Let’s play a game. It’s called “Who’s the Mark?”
You pour $5 billion of taxpayer money into resurrecting the American manufacturing. The goal is to bring noble, high-paying jobs back to the heartland; to make things in America again with American hands.
You hold the press conference. You cut the ribbon and tweet the victory lap. Next, you feel a warm, self-congratulatory glow. You are a Job Creator.
Now, fast forward. The federal agency tasked with immigration enforcement—the same one often accused of being asleep at the wheel or having its hands tied by political whims—conducts a raid on your shining beacon of American industry. And what do they find?
They don’t find a line of proud, salt-of-the-earth Georgians building Palisades and Tucsons. They find a small nation of illegals. Not a handful or a few bad apples. Over four hundred of them. A veritable shadow workforce practically running the entire facility.
So, again, who’s the mark?
Hint: try the American taxpayer, who just funded a $5 billion irony factory.
Welcome to the Hyundai plant in Montgomery, Georgia, the physical manifestation of a broken promise and a national punchline that isn’t even funny anymore. This facility isn’t just an automotive plant; it’s a monument to cognitive dissonance, built with funds from the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act—legislation explicitly touted to create “good-paying American jobs.” The only thing “American” about these jobs was the currency on the paycheck, and even that’s debatable if the money was being sent back to families abroad.
This raid should have been a five-alarm fire on the front page of every newspaper, a case study in the spectacular failure of top-down economic planning. But it was quickly relegated to a sidebar, a fleeting moment of schadenfreude before the news cycle moved on. We’ve become so numb to the farce that a $5 billion scandal is just Tuesday.
But the hypocrisy doesn’t end at the factory gate. It drives itself all the way to the halls of Congress, where it has a reserved parking spot.
We are constantly told by a certain political class that certain jobs—in manufacturing, agriculture, and service—are “jobs Americans just won’t do.” It’s a phrase uttered with a condescending sigh, as if Americans have become too soft, too entitled to get their hands dirty. The Georgia raid proves the lie. Americans won’t do jobs that pay a pittance, often under exploitative conditions, while corporations, aided by a blind eye turned from the top, actively seek out a desperate, compliant labor force that can’t complain about workplace safety or demand a living wage. It’s not a labor shortage; it’s a wage and dignity shortage.
This brings us to the other, more fragrant layer of hypocrisy: the elected officials who benefit from this system while preaching from a mountaintop of moral authority. If we’re talking about rules and who follows them, let’s talk about Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN).
The rules for immigration and citizenship are not a mystery.
They are a long, arduous path designed to prioritize those who truly want to be here, to contribute, to become Americans in spirit, not just on paper. Legal immigrants are some of this nation’s most patriotic and productive citizens because they chose this nation, they sacrificed for it, and they played by the rules to earn their place.
Then there’s Rep. Omar. According to numerous investigations, including a 2016 report from the Department of Education which found her likely committed marriage fraud by wedding her own brother to secure citizenship, she allegedly skipped to the front of the line. The case is complex and mired in he-said/she-said, but the IRS and FEC investigations into her campaign finances and marital disclosures don’t exactly paint a picture of pristine integrity.
Now, as a sitting member of the United States Congress, she routinely offers critiques of America that go far beyond policy disagreement into the realm of visceral contempt. This is, of course, her right. But for those who respect the institution of citizenship, it’s a galling spectacle: allegedly gaming the system to get in, only to spend a career biting the hand that fed her the opportunity.
The pinnacle of this contempt was on stunning display recently. Omar, along with Representatives Lateefah Simon (CA-12), Delia Ramirez (IL-03), and Summer Lee (PA-12), formed a caucus of chaos by being the only four votes in the entire House of Representatives against the Stop Chinese Fentanyl Act.
Let that marinate. A bill designed to combat the flow of a chemical weapon of mass destruction—a substance killing over 70,000 Americans a year, tearing families apart, and decimating communities—was too much for them to stomach. What possible “progressive” principle justifies allowing a hostile foreign power to continue pumping poison into our cities? It’s a level of ideological purity so extreme it becomes a death cult. What kind of sick person must you be to not want to stop this drug from killing Americans?
But the grift, as it always does, comes back to money.
While Americans struggle with inflation and the very fentanyl crisis Omar et al. seem unconcerned with, rumors swirl around the congresswoman’s sudden financial enlightenment. If reports are to be believed, she and her political consultant husband are now worth a staggering $30 million.
Let’s be clear: serving in Congress pays $174,000 a year. Even with the most generous stock tips from the ghost of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the math doesn’t math. Americans deserve a full, transparent, and forensic accounting of how this happened. Are they world-beating entrepreneurs who launched a revolutionary startup between committee hearings? Or did they, perhaps, enroll in the Joe Biden Academy of Grift and get their Master’s at Pelosi’s School of Inside Investing? The stench of corruption is overwhelming.
Worse still, as the couple allegedly amassed millions, stories surfaced that they may owe the IRS and Minnesota Department of Revenue over $200,000 in unpaid taxes.
So, not only do they allegedly not want to stop the flow of deadly drugs, but they also allegedly don’t want to pay their fair share to the very government and society they are elected to serve. The hypocrisy is so thick you could pave a road with it.
The arc of this story is a perfect, miserable circle. A government pours public money into a private enterprise for a public good. The enterprise, hungry for profits, bypasses the public to hire illegal labor. The politicians who enabled the funding turn a blind eye to the labor violation, and some even vote to keep the deadly drugs flowing that are killing the very public the jobs were meant to help.
The plantation isn’t in Georgia. It’s in Washington D.C. And we’re all on it.
