Republicans cannot serve two masters on immigration



Eleven years after Donald Trump’s rise, the Republican Party still has not broken with the business interests that depend on cheap, abundant migrant labor. A handful of conservatives want to shut off the employment spigot and reduce both illegal and legal immigration. But too much of the party remains willing to protect longtime illegal workers in agriculture, expand guest-worker programs, or legalize workers already here when employers insist they cannot operate without them.

That’s the real fault line. Almost every Republican says border chaos is bad. The harder test comes when immigration enforcement raises labor costs for industries dependent upon a large foreign workforce.

When a party’s voters and its governing class want fundamentally different things on a defining issue, eventually the contradiction must break somewhere.

For years, Republicans have talked about focusing deportations on criminal aliens while treating workers in agriculture, hospitality, and other favored industries differently. That approach leaves the cheap labor pipeline largely intact. If employers can continue hiring illegal labor with little consequence, the incentive to come and remain does not disappear.

Republicans simply won’t protect our nation’s sovereignty. Instead, they build up a false dichotomy that points to one solution: amnesty.

Senator Jim Justice (R-W.Va.) made the tension explicit last month. He told Politico that ICE can get “carried away” and questioned “dragging people away that have lived on your street corner for 15 years.” He later issued a statement saying he supports Trump’s immigration strategy “full stop,” while emphasizing the removal of dangerous criminals.

Justice serves one of the most anti-illegal alien states. He did not endorse blanket amnesty outright. He didn’t need to. His comments reveal how quickly the politics change once enforcement reaches local industries and communities that have become addicted to illegal labor.

The same pressure surfaced in southwest Kansas after ICE operations disrupted meatpacking towns. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) complained that local law enforcement had not received adequate notice and said the operations caused “mass disruptions to local communities and businesses.” Enforcement, he said, should be done “in a responsible and secure manner.” Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) likewise urged coordination with local police and said DHS told him the operation targeted people with criminal warrants.

Their complaint was about tactics and coordination, not ICE’s legal authority to remove illegal aliens. Still, the episode underscores the problem: Enforcement remains popular in the abstract until it collides with an employer’s workforce. Clearly, the problem is worse than we thought.

Rep. María Elvira Salazar (R) of Florida has gone further. In a campaign ad, she told Trump that some enforcement efforts had “gone too far” and said Hispanic voters who backed him in 2024 “feel betrayed.” Salazar explicitly said she was not proposing amnesty. But she has long favored a “legal-status framework” for many illegal immigrants already living and working here. In other words, amnesty.

RELATED: Kansas Republicans muddy the waters on ICE enforcement

Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

The guest-worker side of the equation is even clearer.

House Agriculture Committee Chairman Glenn Thompson (R-Penn.) introduced the Securing Agriculture’s Workforce Act with 50 co-sponsors. The bill would allow H-2A labor certifications lasting up to three years, make it easier to transfer guest workers between employers, and let certain illegal farmworkers who were already here and had worked in agriculture apply for H-2A status. That is not citizenship, but it is a legalization mechanism tied directly to agricultural employment.

The administration has moved in the same direction on temporary labor. For fiscal year 2026, DHS and the Labor Department authorized up to 64,716 additional H-2B visas on top of the statutory cap for seasonal non-agricultural workers.

H-2A has no numerical cap. In October 2025, the Labor Department changed the methodology used to set the program’s minimum wage. The department itself estimated the rule would produce $2.46 billion in annualized wage transfers from H-2A workers to employers. A federal judge ruled the methodology unlawful in August but did not vacate the rule, leaving the wage rates in place while the litigation continues.

Whatever one thinks of the legal dispute, the economic direction is obvious: Washington is making foreign farm labor cheaper and easier to use.

In July, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) led a bipartisan letter — joined by six Republican senators and a number of House Republicans endorsed by Trump — asking the administration to reduce processing delays and structural barriers in the H-2A program. The letter did not ask Congress to raise a visa cap, because H-2A has none. It asked the executive branch to make the existing pipeline work more smoothly.

Sadly, this is not a fringe position inside the GOP. The cheap-labor lobby remains deeply embedded in the party’s agricultural and business wings.

