Spain Is the New California

On fire, overrun, and run by socialists. Plus Fauci pleads the Fifth a hundred times, and a mayor unveils a Soviet grocery store.

Lau here, writing to you from, and about, Spain again. I'd meant to open with something else this week, but Spain found its way back into the headlines yet again, and yet again for all the wrong reasons. So I hope you'll bear with me.

This time it wasn’t the fires. It was 60,000 illegal migrants storming into the town of Ceuta (the overwhelming majority of them fighting-age men), crossing from Morocco by land and sea in a matter of hours. Here’s some footage, to give you a taste.

Now, in case you’re worried about the wellbeing of your editor, don’t be. Ceuta is not located on the Spanish mainland. It’s a small piece of Spanish territory, an enclave, that sits across the water on the North African coast.

But here’s the thing about the place: it’s a city of only about 85,000 people. So when 60,000 pour across the border in a matter of hours (reporters on the ground were clocking something like 200 people a minute), you’re looking at more than half the city’s entire population arriving in a single day. That’s when a town’s real trouble starts. And the internet is full of videos of the place descending into chaos: crowds of young men harassing locals, breaking into shops and even private homes. A total sh*tshow, and a nightmare for anyone who actually lives there.

Now, there’s nothing new about Spain’s coastline being a landing point for illegal migration out of Africa. It’s been happening for years, really ever since Angela Merkel threw open Germany’s doors back in 2015 and signaled to the whole continent that the welcome mat was out. But this is something else entirely. This is on a scale nobody has seen before.

So unprecedented, in fact, that it pulled a statement out of Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who called for Spain to be suspended from Schengen, the EU’s visa-free travel zone.

Source: X

And as I write this, Italy has already started acting on it, reintroducing checks on arrivals from Spain by air and sea.

Now, in case you’re not familiar with it, most of the EU belongs to what’s called the Schengen Area. No passports, no border checks, drive from Lisbon to Tallinn without ever stopping. That was the deal, anyway, and it’s meant to be the crown jewel of the whole European project, the thing the EU is built on. But the way I see it (and Italy just proved the point), it’s already dead in the water. Country after country has been quietly reintroducing controls, mostly because of out-of-control immigration and everything that comes with it.

I saw the writing on the wall myself a little over a month ago. On our drive down to Spain I wrote about hitting border checkpoints crossing into Poland and then Germany that simply weren’t there the summer before.

So what brought this on?

The internet’s already cooking up theories that this is payback, punishment for Spain being the one EU country willing to stand up to both Washington on China and Israel on Gaza. And look, I keep an open mind. Far too many so-called conspiracy theories have turned out to be true lately, COVID leaking from a lab being the cleanest example.

But I don’t think that’s it.

For starters, a lot of the people pushing that line conveniently forget that Spain has, for the better part of a decade, been run by a rabidly socialist government that despises almost everything the West stands for, including its own history and, frankly, its own people. So any “principled stand” coming out of Madrid against the U.S. or Israel isn’t really about the Palestinians or the Iranians. It’s ideological. In plain terms: they’re communists, and they hate the West. And they hate their own population as an extension of that West. So much so that they’ve been openly trying to replace it with foreigners, as a way to lock their opponents out of power for good. It's why, just months ago, they pushed through an extraordinary regularization scheme handing legal residence and work permits to about a million migrants over the next three years, with a path to citizenship.

Source: Euronews

Note: That, coming back to Schengen for a moment, is the real problem for everyone else. Once a country turns itself into one giant sanctuary, and there are no borders between it and the rest of the continent, those migrants aren’t just legal there. They’re legal everywhere in the bloc. They can go anywhere and do as they please, and the rest of the continent is left standing downstream of it.

There’s a lot more to say here (I may even write a fuller piece, with some of the conversations I’ve had with people while I’m here), but suffice it to say I’ve never seen Spaniards despise a government the way they despise this one.

Anyway, back to the invasion itself. From my digging, both online and on the ground here, there are two things going on.

The first is legal. Back in July (just weeks ago), Spain’s Supreme Court ruled that migrants who reach Ceuta or Melilla by sea can no longer be given the “hot return” (devolución en caliente) that used to send them straight back. Now they have to go through the full legal process. The ruling applies to them because they don’t climb the border fences. They swim around them.

That doesn’t mean you automatically get asylum. But to the smugglers and the migrants, the message is dead simple: make it to the beach, and Spain has to process you. Maybe you get asylum, maybe you don’t, but in the meantime, while you wait, it’s free housing, free food, free everything. A pretty good deal for people who don’t have two cents to rub together.

