The American Conservative has been a bit unwieldly from the start, attracting dubious characters whose only “conservative” instinct was isolationism rooted in the very unconservative impulses of pacifism and alienation from the values of fellow Americans. Pat Buchanan has had little involvement for a while. Taki left and started his own magazine, which now appears to be headed towards self-destruction. What remained has been adrift for quite a while. Now, confirming for the millionth time the truth of O’Sullivan’s First Law, the American Conservative under the leadership of Ron Unz has started to question the immigration reform views of traditional conservatives, suggesting that fears of Hispanic Crime–which tends to be 3X the rate of native-born whites–are overstated and exaggerated. Don’t we have the Weekly Standard and the Wall Street Journal to promote such mythology?
Of course, crime is not the only reason to oppose massive Latin American immigration. There are other issues like the job security of native born Americans and the ways that Third World values corrupt our political culture and collective ways of life. Ignoring these other concerns shows a real lack of conservatism, and the suggestion that these fears are irrational is not only stupid, but is easily refuted factually, as Heather MacDonald and Steve Sailer have done for years. But the bigger question is: why, even if crime were absolutely a non-factor in Latin American immigration, would a conservative, concerned with conserving a particular American way of life from change and degradation, support what has been one of the most significant drivers of our national dissolution, disunity, and decline. I would not want millions of people from anywhere coming here, even if they all were quite pacific. Conservatism is supposed to be about conserving something, but Unz has demonstrated (again) a marked indifference to the survival of America as a coherent and historical entity.
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[...] Conservative email lists today teemed with angry messages about a recent article. Over at the American Conservative, Ron Unz, the neoliberal publisher of the American Conservative (since the departure of Patrick J. Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos), has penned a rather politically correct piece criticizing conservatives for criticizing Hispanic crime. [...]
I have never been sympathetic to Latin American immigration. I understand why our forefathers from Europe left the Old World and came to start anew here. I understand why many in Asia and Africa would like to do the same today.
But Latin Americans are New World immigrants, which means THEY FAILED. All of us in the New World started new nations and had every opportunity to succeed since we were blessed with abundant resources. But after more than 200 years, it has become clear which governments, cultures and value systems have succeeded and which have not.
Look at the empirical evidence. In the New World there are 4 first-world countries that people want to live in; the USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. What do these four have in common?
The rest of the New World has been a colossal failure. And no, it is not the fault of US foreign policy or the US-Mexican War that has caused this.
In Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, he writes several pages about the lack of achievement in the Spanish and French colonies versus British North America. Keep in mind this was written in 1776 and even back then Smith and others could see that British part of the New World was exceeding the Latin part despite the fact that the Latin colonies tended to have better climates, better resources and more people.
If anything Latin America needs to emulate the successful policies of the US and Canada. They need to encourage more immigration from China and India and other places to infuse them with more of an entrepreneurial spirit.
I skimmed the TAC article. (Did anyone actually read the whole thing carefully?) I’m not interested enough to evaluate his empirical argument, but if Unz is right then there’s nothing wrong, in itself, with TAC openly discussing the fact that Hispanic crime is a myth. It’s an interesting question that should be discussed, and right-wing publications are the only forum where such a public discussion can take place.
But as Mr. Roach said, even if Hispanics were completely law-abiding it would still be incredibly stupid or self-destructive to let them immigrate in large numbers. I was looking for that point while skimming the article, but the closest Unz came to it was when he said that restrictionists “can” provide “legitimate arguments” other than crime. Not “irrefutable or even “convincing” arguments, apparently – “legitimate” arguments. Even many pro-immigration people are happily willing to concede that there are “legitimate” concerns. So thank you, Mr. Unz.
For me, immigration is the problem facing America. It’s the one problem that cannot possibly be overcome or reversed. It can never be overcome because it’s not only a matter of culture, the American way of life. For me it’s also about race. I want America to stay white. Even if we could somehow be assured that Hispanics (or Asians or whoever) would assimilate perfectly and become indistinguishable, culturally, from European-Americans, I’d still oppose mass immigration just on the basis of race. Mass immigration is an irreversible problem, even in the best-case scenario.
Obviously it’s best not to mention race when talking about this stuff with liberals or mainstream conservatives, but it’s just as important to be honest with ourselves about the reasons we oppose immigration. There may come a time when an open, honest discussion is possible.
P.S. Agreed about the decline (and imminent fall?) of Takimag. About the time you were writing for it, it was a great website. I guess it’s nice to get the Next Generation involved and all that, but these newer contributors are all lightweights, and mostly shitty writers as well. (Contrast with John Zmirak’s columns.) Sad.