Consider Nebraska. Gov. Jim Pillen (R) has embraced Trump’s immigration-enforcement agenda, yet a New York Times and Flatwater Free Press investigation found that Pillen Family Farms had employed undocumented workers at at least 20 hog farms. Court records showed at least a dozen workers charged with using fake or stolen IDs between 2015 and 2024. Pillen and the company say they never knowingly hired illegal workers and that the business now uses E-Verify. Still, it’s worth noting that Pillen’s farms have never been raided by ICE.

RELATED: The promise was mass deportation. The policy is carve-outs.

Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Republicans often treat illegal farm labor as the least objectionable form of illegal immigration. In reality, it may be among the most transformative.

Over the past few decades, large agricultural employers have reshaped rural communities across the Great Plains by relying heavily on immigrant labor. In Schuyler, Nebraska, roughly three-quarters of the population is Hispanic, while 27% of students in the Central Nebraska school district are foreign-born — figures more commonly associated with major metropolitan areas like New York and San Francisco.

The political divide is less about whether mass immigration transforms communities than about where that transformation occurs. Democratic interests tend to favor it in large cities; Republican-aligned agricultural interests have helped bring it to rural America.

When a party’s voters and its governing class want fundamentally different things on a defining issue, eventually the contradiction must break somewhere. The Republican Party itself was born in 1854 when the old party system fractured over the expansion of slavery into the territories.

If Republicans cannot choose between an immigration policy built around American workers and one built around employers’ demand for ever more labor, voters may eventually make the choice for them — and let this party go the way of the Whigs.

Democrats just revealed their endgame if they retake power



Democrats aren’t hiding anything when it comes to what they want for not only our immigration system, but the future of America — and BlazeTV host Sara Gonzales is sick of hearing it.

“They’re just saying it out loud,” Gonzales says, noting that all she has to do is “roll the tapes.”

“I’m going to have to remind you guys what this country will look like again with Democrats in power,” she continues, adding, “One of their endgames is to flood this country with immigrants to replace us.”

“And this is an area that we really need to have a healthy and robust immigration program,” Democrat Senate candidate Josh Turek said to an audience.


“You’ve got around 41% of the direct care workers that are immigrants. And so I think we also need an easier pathway to earn citizenship so that we can bring in more workers, not only for that industry but as well as the agriculture industry and the meatpacking plants,” Turek continued.

“I mean, this is a state that’s really, really struggling,” he added.

“No, no, no,” Gonzales says. “Literally all across the country, we are all saying the same thing. We do not need more foreign workers. We do not need more immigrants. We actually need less. We just voted in November of 2024 for mass deportations. We want people gone.”

“‘Meatpacking plants are struggling, let’s bring in cheap foreign labor,’” she mocks.

“Because you know, that’s always the Democrats' plan. The Democrats' plan is always, ‘Let’s figure out how to make slavery legal again in every way, shape, or form,’” she adds.

But Turek isn’t the first one to make his case for what Gonzales calls “slave labor” in the United States.

“Mass amnesty for cheaper labor,” Gonzales says. “Chuck Schumer actually let that cat out of the bag all the way back in 2022.”

“Now more than ever, we’re short of workers,” Schumer said in a 2022 speech. “We have a population that is not reproducing on its own with the same level that it used to. The only way we’re going to have a great future in America is if we welcome and embrace immigrants. The dreamers and all of them.”

“Because our ultimate goal is to help the dreamers but get a path to citizenship for all 11 million or however many undocumented there are here,” he added.

“What are we doing?” Gonzales, annoyed, asks.

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The promise was mass deportation. The policy is carve-outs.



Voters were not confused about what they were choosing in 2024. "Mass deportation" was not a line buried in a white paper. It was printed on signs, chanted at rallies, and repeated by the candidate himself. Americans who cast their ballots on that promise had every reason to believe it meant what it said.

Nearly two years into this administration, it is fair to ask whether that promise is being kept. By the government's own numbers, it is falling short. Those numbers are not a failure of the men and women in the field. They are the result of decisions made well above them.

As long as the jobs are there and the penalties for employers are weak, no amount of border rhetoric will change the math.

I spent 24 years in federal immigration enforcement and retired as deputy field office director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York City, the largest field office in the country. I know what it takes to move removal numbers, and it is not rhetoric.

