I started seeing the videos before I knew where they were from: Mostly young, mostly male Moroccans crawling onto beaches, climbing hills, scaling walls, jumping over fences, surging past police in order to get into Europe. On Friday, July 31, JD Vance posted one on his X feed, a clip from a Fox News story. The headline read “Migrants Storm Border of Nothern Spain.”
JD Vance@JDVance
Thank God @POTUS was elected and our country’s border no longer looks like this. These images out of Spain are an unfortunate reminder of the consequences of mass migration and the radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the Invasion of the West. @BillMelugin_:
1:00 PM · Jul 31, 2026 · 4.79M Views
12.8K Replies · 25.5K Reposts · 150K Likes
But the clip was not from Northern Spain. It was from Ceuta, a Spanish enclave in Northern Africa. The people it depicted were never going to be able to enter mainland Spain, or the rest of Europe, because there are border controls between Ceuta and Spain. Despite the fact that they could not reach the Schengen zone, the European Union’s zone of free movement, a whole series of far-right politicians wrote dire, fear-mongering messages claiming that they would.
Nigel Farage, Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, of the UK’s Reform party, said they would soon arrive in Britain. Alice Weidel of the AfD, the German far-right, said Germany was their “likely destination.” Vance declared that “These images out of Spain are an unfortunate reminder of the consequences of mass migration and the radical left-wing globalist policies that have enabled the Invasion of the West.”
Not only were they wrong, none of the people posting angry messages looked closely at what had actually happened, or asked why some 60,000 people had suddenly made the risky decision to swim to Ceuta. As I wrote in The Atlantic,
Last week, according to El Pais as well as other Spanish, international, and Moroccan media outlets, many Moroccans saw a TikTok video nevertheless claiming that “the Spanish border is open and you can cross without papers,” meaning they could reach the European continent. The video appeared to reference a recent ruling by the Spanish supreme court making it harder to return migrants who arrive by sea, but it was not the only encouragement. Other messages, many of which have now disappeared, told people where to buy wet suits, flippers, goggles, floats, and even waterproof bags for documents and cellphones. Screenshots from Google Maps told them which sections of the Ceuta beach might have fewer police. Moroccan border guards were either unwilling or unable to stop them.
By Sunday, after they learned that they could not, in fact, get to mainland Spain, the vast majority of the migrants had returned to Morocco. Spanish police were escorting the few who remained to the border. Neither Vance nor Farage nor anyone else acknowledged the resolution of the crisis. Nor did they talk about the tragedy that unfolded alongside it. On Monday, the morgue in Ceuta contained 88 bodies of people who died during the crossing. The Moroccan government said it had recovered an additional eleven.
No hard evidence about who orchestrated this campaign is yet available, although I am told the Spanish government is investigating. But we can certainly see who amplified it, and we can guess why.
Because the Moroccan border guards did not stop the would-be migrants, some have speculated that the Moroccans themselves might have been behind the incident. The Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, was recently in Algeria, holding a friendly meeting with one of Morocco’s great rivals. Morocco might also want to put pressure on Ceuta and another Spanish North African city, Melilla.
The Trump administration, which has also questioned Britain’s control of the Falkland Islands and Denmark’s control of Greenland, might be interested in the same thing. Recently, a congressional report described the cities as “under Spanish administration,” rather than a part of Spain. Trump himself has reasons to be pleased with Morocco, which has joined his Board of Peace and named a highway in his honor. He also has reasons to dislike Sánchez, who refused to let the U.S. use Spanish military bases for Trump’s war in Iran and says he will not, like the rest of NATO, raise his country’s defense spending to 5 percent of its GDP.
Others also had reasons to exploit the incident. Inside Spain, where Sánchez’s administration and party are under investigation for corruption—a former party leader is alleged to have ties to Chinese and Venezuelan criminal networks—the prime minister has plenty of opponents. One politician from Vox, the Spanish far-right party, visited Ceuta and called for “everyone to defend their family with whatever they have at hand.” The Ukrainian foreign minister published a list of Russian outlets that enthusiastically piled on too.
