It Occurs To Me: Protecting ‘are kids’!  

The accompanying photograph says it all, taken at a far-right rally in London, accompanied by a post which read: “I’m sick of people coming into our country and refusing to learn the language!”

Jesus wept! During Tommy Robinson’s Unite the Kingdom rally in central London, Elon Musk appeared via video link last Saturday afternoon and claimed “massive uncontrolled migration” was leading to the “destruction of Britain”. He added that “violence is coming” and urged the crowd to “fight back or you die”.

Protect ‘Are’ Kids indeed. Protect them from uneducated halfwits who will try to blight their upbringing by convincing them that skin colour is the only criterion for real patriots.

Protect them from some of our own politicians who are welcoming Trump to Doonbeg for the Irish Open. 

Last March, Enterprise Minister Peter Burke gushed: “It is important to understand that Donald Trump, at his core, is a businessman. You can see from the Canadian decision how much he can change his narrative quite quickly.” 

Businessman? Eleven bankruptcies and tariffs that are ruining his own economy.

Last week, Burke said Mr Trump would be a “welcome visitor in our country” as he emphasised the importance of increasing ties with the US. 

Bullshit! He is not welcome by the vast majority of citizens who treasure democracy. 

Fine Gael lost the plot in May 1945 when DeValera visited Ambassador Hempel at the German Embassy to offer condolences on Hitler’s death. Now, one of their senior ministers is saying that a modern day dictator is welcome. In Doonbeg terms, Minister, you’ve scored a double bogey!

                               The turd reich?  

Fox News is not, and ever was, a proper news channel. It has long been the propaganda wing for the obnoxious ‘Right’ in the US. 

Trump has surrounded himself with ex-Fox acolytes, whose nauseating sycophancy is rapidly destroying democracy in America. 

Let’s remind ourselves - Fox News agreed in 2023 to pay Dominion Voting Systems nearly $800 million to avert a trial in the voting machine company’s lawsuit that would have exposed how the network promoted lies about the 2020 presidential election. 

Outside of the $787.5 million promised to Colorado-based Dominion, it was unclear what other consequences Fox would face. 

Fox acknowledged in a statement “the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false,” but no apology was offered. So, clearly, lies are part of their sick philosophy and it sits well in the White House.

I don’t watch Fox News much, but force myself on occasion as it is imperative to do so, if I’m to criticise it. Last week saw the nadir of Fox’s scandalous history, when three presenters advocated getting rid of the homeless – literally!

Co-host Lawrence Jones said that while there is compassion regarding the mental health crisis among the homeless, “we shouldn’t have to live in fear” while authorities figure out what to do.

“Put him in a mental institution, put him in a jail, and you guys figure it out. But people having to duck and dive on the trains and the buses, walking through the street, this is one case, but this is happening all across the country, and it’s not a money issue. They have given billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population,” Jones said.

“A lot of them don’t want to take the programs, a lot of them don’t want to get the help that is necessary. You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re going to give you and — or you decide that you are going to be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now,” he added.

Co-host, Brian Kilmeade, interjected: “Or involuntary lethal injection… or something. Just kill ‘em.” 

“Yeah,” Jones adds. Fellow co-host Ainsley Earhardt then said: “Yeah, Brian, why did it have to get to this point?” 

Since then, Kilmeade has said that he ‘wrongly’ made the suggestion. Note the word! Not exactly an apology.

Isn’t it hypocritical that Matthew Dowd was fired by MSNBC for showing up the late Charlie Kirk’s dangerous rhetoric? One of many examples being Kirk saying that “I want to see executions on TV. Imagine if Coca-Cola sponsored executions. That would be so American, so patriotic. People would tune in. I think children at a certain age, as initiation, should be required to watch. Public executions by guillotine are holy.”

READ NEXT: Death of Fr Michael Keaveney, one of the divers who discovered Spanish Armada shipwreck

Now, the very same Republicans who agreed with Trump that his murder was by ‘the radical left’ have suddenly gone quiet when Tyler Robinson, the alleged sniper, was shopped to the police by his father, and his grandmother, Debbie, admitted: “My son, his dad, is a Republican for Trump,” Debbie Robinson told the outlet. “Most of my family members are Republican. I don’t know any single one who’s a Democrat.”

                               What’s in a name…or names?  

Remember the ‘birther’ controversy about Barack Obama? In March 2011, Trump first began mentioning that he had “real doubts” about whether Obama had a US birth certificate.

In the days that followed, he said he was sending a team of private investigators to Hawaii to learn the truth and promised to donate $5m to charity if anyone could convince him Mr Obama was born on US soil. Over the following years, Mr Trump continued to raise questions and express doubts.

In 2012 he tweeted that he had an “extremely credible source” who told him the birth certificate was a fraud. In 2013 he raised suspicion about the death of a Hawaiian health official who verified copies of Mr Obama’s “birth certificate”. In 2014 he asked external hackers to access Mr Obama’s college records and check his “place of birth”. A few years later, he had to admit Obama was US born, but he never apologised.

Meanwhile, he appoints a Vice-President who is an absolute chameleon when it comes to identity. JD Vance was born James Donald Bowman in Middletown, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1984, his middle and last names the same as his biological father, Donald Bowman. His parents split up “around the time I started walking,” he wrote. When he was about 6, his mother, Beverly, married for the third time. He was adopted by his new stepfather, Robert Hamel, and his mother renamed him James David Hamel.

When his mother erased Donald Bowman from his and her lives, the adoption process also erased the name James Donald Bowman from the public record. The only birth certificate for Vance on file at Ohio’s vital statistics office reads James David Hamel, according to information provided by the state. Beverly kept the boy’s initials the same, since he went universally by J.., Ironically, Vance wrote, “Any old D name would have done, so long as it wasn’t Donald.”

Vance spent more than two decades as James David “JD” Hamel. It’s the name by which he graduated from Middletown High School, served in Iraq as a U.S. Marine (officially, Cpl. James D. Hamel), earned a political science degree at The Ohio State University and blogged his ruminations as a 26-year-old student at Yale Law School.

“I shared a name with no one I really cared about (which bothered me already), and with Bob gone, explaining why my name was J.D. Hamel would require a few additional awkward moments,” he writes in “Hillbilly Elegy.” 

“Yeah, my legal father’s last name is Hamel. You haven’t met him because I don’t see him. No, I don’t know why I don’t see him. Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures.”

So he decided to change his name again, to Vance — the last name of his beloved ‘Mamaw’, the grandmother who raised him.

“Poor people,” he proclaimed in a 2016 interview with The American Conservative, are “my people.” 

However, Vance himself was never actually impoverished. His family never had to worry about money; his grandfather, grandmother and mother all had houses in a suburban neighborhood in Middletown, Ohio. He admits that his grandfather “owned stock in Armco and had a lucrative pension.” 

He falsely introduces himself to his Yale classmates as “a conservative hillbilly from Appalachia.” 

Over the course of his book, Hillbilly Elegy he variously claims that he is middle class, working class and poor.

In order to justify his memoir as something more than a tale of a drug-addicted mother and a son who went to Yale, he fashions a grand theory that being a hillbilly does not have to be related to social class – or even living in Appalachia. 

In Lennard Davis’s book Poor Things he describes Vance as a “Poornographer”, a classic example of “poornography”, in which the rich try to speak on behalf of the poor. In other words, a perfect fit for Trump, who imagines himself as many things, but as we’ve found out, the Emperor has no clothes!