Removals are a pipeline: locating the person, arresting him, detaining him, getting a final order through an overwhelmed court system, and putting him on a plane. The pipeline moves only as fast as its narrowest point.

When an administration is serious, it widens every one of those points at once, through detention space, fugitive operations teams, cooperation from local jails, immigration judges, and flights.

When it is not serious, you see press releases instead.

Consider what happens after an arrest. Many people assume a deportation is nearly complete once an officer puts someone in handcuffs. In reality, the foreign government has to be notified, and it has to confirm the person's identity and issue a travel document. Some countries turn those documents around quickly, while others slow-walk them or refuse outright.

Every day of delay is a day in a detention bed that could hold someone else, and if the wait runs long enough, the person may have to be released back into the community. Even when the document arrives, the flight still has to be coordinated, whether that is a seat on a commercial flight with escorting officers or a spot on a charter that has to be filled and scheduled.

So where is the pressure against mass deportation coming from? Look at who benefits from enforcement that stops at the factory door. Agriculture, hospitality, construction, and meatpacking interests have lobbied openly for exemptions and slower worksite enforcement.

Each carve-out is defended as practical. Taken together, they amount to a policy of enforcing the law against individuals while protecting the employers who hired them.

RELATED: Kansas Republicans muddy the waters on ICE enforcement

Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe/Getty Images

Worksite enforcement is the one measure that shows whether an administration means business, precisely because it is the one measure that impacts the political donor class. As long as the jobs are there and the penalties for employers are weak, no amount of border rhetoric will change the math.

We should also call things by their proper names. Issuing work-authorization workarounds, or declining to pursue people with final orders of removal, are just amnesty by other names. Every one of these moves is a message to the world that American immigration law is negotiable if you wait long enough.

The people most insulted by this message are the immigrants who did it the right way. Every fraudulent case that clears is a slot, a court date, or a benefit taken from someone who waited in line and told the truth.

Critics say mass removals would disrupt the labor market and raise prices. The answer to that concern is simple: An economy built on a permanent pool of workers without legal status, who cannot report abuse and undercut wages for citizens and legal residents alike, is not a model worth defending.

Regardless of how it is covered, a substantial share of Americans support mass deportation. The Harvard CAPS/Harris poll surveyed 1,725 registered voters from May 29 to 30, 2026, with a margin of error of ±2.4 points. It found that 80% support deporting immigrants who are here illegally and have committed crimes, up five points from 75% in April. That includes 71% of Democrats, 90% of Republicans, and 79% of independents.

They are not asking for cruelty. They are asking for a system that works, one with no amnesty, no fraud, and no exemptions for the well-connected.

Here is what keeping the promise would look like: mandatory E-Verify for every employer, funding for detention capacity and fugitive operations that matches the stated goal, worksite enforcement without industry carve-outs, and immigration judges and attorneys to clear a backlog that currently stretches for years.

The president made a promise, and voters took him at his word. The officers in the field are ready to do the job. What is missing is the will to let them do it.

Legacy Media Falsely Argue That Republicans Are About To Lose Because Americans Hate Deportations

Capitulate, and then you can win again. This is RINO 101, and it’s everything that’s wrong with the Republican Party.

The conservative base will remember this betrayal



I am an American whose family was here before there were these United States. I grew up believing that citizenship carried obligations, borders meant something, and elected leaders were supposed to defend the country we birthed. In 2024, the Republican National Convention sounded as if the party remembered that duty. Signs reading “Mass Deportations Now!” filled the hall. Tom Homan told illegal immigrants to start packing. Texas Governor Greg Abbott led chants of “Send them back!” Donald Trump promised the largest deportation operation in American history. For a brief moment, the party spoke with unusual clarity about enforcement

Two years later, parts of the same Washington establishment elite are drifting back toward the old language of “dignity,” “modernization,” and “compassion.” Bipartisan proposals promise legal status or pathways to citizenship for millions of foreigners who entered or remained in the country unlawfully.

The base has heard the promises before. It should measure Republicans by removals, enforcement, and legislation — not rhetoric.

Republican names appear on the co-sponsor lists. The same party that campaigned on deportation is again entertaining versions of the “comprehensive immigration reform” voters have heard for decades.

That is the betrayal. Republicans asked voters for power on an enforcement mandate. They should not now pretend that mandate was merely a campaign-season flourish.