Coincidence that the amconmag.com is currently pointing to a GoDaddy parking page instead of the magazine?
Wasting space, much less the cover, of a supposedly real conservative magazine, to discuss the “myth of hispanic crime” is like pruning the shrubs while the house is burning down. They might as well have done a story about Final Four. Sad is an understatement. They’re going down, which I’m sure was the whole point anyhow.
Zmirak? He was the biggest idiot and moral coward of the bunch. He’d be fine if all whites in America were replaced with mestizos as long as they were Catholic. This type of insanity must be rejected outright. He’s an apologist for genocide. He needs to be drummed out of anything truly conservative. He’s an embarrassment.
All these fake “conservatives” want to conserve is their reputation as respectable conservatives. The last thing they want to do is make liberals look stupid or poke real holes in the new religion of political correctness.
I’m not sure O’Sullivan’s First Law offers the best explanation for what has happened to The American Conservative.
“O’Sullivan’s First Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing. I cite as supporting evidence the ACLU, the Ford Foundation, and the Episcopal Church. The reason is, of course, that people who staff such bodies tend to be the sort who don’t like private profit, business, making money, the current organization of society, and, by extension, the Western world.”
Some of these don’t fit Ron Unz at all:
• doesn’t like private profit
• doesn’t like business
• doesn’t like making money
• doesn’t like the current organization of society
• doesn’t like the Western world
I think we need to look for another explanation.
“I skimmed the TAC article. (Did anyone actually read the whole thing carefully?)”
I did.
“I’m not interested enough to evaluate his empirical argument, but if Unz is right then there’s nothing wrong, in itself, with TAC openly discussing the fact that Hispanic crime is a myth.”
Yeah, but the problem is that Unz is wrong.
Much like a magician sawing a lady in half, Ron Unz has have created an illusion by making it so we only see a misrepresentative part of what is actually there.
The basic issue is that because Hispanics are much more likely to be in the Country Illegally, an offense that falls under the purview of Federal Law Enforcement, they are far more likely to have the crimes they commit go to a Federal Court.
And this applies even for those of their crimes that aren’t immigration related.
So often, an Illegal Immigrant will only be taken into custody by the Feds because he committed a Violent or Drug Related Crime, as opposed to being taken in by the Feds just because he was in the Country illegally.
So guess what Unz does in his study?
He deliberately excludes people incarcerated for Crimes they were convicted of in Federal Court, instead only looking at people incarcerated for Crimes they were convicted of in State Courts.
Thus he rejects the far more valid technique used in The Color of Crime, which involved combining those convicted in State Court with those convicted in Federal Court to get a comprehensive and unbiased sample.
For this reason the American Conservative Article can be described as nothing more than a damned lie, carefully designed to dupe the gullible and weak minded.
There is not a single particle of validity in the Unz Study, it is nothing less than a perversion of Statistics, and it demonstrates with sickening clarity how motivated Anti-Whites can be in their quest to create something that looks reality based, but is in fact no such thing.
The Color of Crime found that in the overall prison population in 2001, Hispanics were overrepresented relative to Whites by +190%.
Ron Unz found that in the State prison population in 2005, Hispanics were overrepresented relative to Whites by only +80%.
The reason for the disparity is that Ron Unz’s sample only looked at a part of the prison population that is disproportionately Non-Hispanic. It isn’t that for some bizarre reason there was a massive decline in the Hispanic Crime Rate from 2001 to 2005.
Really, you don’t have to be very smart to see that if you have two studies saying very different things, you should believe the study based on a comprehensive and representative sample.
In other words, you should believe The Color of Crime, and its finding that Hispanics are nearly 3 times as Crime Prone as Whites, while discarding Unz’s study into the trash bin like the worthless piece of garbage that it is.
This seems like a manifestation of a larger problem: the redefinition of “liberal” and “conservative”. These adjectives are now used to describe groups of people rather than definable ideas. Thus, a magazine called “The American Conservative” can defend massive demographic transformation of the USA – an obviously non-dictionary-conservative position – because “conservatives” like Bush and McCain endorse it. And why “liberals” like Obama can advocate more “hate crimes” legislation, higher taxes, and other authoritarian positions. It’s like if we got confused and started lumping in Tom Brady with the Founding Fathers, because they’re all “patriots”.
In response to Ted, I’d say that someone who likes “the current organization of society” and likes “the Western world” would not defend Third World immigration. Conservatives want to keep things as they are. Changing the demographic composition of America into something it has never been is an inherently progressive position.
I wrote an article touching on some of these issues (not AmCon, but on immigrant crime).
