Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:00 PM | September 13, 2026
meme

As the Babylon Bee has found to its displeasure, it's getting increasingly difficult to parody the Left. 

However insane a parody sounds, within a year or two the left mimics whatever the Babylon Bee thought was a hyperbolic example of a real trend. It's led to a new meme: the Babylon Bee prophecy, where an old Bee headline is juxtaposed with a current real one. 

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Who, for instance, could have predicted in a serious fashion that liberals would start attacking federal law enforcement officers to stop them from deporting rapists and paedos? Ten years ago it would have been a joke about how lenient on criminals the Left is, and how much they love illegal aliens. 

Now? It's reality. 

Search X for "Babylon Bee Prophecy," and you can find many examples that fit perfectly, or nearly so. The Left has become a parody of itself.

I was thinking about this as I ran into this story from the Boston Globe about how Vermonters are upset that they are being sent refugees who aren't medieval barbarians, but white people from a country in which they are being hunted for their skin color. 

It's "awkward," you see, to have white South Africans be resettled in a state desperately trying to shed its majority-white status. 

I'm not kidding. People in towns of 12,000 are upset that their goal to become more racially and religiously diverse by importing Middle Easterners is being upended by the arrival of whites.

Although it is overwhelmingly white, Brattleboro — like much of Vermont — generally reviles the very policies that brought Marais here: President Trump’s decision to end refugee programs for people of color and instead admit the descendants of those who controlled South Africa during apartheid.

That’s led to a bit of awkwardness in a place that prides itself on its welcoming ways.

“It’s tricky. I’ll put it that way,” acknowledged Joe Wiah, a Liberian refugee who now runs Brattleboro’s resettlement program.

For decades, refugees were typically placed in northwest Vermont, around Burlington, where much of the state’s population lives. But in 2021, business leaders in Brattleboro decided to establish a resettlement program in this town of 12,000, near the border with Massachusetts and New Hampshire. They saw it as an opportunity to address troubling economic trends: a stagnant and aging population that could not fill local jobs. Plus, it would bring diversity to a town that was more than 92 percent white.

The decision coincided with the United States’ precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan. Over the next four years, around 650 Afghans moved to Vermont, many to Brattleboro, Bennington, and surrounding towns along the southern border of the state, according to the Vermont Afghan Alliance.

“The community responded beautifully,” said Paul Gallagher, cochair of the Brattleboro-based St. Michael’s Episcopal Church Refugee Ministry, which organized volunteers to support the new arrivals.

But the day Trump returned to office last year, he suspended the refugee resettlement program, which had brought more than 100,000 people to the US the previous year, largely from impoverished, war-torn, majority-Muslim nations. Weeks later, the president granted a single exception: for Afrikaners, who he said were victims of “white genocide,” a widely debunked claim.

“It was malicious because it was just so false,” Gallagher said. “They do not meet the definition of a refugee.”

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Now I did something that the Boston Globe failed to do: I looked up crime rates in Brattleboro in recent years, and what do you know? Crime has been skyrocketing, with formerly safe Brattleboro seeing a massive crime spike in recent years, and crime rates now well above the national average. 

In Vermont. VERMONT. 

Businesses that survived the fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic have expressed frustration that the situation is scaring away shoppers just as signs of new commercial and cultural life are springing up.

“The perception of safety — or lack of safety — feels at an all-time high,” Kate Trzaskos, executive director of the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance, said at a recent selectboard meeting. “That’s what we’re really wrestling with on a day-to-day basis.”

Baker noted a string of local headlines dating back to last year’s murder of a Brattleboro shelter coordinator.

“I have not worked in a community where I sense the depth of the trauma that I sense in Brattleboro,” the former chief turned consultant said.

Even so, Baker found something positive in the rise in police calls.

“That means people are calling the police department because they trust the police department,” he said.

Residents who’ve crowded into the selectboard’s most recent meetings see it differently.

“I think it shows,” DeGray said, “that we have a lot of activity in our town that people are just fed up with.”

Gee, I don't know. Maybe there is a causal link? Certainly, there is a correlation between the importation of Third-Worlders and rising crime. 

Just sayin'.

Yet everybody in the region seems proud of their efforts to integrate their communities with people who come from countries where stoning women and raping children are considered normal, while bringing White South Africans makes their skin crawl. 

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It's so awkward. It doesn't fit The Narrative™. And TRUMP. 

These people are fleeing a country where the anthem for a major political party calls for their murder, but, really, don't they deserve it? They are, after all, white. 





























































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