Calvin Coolidge understood that immigration policy had to serve the national interest. “America must be kept American,” he told Congress, arguing that new arrivals had to be limited to the country’s capacity to absorb them “into the ranks of good citizenship.”

Theodore Roosevelt likewise demanded assimilation and undivided civic loyalty. He demanded that every immigrant become “in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.” No divided allegiance. No polyglot boarding house. Room for only one flag, one language, one loyalty.

Whatever one thinks of every policy those men supported, the underlying principle was once unremarkable: Immigration exists for the benefit of the nation receiving immigrants, and citizenship carries duties as well as rights.

RELATED: Birth tourism is only the beginning

ULISES RUIZ/AFP/Getty Images

Today, even that proposition is smeared as “far right.” Washington lectures us endlessly about “our values” while avoiding the more basic questions: How many people should the country admit? On what terms? How quickly can newcomers be assimilated? What happens when immigration policy outruns the government’s ability to enforce the law or sustain public confidence in the system?

Those are not abstract concerns. Voters sent Republicans to Washington after 2024 expecting them to act on the mandate they claimed. I feel this betrayal in my gut.

Too many Republican elected officials have returned to the donor-class language of labor shortages, “workforce needs,” and legalization. They treat the voters who carried them as people who can be placated with border-wall rhetoric while the harder work of interior enforcement is postponed or diluted. Every time a Republican co-sponsors another legalization scheme, the message becomes harder to miss: The base is indispensable at election time and negotiable afterward.

That is managed decline sold as pragmatism. A country that cannot control its borders, enforce its immigration laws, and decide who may remain within its territory is surrendering one of the most basic functions of sovereignty. The argument for restriction does not require hostility toward immigrants. It requires the far simpler proposition that the American government has a first duty to American citizens and that immigration policy should be made with their security, wages, communities, and future in mind.

RELATED: DHS is naming names, and the media is melting down

Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The fight does not end with one election cycle. Voters should keep pressure on officials at every level of government. City councils, state legislatures, Congress, and the White House should all be held to the promises made during campaigns. Officials who drift toward amnesty should be named, challenged, and, when necessary, replaced.

Elected officials must never forget that citizenship is a privilege. Assimilation should be expected of those we choose to admit. Enforcement should not disappear the moment an election is over.

To every speaker preparing remarks for the 2026 Republican National Convention in Dallas next month: You must address mass deportation — not as a slogan to be discarded after the balloons drop, but as the concrete policy Republicans promised to pursue. If the policy was necessary in 2024, it did not become unnecessary because the election was won.

The base has heard the promises before. It should measure Republicans by removals, enforcement, and legislation — not rhetoric.

If elected officials believe the country needs a different immigration policy, they should say so plainly and defend it. What they should not do is campaign on enforcement and govern toward amnesty. That is not compromise. It is bait-and-switch.

Ceuta is America’s border warning



Spain is offering the United States a warning we would be foolish to ignore.

For years, Democrats have pursued an immigration agenda built around weak enforcement, mass amnesty, and the surrender of national sovereignty to globalist priorities. Americans who want to see where that agenda can lead should look at Ceuta.

Codify secure borders now or prepare to watch the crisis return under the next Democratic administration.

In recent days, an estimated 60,000 migrants — many military-age men — attempted to overwhelm the small Spanish enclave on the Moroccan border. They arrived by land and sea, swamping local authorities and producing deadly chaos.

This was not an isolated event. It followed Spain’s moves toward amnesty for illegal immigrants, effectively signaling that unlawful entry might eventually be rewarded.

Spain’s Civil Guard described the border as totally collapsed. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez rushed to the enclave, denounced the surge as a violation of Spain’s territorial integrity, and deployed the military.

By then, however, the warning was unmistakable. Ceuta has a population of roughly 85,000. A migrant surge approaching three-quarters of that number threatened to overwhelm the enclave in a matter of days.

Americans should recognize the pattern because we recently endured our own version of it.

During the Biden-Harris administration, the United States suffered four years of relentless border disorder. Record numbers of illegal immigrants crossed the southern border while the administration expanded catch-and-release, abused immigration parole, and allowed migrants to exploit an asylum system never designed to handle claims on that scale.

The result was a border that functioned less as a boundary and more as a processing center for unlawful entry.

