot of turmoil and suffering. And it can actually still be stopped.

I also want to say I think the Spanish right, from what I can see, is totally out to lunch. The Israel conspiracizing is very bad and very stupid. I have seen worse floating around online -- that this is actually a plot by the Washington-Rabat-Tel Aviv axis to take control of the Straits of Gibraltar. That Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are plotting to carve up and dismember Spain. That Israel and THE JEWS are behind this. (Again, this stuff has very good odds of seizing power if more mainstream parties refuse to do anything about it.)

I don't think Israel has anything serious to do with this. I think Israel politicians and personalities have a very disastrous talent for bad PR, like an entire country raised on Fox News norms of crying in the town square.

Likewise, Michael Rubin is a total nobody. The American Enterprise Institute has some prestige, but they are not actually on the levers of power anywhere. Washington is full of these kinds of institutes. The closest they get to power is generating novel theories for people with actual power to use as bargaining chips. So Spain says that it's not going to support NATO initiatives and Marco Rubio can respond, well, what if we said you're actually occupying Ceuta? And stuff in that vein.

What I'm starting to see however is a troubling tendency for the European Right to blame America for all its problems. It's America's fault. There's nothing we can do, we're just a small vassal state of the Great American Satan. I think it's a cry of impotence. If the problem were diagnosed as being the fault of Spain's government, there's a lot that could be done to solve this problem. But if it's America's fault, the right can continue its permanent exile because it has no real power, and therefore no real responsibility. An entire generation that wants to doomscroll forever. I think it's disgusting.

If there is any American money behind this at all, it is probably the same complex of unaccountable NGOs laundering money and political power that it has been over all the rest of the world. I don't believe that there is a secret government document titled, "Our Plan to Overwhelm Spain with Jew Power". Quantum of Solace was more realistic. It's not a serious proposal. And thinking along those lines will alienate exactly the allies Spain needs to solve its problems.

This reminds me of the Iran War, which is a whole other conversation I don't want to really get into on this thread. But in addition to all the reasonable positions both sides (yes, I think some of the criticisms made of my arguments that I disagree with are still sane), I think there is a lot of really bad conspiracizing. Total internet nonsense. Iran is emerging stronger than ever, it's going to invade Kuwait soon, the American navy is at the bottom of the sea. It's like something half-intelligible cobbled together by AI. I bring this up to suggest that I'm noticing a trend.

this is actually a plot by the Washington-Rabat-Tel Aviv axis to take control of the Straits of Gibraltar

How Britain has fallen. Such a sad state of affairs... and yes, I'm sure in this conspiracy they fall under "Washington's vassal", but my point is that if there's one place they shouldn't, it's the Falklands. If there's two places, the second is Gibraltar.

What I'm starting to see however is a troubling tendency for the European Right to blame America for all its problems. It's America's fault. There's nothing we can do, we're just a small vassal state of the Great American Satan. I think it's a cry of impotence.

Yeah, no. You can make reasonable argument for the conspiracy being located in Brussels, instead of Washington or Tel Aviv, but an argument that there is no conspiracy, and this is just an issue with the local government is more insane then the conspiracy theories you were sneering at. None of what's happening in Europe has the characteristics of local governments bumbling around randomly, and all the characteristics of a single ideology spreading throughout the elites of the entire European continent, or even the West writ large.

I don't believe that there is a secret government document titled, "Our Plan to Overwhelm Spain with Jew Power".

Yeah, instead there's probably a public non-government book (or several) that was written and read by people at the tops of government and corporate power, which may not involve "Jew Power" but definitely has something to say about replacing the native European population, and was never declared official (or even secret) policy, because these people aren't retarded.

The idea of a conspiracy is unnecessary to explain is happening. An ideology can spread and control politicians' actions without there being a conspiracy to spread it.

To me it seems that the ideology that is responsible for how Europe has been reacting to immigration is not fundamentally an ideology that seeks the replacement of native Europeans. Its main immigration-related goal is not replacement, it is to treat migrants very altruistically, even if that imposes some costs on the natives. I imagine that the number of European politicians who genuinely want to eliminate the native European population and replace it with Africans and Middle Easterners is very small.

The idea of a conspiracy is unnecessary to explain is happening.

Strictly speaking conspiracy is unnecessary even for things that have actually resulted from conspiracy.

An ideology can spread and control politicians' actions without there being a conspiracy to spread it.

