Dec. 12: What Hath Biden Wrought

The Dem consultancy behind an anti-Israel 'Black radical' magazine; Has Obama found his Rogan?; Spenser Rapone stays losing

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The Big Story

In his first three years in office, President Joe Biden oversaw the most consequential demographic transformation of the United States since before the Civil War, according to a Wednesday report in The New York Times.

From 2021 to 2023, more than 2 million people entered the country every year, the largest number in U.S. history both in raw terms and measured as a percentage of the population. Around 60% of those have come illegally. The following chart from the Times puts the current numbers in historical perspective:

The Times did not analyze numbers from 2024, which are not yet available in final form. Still, the paper conservatively estimates that more than 8 million people will have entered the United States by the end of Biden’s term in office. At the end of 2023, the share of the U.S. population born in another country sat at 15.2%, the highest in U.S. history, up from the previous record of 14.8% in 1890, more than 130 years ago:

Why? Well, that depends not only on who but when you ask. Prior to the election, the Times’ answer was something like, “Huh? What are you talking about?” A lavishly produced Oct. 30 video opinion piece, titled “If You Think Biden and Harris Were Weak on the Border, Think Again,” explained that the administration had “pulled off what Trump could only dream of”—an “invisible border wall.” Times producer Alexander Stockton told the camera that while he was “surprised” by the results of his deep dive into Biden-Harris border policy, the facts led one inexorably to the conclusion that …

This administration has conducted a campaign to secure the border since Day 1. Despite sounding pro-immigration in public, behind closed doors, they were fulfilling many conservative aspirations. I know that’s hard to believe … [but] Biden and Harris have transformed the border. It used to indiscriminately allow millions in, but now it tightly controls who gets in.

Apparently neither the American public, nor the migrants themselves, nor the author of yesterday’s Times piece, David Leonhardt, got the memo. “The Biden administration’s policy appears to have been the biggest factor” in explaining the immigration surge, Leonhardt writes. “After Mr. Biden tightened enforcement in June, the number of people crossing the border plummeted.” You don’t say.

The United States has previously experienced close to present levels of immigration (at least when measured as a percentage of the population), but the current wave, which began with the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, has seen a transformation in the sources of migration to the country. As a September report from Pew noted, between 1840 and 1919, more than 90% of immigrants came from Europe and Canada; since 1965, that number has dropped to 14%, while the combined share from Latin America and Asia has risen from below 5% to 76%. Few wish to return to the world of explicit racial discrimination in U.S. immigration law, but one can legitimately ask about the long-term effects of such an influx on American political culture. As Tablet News Editor Tony Badran has noted, the antisemitic campus protests of the past year have frequently been led by immigrants and the children of immigrants from countries where antisemitism and other sectarian passions are standard operating procedure, as is corruption, terrorism, and one-party rule.

Donald Trump won the election in large part due to his promise to reverse some of these trends—an effort in which he was moderately successful during his first term, only for the Democrats to reopen the floodgates on recapturing the White House. A major question going forward, then, will be whether the Democratic Party and whatever “resistance” emerges during Trump’s second term will bow to popular sentiment on immigration and moderate the party’s position, or whether the party has become so structurally dependent on immigration that it cannot reverse course even if it wants to.

Some signs point to the former. The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last, the “Never Trump” former Republican who became a major Harris booster in the 2024 campaign, has recently begun urging the Democrats to embrace mass deportations to punish Hispanics for their disloyalty to the Democratic Party. In a podcast appearance earlier this week, Last admitted to becoming “angry” after reading an account of an illegal immigrant whose citizen children voted for Trump:

It made me come around on mass deportations. Like, let’s do this thing. Let’s just do this thing, right? We haven’t gotten the validated voter numbers yet, but it looks like Trump got about 50% of Hispanic voters, [maybe] a little less than 50%, [and] almost certainly went over the 50% mark with Hispanic men. And if it turns out that what Republicans needed to break through with Hispanic voters was that they needed to promise to use the military to enforce mass deportations, including of children who are American citizens whose parents happen to be undocumented … Then I’m just like, “Ok! Let’s do this thing!”

In a Dec. 8 post on BlueSky, Last stated his point even more succinctly: “It is madness to spend political capital to help people who are no longer a major part of your electoral coalition.”

Tablet’s Michael Lind, however, is more skeptical. In a January article, Lind noted that the modern Democratic coalition is “an alliance of interests threatened with long-term demographic decline”—highly educated professionals who have few children, deep-blue cities and states hemorrhaging U.S.-born residents, and economic elites dependent on “immigration-driven wage suppression.” For these reasons, Lind argued, the party cannot abandon mass immigration without entering a political death spiral. If Hispanics are unreliable, others will do:

If partisan divisions among Hispanics thwart the hoped-for immigration-driven hegemony of the Democratic Party, then the Democrats will have to return to the strategy of “third way” New Democrats like Bill Clinton, move to the center, and try to convert Republican voters instead of importing new voters from other countries … No, just kidding! If Latin Americans fail to vote the way that Democratic strategists want, new voters will simply have to be found and imported from other regions of the world like the Middle East and Africa, where Democrats can hope that the combination of race, religion and deep-seated ethnic hatreds will successfully ghettoize new voters and ensure their allegiance to the party.

That’s the plan, at least. Which is why we hope that Trump’s shock victory—and border czar Tom Homan’s promised campaign of “shock and awe”—will prove the truth of a saying from the great sage Mike Tyson: “Everybody’s got a plan until they get hit in the mouth.”