President Trump’s return to office and his decisive executive actions have restored deterrence and operational control. But executive actions are temporary. A future Democratic administration could reverse them as quickly as Biden reversed Trump’s first-term policies.

Conservatives rightly insist on “no amnesty.” Honesty, however, requires us to confront a harder truth: Unless Congress closes the loopholes embedded in current law, America remains one presidential election away from another invasion.

The vulnerabilities exploited during the Biden years remain.

RELATED: Illegal aliens may need to phone home amid new ICE actions

ANTONIO SEMPERE/AFP/Getty Images

The Flores Settlement continues to encourage family units and unaccompanied minors to arrive at the border knowing that current law may lead to their release into the interior. The asylum system remains vulnerable to economic migrants who use dubious claims to gain admission. Mass parole authority and catch-and-release remain available to an administration determined to abuse them.

Presidential resolve is not enough. Congress must harden the law itself.

The House Freedom Caucus has used its leverage to advance the reforms necessary to do that. This summer, we secured a House Judiciary Committee markup for Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy’s Permanent Trump Secure Border Act, H.R. 9773.

The bill carries forward the strongest border-security provisions of H.R. 2, which passed the House in the 118th Congress with overwhelming Republican support. It offers Congress a vehicle to make Trump’s successful border policies permanent and protect Americans from the next open-borders administration.

Its provisions are serious and targeted.

The bill would reform asylum by barring claims from migrants who passed through safe third countries, raising the credible-fear standard to “more likely than not” and limiting asylum applications to ports of entry.

It would end the abuse of mass parole, require detention or prompt return when operational control cannot be maintained, and mandate safe-third-country agreements.

It would also close loopholes created by the Flores Settlement that encourage the release of families and minors, crack down on visa overstays, and expand the criminal bars to asylum eligibility.

These reforms directly address the gaps the Biden-Harris administration exploited.

RELATED: Assimilate or hit the brakes

Marcos del Mazo/LightRocket/Getty Images

When Congress returns in September, Republican leaders must bring the Permanent Trump Secure Border Act to the floor immediately.

Partial measures will not suffice. Neither will another round of promises to address the border later. The left has not abandoned its vision of demographic transformation through unchecked migration. It is waiting for another opportunity to impose it.

Ceuta offers a preview of what can happen when government signals that borders are optional and unlawful entry may be rewarded.

America has restored order for now. The question is whether Congress will make that restoration durable.

The House Freedom Caucus has provided the blueprint. Republicans need to pass it.

Codify secure borders now — or prepare to watch the crisis return under the next Democratic administration. Our sovereignty, security, and rule of law depend on getting this right.

There Are No Ag ‘Jobs Americans Won’t Do’ If They Earn A Living Wage

Pro-amnesty Republicans are allowing the agriculture industry to shut out American workers in favor of foreign migrants.

Republicans Will Do Anything To Illegals Except Deport Them

Americans didn't elect Republicans in 2024 to devise new ways to keep illegal aliens here.

47 Republicans Are Pushing Amnesty For Illegal Alien Agriculture Workers

Dozens of House Republicans are pushing a mass amnesty bill that would expand a visa program for illegal alien agriculture workers and give many of them legal status. Forty-seven Republicans have signed onto a bipartisan bill in the House that would allow illegal aliens who work in agriculture as of May 31, 2026, to obtain […]

The internet makes monsters and saints before the body is cold



The internet has done an admirable job hobbling the corporate left-wing media’s ability to control the population through a single narrative. But that blessing comes with regrettable costs.

The speed of information and the incentive to push hot takes onto social media mean that when a public figure dies, there is an immediate race to decide which competing narrative will define his legacy.

Was Graham a true convert to MAGA and its values? Unlikely. But politics is not a contest over who believes harder.

When Lindsey Graham died suddenly of heart failure over the weekend, conspiracy theories about foreign assassination plots immediately began to circulate online. Many leftists openly celebrated his death, and the reactionary impulse of conservatives drove others to recast Graham as a stalwart crusader for MAGA.

The truth is more complicated. But in the eternal battle for narrative supremacy, there is little time for reflection, even in response to death.

No one is above criticism. But in a healthy society, some space exists between a public figure’s passing and attacks on his legacy.

