Refugees sent to Martha’s Vineyard

Seems like someone might be 'mistranslating' what the asylum seekers are actually saying. According to MSNBC they were thanking DeSantis for flying them to Martha's Vineyard https://twitter.com/RealMacReport/status/1570877407116263424

CNN have an interview with one of them, actual words from someone who was on the place. He says they were given a choice of three different places, whatever was available. He sounded pretty happy to have arrived at Martha's Vineyard, completely oblivious that he was now in mortal danger. Hear from migrant sent to Martha's Vineyard - YouTube

I hear Bob Geldoff is moving to Martha's Vineyard.

That'll free up his house for all the refugees he took in

Doing what it can... towards what ends though? If their aim is just to use immigrants as pawns in their ongoing culture wars to provide yet another justification for people who are resentful of 'everyone else', and point fingers at 'everyone else' as the cause of their lack of agency, then yes, they're doing a bang-up job of achieving their aim. Their latest stunt took aim at killing two birds with the one stone - raising anxieties about immigrants, AND taking a shot at progressives, at the same time.

When I refer to 'their failings', I'm referring to the lack of any adherence to Republican values, or principles. They appear to have completely abandoned the values of how Republicans can be identified, in favour of just straight up populism - no values, no principles, just portray 'everyone else' as the existential threat to Southerners way of life. They're basically reacting to progressives, and the seeds of it were sown since the Bush Administration was in office. At least then, Republicans were still identifiable by their values and principles, when the Bush Administration had an actual policy which was intended to control immigration, as opposed to just stoking resentment towards immigrants.

To put what I call their failings in some sort of context, it's probably better to lay out what I would have always considered Republican values and principles. There's a good summary of them here, which more or less about covers it. I've just included the main headings, but they're expanded upon in the article -

Traditional Republican values - NH Business Review (nhbr.com)

• Freedom
• Limited government
• Government close to the people
• Strong national defense
• Quality public education
• Limited taxes and balanced budgets
• Conserving the environment
• Encouraging capitalism
• Realistic foreign policy based on American leadership

There are more obviously, but that'd be getting more granular as in individual Republicans will have their own ideas of what constitutes Republicanism for them, but at their most fundamental operating level, Republicans could always be said to align closer to the idea of the Golden Rule. Recently though. while most Republicans would still share those values, it appears that the political leaders (I use the term 'leaders' loosely), haven't just failed to promote traditional Republican values in their positive sense, they've outright abandoned them in favour of behaving like petty, spiteful miscreants. I know you've argued earlier in the thread that this latest political manoeuvre puts immigration policies back in the spotlight and was a protest, but their actions were not those of Republicans, they were the actions of a petulant child kicking another child in the belief their parents will be sorry now that they won't let them get a pet. It's punishing an innocent party thinking it will have any impact on the decisions made by other people. Immigrants don't make immigration policies, so why are they being made to suffer? And it is suffering, because the immigrants being shunted out of state didn't ask for it. They intended to get to where their own people are, primarily in states like Texas and Florida, and even then Venezuelans only make up a tiny percentage of the immigrant population in those states, among the tiny percentage of immigrant populations in those states -

Article: Venezuelan Immigrants in the United States | migrationpolicy.org

Shunting them out of state, and particularly to a place like Martha's Vineyard, demonstrated no regard whatsoever for the immigrants welfare. It's literally setting them up for failure, and trying to set the northern states up for failure by just dumping immigrants on them, deliberately not notifying them so it would look like they were failing to support immigrants. Even when immigrants were being moved to a military base which is better resourced and better able to accommodate them, STILL there were the usual populist sorts trying to put a sneery spin on the whole spectacle to bolster their efforts to suggest that people in the northern states were caught off-guard because they don't want immigrants. Populist politicians don't do reality, they do propaganda and spin. When their fearmongering nonsense isn't working fast enough, they'll engineer circumstances which they imagine will align with the image they want to portray. Meanwhile people who hold Republican values and principles, will behave like people who hold Republican values and principles -

Migrants Flown to Martha's Vineyard Moving to Military Base | Military.com