Interesting Article
A lot of the leftist misconceptions about this sort of thing come from excluding children born in the US to foreign-born parents from the definition of “immigrant”. (These would be considered “first generation” or “second “generation” depending on who is talking.) Foreign-born people have lower crime rates than US-born people of the same ethnic group, for every ethnic group.
The people who distort information to suit a pro-immigration agenda use this fact to the hilt, implying that all ethnic groups are the same (they’re not) or that we have no right to choose who settle here (we do).
It’s a very straightforward sort of leftist propaganda, in which the 0.70 incarceration rate among Mexican-born people in the US is used to whitewash the eightfold higher rate among US-born Chicanos.
I think that Scott McConnell’s magazine was about to fold when Ron Unz stepped in with fast cash to keep it going. Unz, like most Jews, favors a non-restrictive immigration policy. He’s made no secret of that. He believes that hispanic immigrants can be “mainstreamed” into the dominant culture by immersion in English and initiated and paid for CA proposition 227 to end bilingual studies in the state’s public schools. Perhaps he also believes that Am Con’s influential paleo right wing readers can be mainstreamed in gradual steps into “movement” conservatives?
Unz is supposedly a super genius with an undergraduate degree in physics from Harvard and a graduate degree also in physics from Stanford. Rather than pursuing a career in theoretical physics, Unz parlayed his analytical skills into designing software for the financial industry and made a fortune at it.
Unz reminds me of another supposed Jewish super genius, David Gelbaum. Gelbaum’s father, Bernard, was a professor of mathematics and the author of many textbooks on advanced topics in that discipline. David used his brains to pursue a career in hedge funds and raked in hundreds of millions if not billions. It is reported that Gelbaum gave over $100 million to the Sierra Club on the proviso that they would drop their principled opposition to immigration. They did, of course.
I agree Takimag seems to be headed south. For me removing comments was a huge mistake. Now Taki’s daughter is becoming the editor. Maybe she is talented, but she seems like a socialite to me. How that qualifies her for editing a conservative political magazine, I don’t know.
Personally, I’ve always found Taki to be a contradictory and vulgar character. How a conservative Christian “purist” like Pat Buchanan can cavort with a licentious, peacocky playboy who uses his “conservative” magazine to brag about his past sexual conquests is a mystery to me.
I also think Taki’s daughter running the magazine is strange. I notice among the rich a tendency to have people build things up for them so they can then step in and run them once the hardest work has been done. I wonder if that is the case here.
In this case, however, as Roach points out, TakiMag had recently gone downhill even while still edited by Spencer. My guess is that he clashed with a lot of the writers but kept his gloves off the big names like Buchanan, with the result that he ended up with a mix of a few big name writers and a lot of more obscure writers. The obscure writers are a mixed bag, for the most part not too talented or insightful. The result is that you can read a Buchanan column, and underneath it, find a total piece of crap.
I also think the magazine picked up an anti-American slant, always present with writers like Raimondo, but increasingly evident as Spencer decided he would become a radical anti-establishment libertarian type. He apparantly decided the U.S. was a rotten corpse of a nation, and took on writers like Paul Craig Roberts, who make even Raimondo look like a patriot. You could see the shift developing as Spencer and a few other writers constantly harped on the idea of abandoning conservatism and relabeling themselves as the “Alternative Right”. Generally, when any group decides to label itself “Alternative”, it’s a bad sign.
It’s sad because TakiMag was a good magazine for a while, and still occasionally features some great articles. I repeat my suggestion for Roach to go and find a few similar-minded bloggers and create his own web magazine on his current platform. I promise that if I ever get ridiculously rich I will be sure to financially support it.
The explanation is simple: Unz is not a conservative. QED
[...] magazine,” bolstering the case for continued mass immigration into the United States. More sober minds were not so [...]
I’m not commenting either way on the issue of Latin American immigration. Any worthwhile points for discussion in this article are lost in the stench of obvious racism… that, or very smug ignorance of basic reason. In a fast-paced, oversaturated information age, when you aren’t willing to start from a position of total factual honesty – including all relevant facts – but instead go cherry-picking them (or, even worse, throwing around statistics with absolutely none of the analysis that makes a statistic relevant or meaningful, a favorite pastime of neocons) the intellectual laziness demonstrated is thoroughly dissuasive of thinking about it a moment further before moving on the the next blog. Except, of course, to occasionally post a comment letting the self-deluded sap know that at least some people are on to him.
[...] Et Tu Amcon? Mansizedtarget.com, January 27, 2010 “Unz has demonstrated (again) a marked indifference to the survival of America as a coherent and historical entity.” [...]
[…] Et Tu Amcon? Mansizedtarget.com, January 27, 2010 “Unz has demonstrated (again) a marked indifference to the survival of America as a coherent and historical entity.” […]