That standard now seems quaint, perhaps naive. It is also better for the soul of the nation.

Unfortunately, wishing to live in that kind of society does not make it real. The information war is relentless. Abstaining from the fight only means someone else defines the truth.

The news cycle does not observe a respectable period of mourning. The battle begins the moment the headline drops.

Wild conspiracy theories now seem obligatory whenever a prominent figure dies, and Graham was no exception. The senator toured a Ukrainian weapons factory the day before his death, and several figures speculated that he had really been killed in an attack on that facility or poisoned by the Russians.

Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin suggested on social media that Graham had likely been killed by Israel, despite Graham’s long record of advocacy for that country.

This is not to denigrate conspiracy theories in general. One thing we learned after COVID is that such theories can often prove correct. But the narratives around Graham’s death were bizarre.

Graham was a 71-year-old man with a family history of fatal heart conditions who did not take care of himself. His death is sad, but its cause was hardly mysterious.

RELATED: Lindsey Graham’s sister appointed to serve out the rest of his term in the Senate

Grant Baldwin/Getty Images

Progressives reacted exactly as expected. There was gloating, celebration, mockery, and even speculation about who should come next.

Graham’s death was nowhere near as visceral or violent as Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but the left’s response carried unnerving echoes. It was a brutal reminder of a lesson conservatives have worked hard not to learn since Kirk’s murder.

Even the average Democrat is emotionally unhinged.

Your progressive neighbor may not be willing to commit violence personally against you over politics. But many are happy to cheer those who do and dance on your grave once you are gone.

The reaction on the right was strange in a different way. Some conservatives rushed to construct a hagiography, transforming Graham into a MAGA saint, a lion who died fighting for the cause.

That impulse may have been an understandable response to the left’s disgusting vitriol. It was not wise.

Graham served in the Senate for 31 years. He supported every disastrous war during his tenure, including the war in Ukraine that Donald Trump ran on ending and the war in Iran now costing the administration dearly.

Graham pushed for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. He backed Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during military operations in Syria and Libya.

He pushed to send hundreds of billions of dollars to foreign governments while inflation was driving up the cost of living for ordinary Americans. After Graham’s death, Benjamin Netanyahu claimed that when he told the senator Israel should pay for its own defense, Graham insisted that American taxpayers should foot the bill.

On immigration, the core issue of the MAGA coalition, Graham was even worse.

He was part of the Gang of Eight and pushed for amnesty alongside men like Marco Rubio. In 2006, Graham teamed up with John McCain to pursue a similar pathway to citizenship. His attempts to secure amnesty for illegal aliens were so common that he earned the nickname “Grahamnesty.”

Lindsey Graham was, in almost every way imaginable, the essence of the Washington swamp Trump promised to drain.

He was also a savvy political operator.

Graham initially fought Trump tooth and nail. Like many Republicans, he slowly changed his rhetoric. Despite still pushing horrible foreign policy and endless war, the senator became a reliable vote for Trump on many domestic issues. His work advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the SAVE Act deserves note.

Was Graham a true convert to MAGA and its values? Unlikely. But politics is not a contest over who believes harder.

It would have been unwise to trust Graham. Many Republicans have discovered new respect for Trump to get what they want, only to betray him the moment he stops prioritizing their issues.

RELATED: Conservatives are blowing the easiest political win in America

Blaze Media Illustration

But Graham delivered votes and support at key moments. That made him politically useful in scenarios that cannot be ignored.

Graham spent most of his career as an institutional neoconservative advancing policies that were disastrous for the country. He eventually corrected course on amnesty and delivered some key votes for the Trump administration. Yet his monomaniacal obsession with war made him one of the central proponents of a foreign policy quagmire threatening to derail the MAGA agenda.

Does his opportunistic support for Trump in the final years of his life make him a true MAGA patriot? No.

Does he deserve the hatred poured on him by the left after his death? Also no.

That is not mercy for a political enemy. It is moral clarity. Refusing to lie about a man’s record does not require joining the mob that cheers his death.

Those are entirely separate moral sins.

In the rush to define the narrative, the complicated nature of Graham’s legacy disappears.

The internet has made immediate judgment mandatory and thoughtful reflection almost impossible. It turns public figures into mascots, villains, saints, and demons before the body is cold.

In the end, the internet makes fictional characters of us all.