Granted, that still doesn’t explain how you get from a court ruling to 60,000 people crossing at once. That doesn’t just happen. It’s organized.

And that’s where Morocco comes in. Morocco has a long track record of “relaxing” its border controls whenever it wants to lean on Spain or the EU, opening the tap, basically, as leverage. The best-known case was Ceuta in 2021, when thousands crossed right after Spain quietly let a figure Morocco considers an enemy into the country for medical treatment.

Fast forward to today, and Morocco looks annoyed about something else entirely: Spain cozying up to Algeria, its bitter rival in the region. In March, Spain’s foreign minister flew to Algiers (the Algerian capital) to deepen energy ties. Then, on July 20 (days before the border broke), Spain’s socialist prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, went himself, with the bosses of Spain’s biggest energy companies in tow, and the two countries announced a “new phase”: more Algerian gas, fuller use of the Medgaz pipeline that runs straight from Algeria to Spain, more LNG, broader cooperation across energy and industry.

Source: Democrata

To Morocco, that’s Spain climbing into bed with the enemy. And a few days later, the border sprang a leak.

It doesn’t strike me as a coincidence, not with Morocco’s track record of using its border as a weapon against Spain.

Anyway, it seems Spain is in trouble. Which, these days, feels more like the rule in Europe than the exception. As even Bill Maher (one of the more reasonable old-school liberals) put it:

Did you see what happened in Spain? 60,000 people in one day bum-rushed the border. And at the same time, Spain’s having horrible fires. Spain is the new California: the northern part is on fire, the southern part gets overrun by migrants, and everybody speaks Spanish.

And since that sharp joke just carried us across the water, let’s turn to the biggest story of the week in the U.S.: Anthony Fauci.

Yes, we finally got to see Mr. Science testify. Well, “testify” is generous. On the advice of his lawyers, Fauci took the Fifth instead. More than a hundred times. He wouldn’t say what day of the week it was. He wouldn’t say what color his tie was. He wouldn’t even say what color the carpet was.

Source: X

Because nothing says “trust the science” quite like pleading the Fifth over the color of the carpet.

And the reason is pretty obvious. Fauci is clearly terrified of incriminating himself.

In case you’re wondering why, Biden’s pardon (or Biden’s autopen pardon, if we’re being precise) only covers crimes committed before he left office. So if Fauci answers a question today in a way that contradicts his earlier sworn testimony, that’s a brand-new perjury case the old pardon doesn’t touch. The same goes for possible state charges or contempt.

Which is exactly why his lawyers told him to shut up and plead the Fifth on everything, right down to the color of the carpet.

Some of my readers may disagree, but I think Congress should grant the bastard immunity. If that’s the only way to drag the actual truth out of him, then do it. Not for his sake, but for the people who lost family, businesses, years of their lives, and whatever trust they had left in “science” and “the institutions.” And so we’ve got a fighting chance of stopping the same circus from playing out the next time someone decides to play God. We already know he funded the research. We already know the diary contradicts the public story. We already know he orchestrated the early narrative. What we still don’t have is the full, unfiltered account, under oath, of exactly how deep it went and who else was in on it. Give him immunity. Make him talk. Then let the chips fall. He won’t get off scot-free before God anyway.

That aside, the other story that caught my eye last week was NYC’s socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani, unveiling plans for New York’s first city-owned grocery store. That one hits close to home. I was born in the USSR and grew up under the exact system he’s now selling to Americans. So here’s the Substack note I posted about it:

That was the week, and a busy one for me behind the scenes, too. Most of it went into finally finishing the SNAFU Investing uranium report, which is up now for paid subscribers. It’s linked just below, along with last week’s other piece.

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From the Comments

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate most about writing here is the conversation that happens in the comments. Here are five that stood out last week, for different reasons. Each one links back to the piece or note it appeared on, so you can click through if you’re interested in the context.

Thanks again to everyone who left a comment last week. I read all of them, even the ones I don’t get a chance to reply to individually. Over the coming days, I’ll try to catch up on the questions and the longer threads.

See you in the comments this week.

Regards,

Lau Vegys

P.S. If you joined as a paid member last week, welcome aboard. Here’s where to dive in:

• The first recommendation: a uranium play, with the full thesis, buy-up-to price, and tranche levels.

• The second recommendation: a silver miner.

• The live portfolio: the scorecard of every open position and where each one stands.