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Have you ever read anything so ridiculous you stopped and asked yourself What did I just read? You might react that way if you read Buzzfeed’s commentary on President Trump’s proposed border wall. Of course they say a wall won’t work, but they’ve gone Full Stupid in their logic.
Buzzfeed says Look! It’s because the wall in HBO’s Game of Thrones series failed when dragons burned it down.
I’m not kidding.
First, they started with a snarky tweet: Hey, check it out — the idiot president has a mocked-up Game of Thrones poster on the desk at his first Cabinet meeting of 2019!
Note the poster on the table in the Cabinet Room. pic.twitter.com/iHc9e5LIg1
— Jeff Mason (@jeffmason1) January 2, 2019
And here’s what the poster looked like up close.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 2, 2018
The image is obviously a riff on Game of Thrones. But the cool kids at Buzzfeed had to poke fun at it, and went Full Stupid with this title:
“Walls Work, Trump Says In Front of a Poster Memeing “Game of Thrones,” Where a Wall Absolutely Did Not Work.”
I wonder what happened in Game of Thrones where the wall ‘absolutely did not work.’ Let’s investigate, shall we? Here’s the video:
Did you notice something different about how that wall came down? Like a flying, fire-breathing dragon burned it down? And flying, fire-breathing dragons do not exist.
Moreover, both the book series and the TV series Game of Thrones are not history but complete fiction.
Did the Buzzfeed kids bother to consider this before they went Full Stupid with a comparison to a fantasy story?
Yes, I know — they’re millennial hipsters and hipsters major in irony, which is the basis for their stupid comparison.
Oh, but they’ve got their historical arguments about the failure of walls, too. They quoted a Reuters National Security Correspondent:
“Ask a Roman historian what happened to Hadrian’s, the Chinese what happened to theirs, the French what happened to the Maginot Line and the former Soviets what happened to the one that divided Berlin.”
Where to start to unpack this Full Stupid?
You can’t compare Trump’s border wall with Hadrian’s Wall or the Great Wall of China because both are ancient barriers. And, as ancient things tend to do, they deteriorated over hundreds and thousands of years. Plus the technology used to build those walls isn’t utilized anymore.
Apples and oranges, anyone?
Okay, what about the Maginot Line? That was one extraordinary barrier that the French built after World War I to keep the Germans out. And it was a lot more impressive than anything Trump is proposing for the southern border. It had bunkers, casements, and over 5000 blockhouses spread over 280 miles. Plus, there were guns, mortars, and machine gun nests. And if that wasn’t enough, at its broadest point, the Maginot Line was over 16 miles deep.
“And yet the Germans still got into France!” say the Buzzfeed kids. “See, see — walls don’t work!”
However, they’d be ignoring one teensy little fact about how Hitler’s army managed to invade France in 1940, despite the Maginot Line. It’s because the Germans went around it and invaded France through Belgium.
Once again, you can’t compare this wall with a wall on the southern border. There’s no unsuspecting country near our border that illegals can march through. Furthermore, I don’t think Trump or anyone else is expecting a Latin American blitzkrieg.
Okay, what about the Berlin Wall? Actually, the Berlin Wall did a pretty good job of stopping East Germans from fleeing to West Germany during its 28-year run. But let’s review: why doesn’t the Berlin Wall exist anymore? Because it doesn’t need to. On one weekend in 1989, East Germany gave permission to its citizens to cross the borders into West Germany. Before long, civilians were hammering away at the wall while cranes and bulldozers completed the bulk of the work. It was a change in political winds that led to the destruction of the Berlin Wall, not caravans of migrants.
Berlin Wall opens in 1989.
Credit: Roger W @flickr.com. Licensed through Creative Commons, CC by-SA 2.0)
But let’s see where a wall does work in the same manner our proposed border wall.
That would be in Israel, which has constructed several barriers between Egypt, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank. Those walls have successfully stopped most illegal entry; at the Israeli-Egypt border the success rate is 99%.
Now I’m no expert on the southern border, and I have no idea what the best way to secure the border would be. Perhaps it would be walls in some areas, or drones and human patrols in others. I’ll defer to the expertise of the Border Patrol and ICE. But there’s one thing I do know: while drones and patrols can be manipulated through the whims of open-borders Democrats, a wall can’t. It’s pretty darn permanent, and, yes, it will work. Despite what the Full Stupid Buzzfeed crowd might think.
Featured image: cropped and enhanced; from Ryan McGuire @ pixabay. Licensed through Creative Commons, CCo 1.0. Public domain.
SFC D says: “See, see — walls don’t work!”
Wrong again, kids. We like our wall in Arizona. It’s not 100% effective, no wall will ever be. But it’s still a very effective tool to keep out people that shouldn’t be here.
Scott says: “Now I’m no expert on the southern border, and I have no idea what the best way to secure the border would be. Perhaps it would be walls in some areas, or drones and human patrols in others. I’ll defer to the expertise of the Border Patrol and ICE.”
I’ll just refer to an old cadence from Basic Training “Hail, Hail Artillery!”
GWB says: And flying, fire-breathing dragons do not exist.
Whoah! Don’t go othering dragons! You’d best not be excluding those who self-identify as mythical beasts!
hipsters major in irony
Hipsters wouldn’t know irony if they sat on it, in most cases. (Like that stupid song, in which nothing named as ‘ironic’ is anything of the sort.)
Ask a Roman historian what happened to Hadrian’s, the Chinese what happened to theirs, the French what happened to the Maginot Line and the former Soviets what happened to the one that divided Berlin.
Ummm, Hadrian’s Wall was pretty effective – until there wasn’t anyone left to man it.
The Chinese wall was pretty effective – except when people bribed the gate-keepers.
The Maginot line forced Hitler to adopt a wholly different strategy and armed forces to go around it (as you noted).
And Berlin…… Oy. Oddly, it’s probably the most correct analogy, in that it was built to keep people wanting a better life out of West Berlin. Of course, the real equivalent would be Mexico building that wall on its side of the border. And machine-gunning anyone who tried to scale it.
As to the usefulness of the Berlin Wall ending…. That would be like The US Annexing Mexico – making the border wall unnecessary. (I’ve argued for that, at times.)
Now, to the wall in GoT…. Does Buzzfeed know that dragons can <strongfly? If the invasion column had aircraft, then a wall would be less helpful. Especially if they were armed in such a way as to destroy the wall. Of course, the media-Democrat complex would have even MORE trouble covering that up than they did that the “migrant caravan” was really an invasion column.
Yeah, Buzzfeed are idiots. But you didn’t need me to tell you that.
Wfjag says: Walls don’t work –
Except across the Southern California border on New Year’s night, where it did work.
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