They're the same picture. If politicians pushing through policies against the wishes of the electorate because of their ideology, they are engaging in a conspiracy.

Its main immigration-related goal is not replacement, it is to treat migrants very altruistically,

How exactly did you come to know this?

you were sneering at

I wasn't sneering at all and meant everything I said very earnestly. Please consider that I mean what I say and with the best wishes for Europe and the right when you read the following:

but an argument that there is no conspiracy, and this is just an issue with the local government

What on earth are you talking about? "The local government?" The "local" government" is the sovereign government of Spain, a country currently managed by left-wing politicians who deliberately supported what is happening. "Bumbling around randomly"? Doesn't have the characteristics of a "single ideology"? What on earth are you talking about?

I know that power in practice is far more complicated than just, "the local government," that Spain is often at the mercy of larger and more powerful sovereign organizations, but come on.

was written and read by people at the tops of government and corporate power, which may not involve "Jew Power" but definitely has something to say about replacing the native European population

Yes, the people "at the tops of government and corporate power" who want to replace the population of Spain are in fact involved in running the government of Spain! Good grief. Why do you need a conspiracy at all to explain anything at all? It's not a secret, there are powerful politicians putting their names and faces to what is happening, smiling.

Having written all that, I can kind of squint and imagine that what you're saying is that the center of this Open Borders cult is not in Spain. So it's much more than just a Spanish problem. But that still doesn't really address my point: It is also a Spanish problem! The Spanish people actually have significant power to stop this. And they will squander that power if they chase conspiracy theories about the Americans and the Jews. You can fire the Prime Minister and you can impeach the Judges but you can't just sit around waiting for the fall of Rome.

What on earth are you talking about? "The local government?" The "local" government" is the sovereign government of Spai

Yes, as opposed to larger political entities like the European Union.

currently managed by left-wing politicians who deliberately supported what is happening. "Bumbling around randomly"? Doesn't have the characteristics of a "single ideology"? What on earth are you talking about?

Does have all the overarching characteristics of a single ideology (I may have accidently a word). You know how Spain "is managed by left-wing politicians who deliberately supported what is happening"? Turns out it's not just Spain, but every single western country. Even ones putting on a show of being "right wing". That's why it's "overarching". I don't think that's a difficult concept to understand.

Good grief. Why do you need a conspiracy at all to explain anything at all?

Because everyone is calling me a conspiracy theorist when I complain about it?

Having written all that, I can kind of squint and imagine that what you're saying is that the center of this Open Borders cult is not in Spain. So it's much more than just a Spanish problem. But that still doesn't really address my point: It is also a Spanish problem!

Sure, I don't disagree with that at all.

The Spanish people actually have significant power to stop this. And they will squander that power if they chase conspiracy theories about the Americans and the Jews. You can fire the Prime Minister and you can impeach the Judges but you can't just sit around waiting for the fall of Rome.

Look, I agree that trying to do something is better than whinging about the powers that be, but I think it's dishonest to deny that there are, in fact powers that be, that will put significant resources into preventing any of this happening. If the Spanish people organize, the entire media apparatus will immediately call them Nazis, dig for any and all dirt that can be dug out, and promote anyone who opposes you. The EU will compel social media companies to throttle your, especially leading up to elections. If by any chance you do win, and start implementing stricter immigration policy, and especially if you start impeaching judges, you will get the Poland-Hungary treatment, and your country can kiss all that sweet EU cash goodbye, and will be fined on top of that.

Again, I don't like whinging any more than you do, but we should not pretend that the challenge is limited to local national politics.

I don't really disagree with any of this per se, and we're more or less on the same side with respect to the threat of migration. There are definitely larger matters at play than just the politics of the government of Spain. But conspiracy theories about the Israelis and the Americans -- and that's what they are, totally unsupported conspiracy theories -- will waste the efforts of the European and Spanish right. It feels like watching Lee prepare for Pickett's Charge, it's totally all wrong, it's going to fail disastrously. And the fantasy itself that America is behind it all will sap what political will remains, because it's a message that says there's little to be done except to keep watching the TV and hope for the best. This is in fact what I think the major problem is: Europe is losing the will to power, and will accept any fantasy that explains why it's correct for them to have done so.

The Israel connection is a bit of a red herring IMHO.

What's hilarious is that this is being organized by the AMDH (Moroccan Association for Human Rights). The AMDH is funded by the EU, because of course it is.

