Hezbollah Bomb Maker Nabbed at US Border, Boeing Whistleblower Case--More Circumstantial Evidence to Suspect Foul Play, France & Latvia Sending Troops into Ukraine War? (The Five for 03/19/24)
Plus, NY Times reverses course on COVID school shutdowns, the political right spars over raising the age of social security.
Hey, welcome to The Five, a publication about the stories that matter.
One quick note before we dive in…I never expected to run for political office,
I did a consulting gig with Normandy Schools Collaborative, and was asked by members of the community to run for board. The district is currently at 7%-16% proficiency in reading & math, due to years of poor leadership.
However, the district has new leadership and a lot of potential, and my unique skill set is positioned to help serve kids in a very mixed income district. School Board is an elected, but unpaid position, and I’m mostly self-financing my campaign. But if you’d like to help with:
signs
printed materials
digital ads
You can donate $5-$20 here. The election is in three weeks, so this will be my only ask.
DONATE HERE
You can learn more about why I’m running, including to:
offer cash incentives to at-risk students, to prevent dropouts
make buying a small business right after high school an educational goal for some grads
Now, let’s dive into the news.
[one]
Over the last 12 months, the surge in illegal immigration has caused rampant speculation as to whether or not some of the military aged men crossing from Mexico into the U.S. could be terrorists, avoiding legal immigration.
Now, a member of the terrorist group Hezbollah has been captured, according to NBC News:
Border Patrol agents stopped a Lebanese migrant at the border near El Paso, Texas, earlier this month who claimed to be a member of Hezbollah and that he was going to New York and was going to try to make a bomb, a Customs and Border Protection official confirmed Monday.
The man is now in U.S. custody and there is an active investigation into him and his claims, said the official, who asked to remain anonymous.
The New York Post first reported that Basel Bassel Ebbadi, 22, had been apprehended trying to cross the border in Texas on March 9 and that he told agents that he had trained with Hezbollah and said, “I’m going to try to make a bomb.”
According to the official 9/11 report, issued in 2005, terrorists enter the U.S. through both the Mexico AND Canadian borders.
A question I was constantly asked while on the Commission
was whether my team had come across any evidence of terrorists'
illegally entering the U.S. While the hijackers chose to
acquire visas and enter legally, other foreign terrorists have
entered the U.S. illegally. For example, Abdul Al-Marabh, a
likely al Qaeda member who told authorities he had often
crossed back and forth over the Northern border illegally, was
finally caught in the back of a tractor-trailer crossing the
Northern border around February 2001. During his time in the
U.S., he had received five U.S. driver's licenses in 13 months,
including a commercial driver's license and a permit to haul
hazardous materials.
Mahmoud Kourani, a known Hizballah operative now in Federal
custody on terrorism charges, crossed the Southwest border in a
car trunk in June 2001. He goes to trial in Detroit in April.
Political asylum and naturalization are the two immigration
benefits most rampantly abused by terrorists in my studies. I
have found 22 separate incidents of indicted or convicted
terrorists who abused our political asylum system. Nine of
these terrorists did so after the 1996 revision of our
immigration laws. Members of Hamas, al Qaeda, and Egyptian and
Pakistani terror groups have all used claims of political
asylum to stay longer in the U.S.So, we’ve known about this for nearly 20 years…and still no changes on U.S. border security, on either the Canadian or Mexican line.
I hope I’m wrong, but my best guess is that this policy will be frantically examined next time there’s a terrorist attack (which doesn’t seem far off), and rather than making meaningful change to border security, the U.S. will just spy on civilians more, a la the Patriot Act.
[two]
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro is known for “triggering” the political left…but recently, he knocked heads with many on the political right after comments about hitting the third rail of politics, social security, according to Yahoo Finance:
“No one in the United States should be retiring at 65 years old. ... It’s totally insane that you believe that you should be able to work from the time that you are essentially 20 to the time that you are 65 — 45 years — pay in, and then you’ll receive Social Security benefits sufficient to support you and your family for, like, another 20 years. That’s crazy talk.”
Conservative commentator Saager Enjeti on Breaking Points:
One of the reasons why I think retirement age is so, or sorry, retirement, social security, and all that is so imperative is that we have a huge manual labor underclass in this country of which their body literally gets broken down. Yeah. And if you look at some of the poverty statistics from the 1930s, It is horrifying.
I know that in AMI and all those, it's like, it's, it val it kind of popularizes this image that it was working age people who were in Hoovervilles, and that is certainly true to some extent, but a lot of the people who were starving to death and dying, they were just old. Yes. They were pensioners. I mean, and, but I mean that they got, they went broke, their bank were gone, and these people Guys, they died of, of literal starvation because they were so poor and they could not go or even qualify under this.
And then finally, there's a basic aspect of fairness. I've been paying in this damn program my entire life. Every time I look at my paycheck, I said, I remember the very first time I get, I got paid. I said, what the, this is FICA shit, you know? And then I was like, Oh, it's social security. I'm like, okay. But that's part of the thing is that every American who works in this country, they're We have paid into this system, fairly or not, you know, you can say reform, etc.
