On Refugee Experts and Liberal Outrage

by William Skink

If I had free time and ten bucks burning a hole in my pocket, I might be interested to hear what refugee expert, Hayley Smith, has to say about the global refugee crisis.

That was my initial thought, but then I came to this paragraph:

The Qatar Foundation and the Montana World Affairs Council teamed up to invite Smith to Missoula. She’ll share the stage Thursday night with Christina Atwood, who’ll discuss the refugee vetting and resettlement process overseas and on U.S. soil.

If you consult those alternative news sources the Washington Post slandered as useful idiots of the Kremlin, there is one word that glaringly leaps from the screen: Qatar.

If that word doesn’t raise your eyebrows, you are probably a liberal do-gooder chronically misinformed by main stream media. For those people, I would direct them to the words of Hillary Clinton:

In a leaked email sent on August 17, 2014 by Hillary Clinton to her current campaign manager, John Podesta, who back then was counselor to Barack Obama, she admitted that Qatar and Saudi Arabia “are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL and other radical Sunni groups in the region.”

Will this “refugee expert” explain to her audience how nations like Qatar and Saudi Arabia are funding terrorists and destabilizing the entire Middle East? Will she accurately describe the role Neoliberal “humanitarian interventions” have played in creating the refugee crisis?

I don’t know why I’m still so amazed at this kind of thing, but I am. I mean, a country like Qatar funding a talk about the refugee crisis is like a serial rapist funding a panel discussion on rape culture. And boy oh boy will Missoula turn out to hear this woman talk.

I think about Missoula’s amor for refugees frequently as I get back into the swing of trying to help people. There are so many people isolated and suffering in this community, it’s no surprise that western states like Montana continue to lead the country with depressingly high suicide rates.

For the people I talk to that won’t get help until they become poor enough to qualify for things like Medicaid, or desperate enough to try things like suicide, I am tempted to tell them if only you were a refugee from half a world away, maybe it would be hip and cool enough to get you some assistance, but since you’re just another domestic refugee of late-stage capitalism, well, tough shit.

To those who so effectively ignore the domestic need when it’s not a preferred demographic while continuing the months-long tantrum over losing a presidential election, even the New York Times is trying to tell you how your behavior is helping Trump:

Liberals may feel energized by a surge in political activism, and a unified stance against a president they see as irresponsible and even dangerous. But that momentum is provoking an equal and opposite reaction on the right. In recent interviews, conservative voters said they felt assaulted by what they said was a kind of moral Bolshevism — the belief that the liberal vision for the country was the only right one. Disagreeing meant being publicly shamed.

Protests and righteous indignation on social media and in Hollywood may seem to liberals to be about policy and persuasion. But moderate conservatives say they are having the opposite effect, chipping away at their middle ground and pushing them closer to Mr. Trump.

“The name calling from the left is crazy,” said Bryce Youngquist, 34, who works in sales for a tech start-up in Mountain View, Calif., a liberal enclave where admitting you voted for Mr. Trump is a little like saying in the 1950s that you were gay. “They are complaining that Trump calls people names, but they turned into some mean people.”

Mr. Youngquist stayed in the closet for months about his support for Mr. Trump. He did not put a bumper sticker on his car, for fear it would be keyed. The only place he felt comfortable wearing his Make America Great Again hat was on a vacation in China. Even dating became difficult. Many people on Tinder have a warning on their profile: “Trump supporters swipe left” — meaning, get lost.

He came out a few days before the election. On election night, a friend posted on Facebook, “You are a disgusting human being.”

“They were making me want to support him more with how irrational they were being,” Mr. Youngquist said.

I don’t think the supporters of relocating refugees in Missoula are capable of seeing any criticism of their efforts as valid, just like many liberals still can’t quite fathom that a vote for Trump doesn’t automatically make someone a card-carrying member of the KKK.

I don’t know why I would expect anything more reasonable to come from a political ideology that seems just fine with mass slaughter and displacement as long as it’s their smooth-talking president overseeing the atrocities.