You'd think that funding an organization pushing to reconquer EU territory would be against some rule or another, but no.

Both Latin and Arabic sources record that Jews of the city "Opened the Gates of Toledo" in 711 to the Arabs that conquered the city and ultimately began Al-Andalus.

The situations aren't comparable. Even if I bought the idea of a geopolitical conspiracy (and I don't) the gates were still not opened by residents/putative allies. They were simply tested by foreign groups with shared antagonism with Spain, which should always be expected (which is why the betrayal is so distressing).

If anyone is the Jew in Toledo in your framing it's the Spanish government.

the gates were still not opened by residents

They were. It's just that they weren't Jewish this time around...

Left out- Spain is in the process of granting mass amnesty and citizenship to illegals. It is not the usual target for mass Islamic immigration(they prefer the wealthier states further north), but it is a damn sight nicer than North Africa and it’s a Schengen area country which gives Spanish citizens free movement in the EU. When their immigrants were mostly skilled workers from Latin america, no one cared(these guys make good immigrants on average, thé US’s problems mostly comes from the ridiculous number of them), but now there might be consequences within the EU.

No Israeli cooperation necessary. That could easily be the kind of Balkans gloating thé Israeli right loves these days.

This could potentially mark the beginning of the end of the freedom of movement between EU countries. Right wing politicians are already pouncing on this, and no one wants to spend resources on welfare programs for people who didn't earn it. Even the left struggles with justifying this, with their main fallback being that the immigrants will start contributing more than they consume eventually. A way of thinking that can be true, but has been proven wrong enough times that it has lost much of its power.

these guys make good immigrants on average, thé US’s problems mostly comes from the ridiculous number of them

Also I'd imagine filtering for those who could get sufficient resources and reason to be in Spain before going walkabout was a reasonable filter.

It is not the usual target for mass Islamic immigration

What? They're full of Muslims.

That could easily be the kind of Balkans gloating thé Israeli right loves these days.

They can gloat, or they can whinge about rising antisemitism, but I'm not dealing with both.

Spain is amusing because the left always goes out of their way to excuse / ignore behaviour they condemn elsewhere.

eg

  • Spain built border walls to defend their African holdings while condemning border walls in Israel and Easter Europe.
  • Ceuta is typically left off of lists of extant colonial holdings while places like the Falklands are kept on.

Ceuta is typically left off of lists of extant colonial holdings

On this they're kinda right. Ceuta is not a colonial holding under any reasonable definition.

Ok so this list I was thinking of was this: United Nations list of non-self-governing territories

It just looks like it's mostly about hating anglos.

Sure, and while I can imagine how you could add, for example, Greenland, or vast swathes of China or Russia into the list, Ceuta and Melilla simply don't qualify. They're Spanish cities with Spaniards as residents, and they have been for centuries.

Agreed, it seems like it was conquered in 1415. If Ceuta is a colonial holding, then so are Wales or Istanbul.

I mean, it is certainly an overseas holding, they would not have kept their independence from Morocco without support from Iberia, but that does not make them a colony.

Agreed, it seems like it was conquered in 1415. If Ceuta is a colonial holding, then so are Wales or Istanbul.

True, but there's regularly pressure these days for Westerners to abandon areas like the Falklands and the Chagos where there was absolutely zero prior human habitation on vague anti-colonialist grounds.

The Chagos islands had a human population that was forcibly removed to build a military base.

Upon the first Western ship arriving at the Chagos Islands there had been no prior inhabitation. The British randomly dropped a few Indians there as they are wont to do, but they are introduced by the British.

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That human population is descended from settlers. Nonwhite settlers, true, but they don't predate the Europeans.

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Although on the face this may seems like a stretch

You should have trusted your gut on this one.

The gloating is obviously of the form "you criticise how we deal with the Palestinians, but it's easy to criticise us when you don't have to deal with tens of thousands of hostile MENA men right on your doorstep. Now you understand what it's like to be on the receiving end." No conspiracy necessary.

Spain is not shooting these people or bombing their homes and has been working to naturalize millions of immigrants. Doing exactly what they say Israel should do.

has been working to naturalize millions of immigrants.

And is the average Spaniard happy about this, in your opinion?

I don't know. Do you put much weight on the feelings of Spanish voters in general? Or only when they can be leveraged towards the rhetorical interests of Israel in some way?