IN THE BACK PAGES: The Scroll’s holiday gift guide

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The Rest

→CORRECTION: In The Scroll Gift Guide sent out earlier today, The Scroll’s editor misspelled “Hanukkah” in the subhed. The mistake was entirely his, not the guest author’s, and it’s been corrected on the Substack, though we are unable to fix copy mistakes in the emails once they go out. We regret the error.

→A “Black leftist” literary magazine that has aligned itself with pro-Hamas radicals is solely funded by Arabella Advisors, the for-profit Democratic consultancy that centrally controls a network of fake “pop-up” nonprofits to astroturf support for Democratic Party priorities, according to a report from The Washington Examiner’s Gabe Kaminsky.

The magazine, Hammer & Hope, co-founded by former New York Times editor Jen Parker and Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, is a Black-branded version of the sort of elite radical chic you’ll be drearily familiar with from the pages of n+1, Jewish Currents, and The New Yorker over the past several years, so we’ll spare you the hyperventilating about the specifics of their rhetoric (TLDR—they’ve endorsed BDS and platformed a handful of minor Palestinian radicals). The more interesting bit is this, from Kaminsky’s article (emphasis added):

All of Hammer & Hope’s funding in fiscal 2023, $150,000, came from the New Venture Fund, a nonprofit group in the Arabella umbrella that doles out hundreds of millions of dollars each year for left-leaning causes, according to tax forms reviewed by the Washington Examiner.

In the preceding fiscal 2022, Hammer & Hope raked in $1.5 million from the New Venture Fund through a registered nonprofit group for its publisher in New York called the Black Radical Project. Hammer & Hope’s publisher was incubated at the New Venture Fund as a project, allowing it to be routed a $750,000 check from the Ford Foundation, a top grantmaker aligned with Democrats, through the Arabella-managed entity, financial disclosures show.

We’ve written about Arabella here at The Scroll before, but for a deep dive, you can read Hayden Ludwig’s 2022 article in Tablet. The short version is that Arabella is a consultancy run by Eric Kessler, a former Clinton White House appointee, which sits on top of an empire of subsidiary nonprofits including the New Venture Fund, the Hopewell Fund, and the Sixteen Thirty Fund that together control more than $1 billion in assets.

In a series of 2023 reports based on leaked internal documents from Arabella, The Washington Free Beacon revealed that unlike other dark-money organizations, which act as pass-throughs for wealthy donors to anonymously give to pet projects, Arabella took a direct and active role in managing the activities of its legions of subsidiary nonprofits and “fiscal sponsorships.” Senior Democratic operatives embedded in the main Arabella nonprofits tightly—and secretively—controlled all hiring, spending, and messaging decisions at their subsidiaries (in apparent violation of U.S. tax law) while in turn paying hefty management fees to the Arabella mothership. In essence, this means that Kessler is getting rich off of using fake grassroots groups to exploit charity laws in the service of electing Democrats. Which we suppose is nice work, if you can get it.

We’d recommend you dive into those links for a more complete sense of how the scam works. Our point here is a simple one: The Democratic “establishment” and the “leftist radicals” are part of the same machine …

→… which is why it shouldn’t be a surprise that Pod Save America, the podcast hosted by several Obama White House veterans that has become a clearinghouse for the party’s self-diagnosis of the 2024 election, recently invited the leftist streamer Hasan Piker to guest host an episode. Piker, 33, is a leading influencer in the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party, and he’s been a vocal (and tiresome) critic of what he’s routinely referred to as a Biden-sponsored “genocide” in Gaza—a topic he’s discussed with communists who likened Oct. 7 to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and with a Yemeni supporter of the Houthis. Notably, the Pod Save bros’ decision to turn their platform over to Piker followed weeks of discussion about the need to identify and support a “Democratic Joe Rogan,” suggesting that in Piker, the Obama faction may have found its man.

→Scroll Man of the Week:

That’s former West Point cadet Spenser Rapone, who was drummed out of the Army in 2018 for “conduct unbecoming of an officer” after the self-described “revolutionary socialist” tweeted the above picture—snapped at his West Point graduation ceremon—in a display of “solidarity” with NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick. As X user @St_Rev noted, Rapone, after receiving his other-than-honorable discharge from the military, entered academia, where he continued to pursue his passion for evil. According to Rapone’s Ph.D. candidate page at the University of Texas-Austin, he is now researching “the intellectual contributions of the Ba’th Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, and other anticolonial nationalist formations that sought to construct a new order and bring about a liberated life and authentic existence in the Arab World.” Over the weekend, the Syrian Ba’th Party was overthrown after 61 years of dictatorial rule by a population that had apparently tired of its vision for a “liberated life and authentic existence in the Arab World.”

→Stat of the Day: 26

That’s how many FBI “confidential human sources,” or informants, were present at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to a newly released report from the Department of Justice inspector general. Of those, four entered the Capitol and 13 entered the grounds; none have faced criminal charges, despite hundreds of others being prosecuted for the same behavior. The report, which can be read in full here, states that there were no undercover FBI officers present at the Capitol that day.

→President Biden on Thursday issued 39 pardons of people “convicted of nonviolent crimes” and commuted the sentences of roughly 1,500 people who were “released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic,” according to a report in the Associated Press. None of the names jumped out to us on first read, and we suspect it will take a few days for journalists and others to dig through the commutations for anything suspicious, but a full list of the names can be found here.

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TODAY IN TABLET:

The Last Days of Kolkata’s Baghdadi Jews, by Sayan Lodh

A multicultural memorial service for Flower Silliman, the oldest member of the Indian city’s centuries-old Jewish community, illustrates the cordial relations between residents of different faiths. Nonetheless, the future doesn’t look so bright.

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The Scroll Gift Guide

by A.M. Tisch

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