Israel’s ambassador to the UN also entered the fray, using the opportunity to undermine Spain, a vocal defender of the Palestinians. Maybe before Spain “continues lecturing us, it’s time it explained to the world why it still maintains colonial enclaves in Africa,” he wrote, also on X. The Israeli ambassador to Spain immediately stated that this did not represent the country’s official position, but speculation about Israel’s possible role continues too. (For what it’s worth: the Spanish point out that the city of Ceuta, Spanish since the 16th century, long predates the the modern country of Morocco).
Unfortunately, all of this messaging has an impact, including on other European governments. In 2015, the Syrian civil war produced a massive wave of migration that also was filmed and photographed, especially after Germany declared that it would accept hundreds of thousands of war victims as refugees. Social-media posts showing migrants walking toward Europe played a major role in the Brexit campaign in the U.K., as well as the rise of the far right in Germany. The scars left by this memory are so deep that several European leaders, including the social-democratic prime minister of Denmark and the nationalist prime minister of Italy, this week accused Sánchez of endangering the Schengen Area even though, once again, the integrity of the zone was never threatened, and even though Spain has helped Italy weather its own migrant crises.
I watched this whole thing unfold with a strong sense of déjà vu:
For more than a decade now, European and indeed American politicians have known that real, fake, enhanced, or context-free pictures of migrants jumping fences will immediately create a wave reaction. Military rhetoric will be used—attack or invasion—and, to quote Vance, “radical left-wing globalist policies” will be blamed. Hardly anyone will ask why it is that so many people are so desperate to move that they will risk their lives. Few will mourn the dead.
And somehow, everyone is surprised, unprepared and intimidated when one of these entirely predictable waves begins. Maybe it’s time that politicians of the center-left and center-right start preparing their own messaging in advance.
Read the whole article here
Continuing to monitor conflicts of interest, ostentatious emoluments, outright corruption and policy changes that will facilitate outright corruption. (Read my original article, Kleptocracy Inc and check out the SNF Agora Institute chart)
July 17
Expedited access to Trump’s Truth Social posts, arguably a form of insider trading, could cost subscribers as much as $100,000 a month.
Trump’s ambassador to Italy, billionaire businessman Tilman Fertitta, took a trip on his $450 million yacht along the Italian coast that stuck Italian taxpayers with the bill for a special sea surveillance mission—involving boats and helicopters from the Italian coastguard, financial police, and port authorities—required to secure his voyage.
July 20
Trump took in revenue of more than $117 million from foreign business interests last year, almost as much as the $149 million in overseas revenue he took in over the entirety of his first term.
The Winklevoss twins donated $10 million in bitcoin to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission moved to abandon a Biden-era enforcement action against the brothers’ crypto exchange, Gemini.
July 22
The Trump administration struck a civil nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia that could allow it to enrich uranium—a step previous administrations had conditioned on the country normalizing relations with Israel—after Trump entered into deals worth millions of dollars with Saudi entities since 2024. Notably, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has also received billions in Saudi investments.
Donald Trump Jr.’s 1789 Capital posted returns of nearly 200% at the end of Q2—a result ten times greater than that of a comparable health venture capital firm—after investing in several firms subsequently backed by the Trump administration.
July 24
The Department of Justice has spent nearly $1 million renovating the exterior of its headquarters, including producing and draping large banners of Trump's face over the building's façade.
July 25
An FDA advisory panel—backed by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—voted to broaden public access to a handful of drugs known as peptides, despite the agency’s scientific staff advising against it. The move benefits peptide companies tied to Trump administration officials, including Enhanced Group, which counts Donald Trump Jr. among its investors, and Olympia Pharmaceuticals, operated by a close associate of Kennedy.
July 26
Trump’s push for nuclear energy expansion, including the Saudi Arabia deal, coincides with investments and business ties benefiting his family—such as Trump Media’s nuclear fusion merger and Eric and Donald Trump Jr.’s stakes in nuclear fuel company Quantum Leap Energy—as well as cabinet members like Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Energy Secretary Chris Wright, whose past companies and family business partners stand to profit from related nuclear contracts and financing deals.
July 29
Despite acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s public retreat on the Department of Justice’s $1.8 billion weaponization slush fund, the agency has made a million-dollar payment to an anti-abortion activist pardoned by Trump of his conviction for conspiring to block access to an abortion clinic.
July 30
Trump has raised more than $800 million since returning to office through his chief fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, who presses companies to donate to the president’s personal and political projects, often shortly after they meet with him.
We were there for a classical music festival…sending best wishes to all
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