Not to make this sound too antagonistic, I've just been coming across these 2016-era ethnonationalist arguments in favor of Israel from unexpected directions. And I'm having a hard time reconciling just how far removed they are from what has been argued continuously by such people for over a decade. Not to say this applies to you in any direct way, just that you happen to fit a pattern in my brain at the moment, pending clarification.

For me it's either a universal principle, or at the very least a principle that applies to both Europeans and jews, or something else is going on that I want no part of until it's openly explained.

All that aside, I don't think the left wing in Europe has ever cared for populism beyond it being a vessel to take power. They use that power to oppose Israel on pretty consistent grounds to what they advocate at home. In that context I don't understand the question you are asking. I'm not too clued in on Spanish elections, but my ignorant assumption would be that they are democratic, fair and the the current government won.

Okay, well my impression is that the modal Spanish voter is not at all enthused about the prospect of naturalising millions of north African migrants. According to this report, a 2011 survey found that two-thirds of Spaniards think there are too many immigrants in the country (although this proportion had fallen to 47% by 2017). A 2017 poll found that only 20% of Spaniards think immigration has had a positive impact on the country. A poll from June of this year found that 63% of Spaniards had an unfavourable opinion of Pedro Sánchez.

My presumption would be that around half the electorate are generally in favor of the shitlib worldview, including immigration. Within that half you typically have two types. An ideologically unaware person that cries at refugee propaganda on TV, and an ideological leftist of some stripe. Spain usually has more of the latter than the average European country.

The right wing half is generally similarly split. The type that says they are opposed to immigration or whatever but can't formulate a coherent reason for why since they otherwise buy into the shitlib worldview without being aware, and the ideologically right wing type. It's rare for the latter to exceed 20% of the electorate or strike out on their own.

In a multi-party system like is common in Europe, a 37% approval rating is not that bad actually.

A crisis that is likely going to end Spain's left-wing government comes out of thin air, clearly coordinated, and also suggested and supported by American policy think tanks? I meant it was a stretch before reviewing all the evidence that this is actually a geopolitical move not a random migration event.

What makes you think that it is likely to end the government? The sudden migration from yesterday has already been largely reversed (or at least, that is what the popular narrative currently is), and I'm not sure that Spanish voters really care that much about migration to begin with.

comes out of thin air

Are you forgetting the part where the Spanish government granted a mass amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants a few weeks ago?

Or perhaps the decision by the Spanish supreme court that forbade the authorities in Ceuta from turning away illegal immigrants?

But no, it must somehow be the fault of the Jews.

The authorities in Ceuta should send them to the Palacio de las Salesas Reales, for humanitarian reasons.

Did Israel and/or America make Spain's Supreme Court annul huge sections of their Immigration Regulations a few weeks ago? Did America tell Spain to spend less on its military so it couldn't defend its borders? Did Israel Spain's left-wing government?

I actually agree with you that Israel and the US is likely involved in this one, but portraying this as "out of nowhere", and the Spanish left as hapless victims of foreign schemes does not help the impression that you're singularly obsessed with Israel / the Jews, to the detriment of literally everything else.

By "out of nowhere" I mean that this wasn't a random migration event. I am well-aware that Spain has been heavily involved in making an enemy of Israel and making the US unhappy- they aren't hapless victims they are paying the price for their politics. There's good reason for US/Israel to not like Spain.

No, what they mean is that Spain's messaging and policy alone gave migrants reason to think they could try their chances, much like similar messaging from the Biden administration was followed by a "surge to the border" (which at the time had a good relationship with Israel, in case we want to blame that on them too)

And what I mean is that if it was not for the left's domestic policy, none of this would be happening to begin with, or at worst it would have been trivially repelled. Russia and Belarus tried the same thing with Poland and the Baltics, and didn't get far.

A crisis that is likely going to end Spain's left-wing government comes out of thin air, clearly coordinated,

How thin air? That left-wing government just recently granted citizenship to half a million Africans, with heavy implications that they'd do it again and in greater numbers. Invasion levels of young men charging into Spain was the most predictable outcome in the world.

This article claims that 1.2 million illegal immigrants have applied, with 600k applications having been processed so far. Half a million is the lower bound.

Is it a coordinated geopolitical move? Possibly.

Is it a coordinated geopolitical move in which the Israelis are involved? I don't think you've even come close to arguing that claim.