I'm like, no, no, no, no, you took my, you took a hell of a lot of my money over the years, not even close to what I'm going to get back out of it. At the very least, I'm going to get something. So the idea that it's going to get abolished is completely outrageous. And the idea that it's a Ponzi scheme is also just factually incorrect.
Elsewhere, Shapiro and fellow Daily Wire host Matt Walsh were hit over not understanding the working class realities:
Personally, I haven’t had enough of a deep dive on this one to be able to speak on the subject articulately, except to point out the more populist segment of the political right seems to be moving to the center here. Or, depending on where you’re starting, toward the political left.
Many left-of-center commentators have described Trump as the “extreme right wing” of the party, but in reality The Donald seems to be pulling some issues towards policies traditionally backed by Democrats.
[three]
New updates on the death of John Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower who allegedly committed suicide before he could finish testifying against the company’s alleged intentionally poor manufacturing processes.
The previous day, Barnett had been on a roll as a video camera recorded the event. “John testified for four hours in questioning by my co-counsel Brian,” says Turkewitz. “This was following seven hours of cross examination by Boeing’s lawyers on Thursday. He was really happy to be telling his side of the story, excited to be fielding our questions, doing a great job. It was explosive stuff. As I’m sitting there, I’m thinking, ‘This is the best witness I’ve ever seen.’” At one point, says Turkewitz, the Boeing lawyer protested that Barnett was reciting the details of incidents from a decade ago, and specific dates, without looking at documents. As Turkevitz recalls the exchange, Barnett fired back, "I know these documents inside out. I’ve had to live it."
Acording to Yahoo, Barnett packed up his room and told his mom he’d be home Sunday. Barnett had previously requested a recess, but Boeing’s lawyers insisted he stay in town.
The next morning, Barnett didn’t answer his phone…and his attorneys drove to the Holiday Inn to find police swarming the parking lot, after his body discovered.
To Turkewitz and Knowles, Barnett’s lawyers and friends for seven years, the tragedy was incomprehensible. “He was in a good mood the evening before, so looking forward to testifying on Saturday,” says Turkewitz. “Although he was tired, I saw no sign he was in distress.” Turkewitz and Knowles said in a statement, “We didn’t see any indication that he would take his own life. No one can believe it. The Charleston police need to investigate this fully and accurately and tell the public. No detail can be left unturned.” Two detectives from the City of Charleston Police Department are currently conducting an investigation into Barnett's death.
I’m not an on-the-ground investigative reporter, but which one of these seems more plausible:
A) It’s coincidence that Boeing insisted Barnett remain in town the night he definitely was not murdered. Barnett’s mood radically shifted overnight, and he went from being excited about his future to taking his life in just a few hours, despite giving no prior signs of self-harm, and which just so happens to benefit a company that makes $7.2 billion in profits each year…
ORRRR…
B) He got whacked.
Again, this is just opinion, not investigative journalism…but the first theory involves a LOT more moving parts to be true.
[four]
Are France and Latvia planning to send troops to battle Russia in Ukraine? Maybe?!
Small European state Latvia has articulated its support for Emmanuel Macron’s explosive talk of deploying NATO troops to Ukraine, saying “We need to make sure that Ukraine wins in this war.”
While NATO in general, and particularly its more Western members remain very concerned about the repeated, almost daily, exhortations from French President Emmanuel Macron that the time for ‘boots on the ground’ in Ukraine may be coming, he is finding some support from the Eastern European states. These countries which have a land border with Russia and Belarus, or would do if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine continued unabated, feel directly threatened by Moscow expansionist sentiment and clearly wish to see a definite outcome for Russia’s invasion, discouraging it trying the same with others.
It’s almost like France forgets they’re the Kansas City Royals of war…doesn’t matter what year it is, they don’t win.
[five]
And finally, the NY Times, a paper which took a very pro-lockdown approach during COVID, now says the data about keeping schools shuttered proves the extended remote learning sessions were harmful.
Four years ago this month, schools nationwide began to shut down, igniting one of the most polarizing and partisan debates of the pandemic.
Some schools, often in Republican-led states and rural areas, reopened by fall 2020. Others, typically in large cities and states led by Democrats, would not fully reopen for another year.
A variety of data — about children’s academic outcomes and about the spread of Covid-19 — has accumulated in the time since. Today, there is broad acknowledgment among many public health and education experts that extended school closures did not significantly stop the spread of Covid, while the academic harms for children have been large and long-lasting.
While poverty and other factors also played a role, remote learning was a key driver of academic declines during the pandemic, research shows — a finding that held true across income levels.
“There’s fairly good consensus that, in general, as a society, we probably kept kids out of school longer than we should have,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease specialist who helped write guidance for the American Academy of Pediatrics, which recommended in June 2020 that schools reopen with safety measures in place.
Until the next one,
-sth