Let’s turn aside from the Shutdown Theater for the moment, along with the associated fight over funding for the border wall. We can still imagine a scenario where the funding is arranged at some point and large sections of the wall, fence or steel spike trap are put in place. As you may have heard, one avenue of potential funding arrived in the form of a GoFundMe crowdsourcing effort which has, at the time of this writing, raised nearly fifteen million dollars to put toward border wall construction.

It remains unclear how this crowdsourcing effort is going to work or even how the government is going to accept the money. But, again, let’s ignore all of those logistical details for the moment and say that it all goes smoothly since this is just a thought experiment anyway. What will the liberals who are so vehemently opposed to such a border barrier do in response? Well, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. They’ll set up their own fund to build giant escalators to help illegal aliens make it over the wall. I only wish I was kidding. (Washington Times)

GoFundMe, the crowdfunding website, has also turned into a major battleground with the president’s supporters asking average Americans to pony up — and some enterprising opponents seeking ways to foil whatever wall emerges.

Luke O’Neil started a page Thursday to, in his words, “build a giant escalator over the wall.”

“The wall is never going to be built but just in case it is we will build a series of giant escalators that are spaced out a half mile along the wall on either side and if that doesn’t happen we’ll just give the money to people who care about the well being of human beings no matter where they’re from,” Mr. O’Neil said in explaining his campaign.

You can look at Mr. O’Neil’s crowdsourcing page here, complete with a photoshopped image of the border wall with a large escalator going over the top. He has thus far raised almost $5,000 of his $200M goal.

O’Neil eventually concedes that the escalator idea is a “metaphor” for any scheme which would assist people in crossing the border, but even with that caveat, this is a dazzling piece of liberal intellectual firepower. Let’s just say for a moment that you could somehow manage to erect a thirty-foot tall escalator on each side of the border wall/fence, arrange a sufficient supply of energy to operate it and fire it up. A number of immediate questions present themselves.

First, tackling this strictly from a logistical standpoint, escalators tend to only operate in one direction. If you only care about people coming into the country I suppose this design is okay, but what about the coyotes who need to come down and pick up their charges and return home later? Really, you’ll need a pair of escalators on each side every half mile so you’ve just doubled the cost.

Second, and not to put too fine of a point on this but… don’t you think CPB might eventually notice a series of thirty-foot-tall escalators spaced out every half mile along the border? Unless you have some sort of stealth camouflage technology in your pocket that nobody else has figured out yet, your installation might not remain in operation very long.

And finally, were you aware that doing anything to facilitate the entry of illegal aliens into the country is a felony? The people using your escalators may only wind up being detained for a couple of days and shipped back to their home countries, but you could easily wind up doing a decade in a federal penitentiary. But hey… don’t let me slow your roll. You keep right on thinking, Luke. That’s what you’re best at.