Normally I'd object to the word "invasion" used to describe illegal immigration, but not in this case, having seen the footage (e.g. here. That account is generally unreliable but there don't seem to be questions about that footage), it's hard to say otherwise. But did you HAVE to make it about the Jews this time? Could you not do that for ONE post? It's not Israel or the Jews doing this, Spain has their own suicidal lefties.

Not sure what Spain can do at this point, given they won't use harsh measures. One unlikely possibility is to evacuate and abandon Ceuta, which would make it an invasion and conquest, though the actual invaders wouldn't get what they wanted from that.

People can use words however they want to, of course, but my personal definition of "invasion" requires top-down coordination, and the numbers are pretty irrelevant. So to me, the D-Day landings were an invasion not because tens of thousands of people landed on the French coast, but because the whole thing was coordinated top-down.

I don't know if there was top-down coordination in Ceuta, I'm just riffing on the topic of the word "invasion".

Insert complaints about NGOs' top-down coordination of migrant caravans from Central America through Mexico into the US.

Its interesting, I'm sure that some time in the not that distant past, a huge group of almost-entirely-male foreigners moving, uninvited, as a horde into your country's declared borders would be decreed an 'invasion' or whatever your linguistic equivalent was by the leaders of your territory. I'd guess this word would apply even if they were motivated by economic necessity or some natural disaster forcing migration, rather than military conquest.

If your team was able to organize and repel them, you'd retain your sovereignty in that area, if you were not, then likely you would lose control/access of that particular piece of territory to the 'invaders.'

But we now have a system of Democracy overlaid on the territory that provides a means for the 'invaders' to be legitimized and deemed citizens of the nation if they can convince a certain number of the existing residents to approve it. So this creates an interesting incentive for the horde of foreigners to appear as sympathetic as possible to maximize the chances of existing citizens to take their side. So now its an advantage to claim economic distress and oppression, and military conquest is not even a necessary condition.

And thus, a given territory can be 'lost' whilst still remaining nominally a part of the nation, because the governmental system just absorbs the newcomers into the system and grants them de facto equal status to everyone else there, at least in terms of their influence on the system itself.

My point is mainly that I cannot imagine that any autocracy would tolerate the behavior on display in that video. No dictatorship, fiefdom, Junta, or monarch would say "oh sure let a couple thousand of them come storming in, we'll get some aid workers on site to make sure they have a place to stay, and after a year or two we'll discuss granting them full citizenship."

This seems borne out by looking at the relatively few remaining autocracies out there and how they treat foreigners.

The danger such a group poses is clear when they might decrease your ability to effectively govern unimpeded in a domain you're charged with maintaining. If, instead, they can bolster your side's political grip and you can slough the costs off on the citizens as a whole, that calculus changes.

To go with your point the government of Morocco wants these to be literal invaders. They know they're probably just going to get low status jobs on the mainland but they'd be overjoyed if these migrants overthrew the municipal government and joined Morocco. This is much more of an invasion then typical migration because actual conflicting territorial claims are involved.

This didn't come out of nowhere randomly, it was coordinated. America, Israel, Morocco, and Spain are the players involved here. American policy shifts on Ceuta, at the behest of Rubio, right before this happens, and AEI calls for this to happen in the Middle East Forum right before it happens. A geopolitical game to punish Spain and reward Morocco (a US and Israeli ally) is far more likely than a random migration wave of 60,000+ people at the same time. Combined with veiled threats and gloating from Israeli diplomats, it's the more likely explanation.

I typically really disagree with your posts, but I think you've done a better job putting together evidence here FWIW.

Do we have any information about what triggered the "Invasion"? Any evidence that it was kickstarted by an NGO? I don't even need direct ties to the US or Israel, it just being there and somewhat responsible would be enough of a signal to accept this conspiracy as probably true in the year of our lord 2026.

America, Israel, Morocco, and Spain are the players involved here.

Aside from tweets, what is your evidence for Israeli involvement?

Your post is arguing the Israelis are involved, but you're already assuming the conclusion.

Morocco is an Israeli ally, when they make a major geopolitical move it's basically given it was in coordination with their major allies. Israel has a motive to facilitate this move. Israeli Newspapers have suggested doing exactly this, Abraham Accords reach the Strait: how Israel can help Morocco reclaim its north

US-Spain tensions over NATO, Iran create opening for Morocco to press claims on Ceuta and Melilla, with Israel positioned to back Rabat diplomatically within US-led alliance that increasingly favors cooperative partners over European holdouts

...

The geopolitical earthquake shaking Washington's relationship with Madrid has opened an unexpected window for one of the Arab world's oldest territorial grievances. Spain's refusal to allow the United States access to its Rota and Morón military bases during the Iran campaign, its consistent failure to meet NATO defense spending targets, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's confrontational posture toward the Trump administration have collectively generated something rare in North African affairs: a genuine crack in Spain's strategic armor over Ceuta and Melilla. Into that crack, Morocco's most consequential new partner, Israel, is uniquely positioned to press.

The pieces have been assembling for months. In March 2026, Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, writing through the Middle East Forum, called on the Trump administration to formally recognize Ceuta and Melilla as occupied Moroccan territory, branding Spain "a colonial power running colonies across the Strait of Gibraltar." Days later, Representative Mario Díaz-Balart, chairman of the House Subcommittee on National Security and one of Marco Rubio's closest congressional confidants, declared publicly that the enclaves "are not in the geographic territory of Spain" but rather in Moroccan territory, and that their fate should be "established, negotiated, and discussed between friends and allies." This was not the fringe speaking. This was the architecture of a coordinated strategic repositioning.

...

The Abraham Accords transformed Morocco from a quiet interlocutor with Israel into a formal military partner. In January 2026, Israel and Morocco signed a joint military work plan for the year during the third meeting of their Joint Military Committee in Tel Aviv, which the IDF described as deepening cooperation with a "key partner for regional stability." The two countries had already concluded a security cooperation agreement in 2021. This bilateral architecture gives Israel something it has rarely possessed in North African politics: direct strategic stake in Rabat's regional success.

That stake has an obvious application to Ceuta and Melilla. The Trump administration's Abrahamic coalition, built around shared opposition to Iran and common economic incentives, has created an operational triangular relationship between Washington, Jerusalem, and Rabat. Israel's voice in that triangle carries disproportionate weight. When Israeli officials signal alignment with a partner's strategic interests, that signal registers powerfully in a White House that has placed Abraham Accords expansion at the center of its foreign policy vision. Morocco's territorial claim over the enclaves is not simply a bilateral dispute with Spain; it is increasingly a litmus test for whether the Trump administration will reward its most cooperative partners over its most obstinate NATO members.

Israel can advance Morocco's cause through three distinct channels. First, through direct diplomatic signaling. Israeli acknowledgment that Spain's continued occupation of African territory undermines the post-colonial credibility that normalization frameworks require would reframe Ceuta and Melilla as a regional governance issue, not merely a bilateral spat. Second, through Washington corridors where Israel's influence is considerable, Israeli officials can amplify the case that Morocco's strategic contribution, anchoring the western Mediterranean, controlling the southern approach to the Strait of Gibraltar, and serving as America's longest-standing treaty partner, warrants concrete American support on its most persistent territorial demand. Third, Israel can expose Spain's glaring hypocrisy. Madrid has been among the loudest European voices condemning Israeli territorial policies and settlements.

Arguments from motives are meaningless.

"Johnson stood to benefit from JFK's assassination!"
"Okay, but do you have any evidence he was involved?"
"He stood to benefit! How much more evidence do you want?"

Motive and means and opportunity. Motive alone doesn't mean much of anything.

I would like to believe your reasoning is more sophisticated than "something bad happens in a country -> that country has criticised Israel in the past -> therefore, the bad thing was deliberately orchestrated by Israel". But you're really not presenting a lot of persuasive evidence that it's more sophisticated than that.

The means are exactly what was suggested by this Israeli paper and Michael Rubin at the AEI- rush the border and create a crisis... Elections in Spain are next year and this is going to hurt the left-wing government. Israeli diplomats are even using the crisis to "expose Spain's hypocrisy" which was also suggested directly by the article... The mean, motives, and opportunity are clear. And the alternative explanation: "random migration event" holds no water.

I agree with you that it may be coordinated. My question is why you don't consider the possibility that it was coordinated by the Moroccan government, but instead immediately jump to the conclusion that it's the Israelis pulling the strings.

(I mean, I know why you jumped to that conclusion. I'm just pointing out holes in your reasoning.)

Of course it was directly coordinated by the Moroccan government. But at a geopolitical level it was also likewise coordinated with Morocco's allies, which would be Israel and the United States. And Israeli newspapers and Zionist American thinktanks lay out the means, motives, and opportunities for doing exactly what has happened.

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