Terrorism and Immigration

No, not all Muslims are terrorists.  And not all Muslims in the US are terrorists.  Clearly, very very few are.  But we don’t know which are which, and the non-terrorists have a bad habit of relativizing, sympathizing with, providing aid and comfort to, and otherwise showing more concern for themselves and their tribe than the broader community.

Equally important, the non-terrorist side of the ledger adds very little to our common and collective life.  We could do without any more such immigrants, and we should work to encourage self-deportation among those already here who are not firmly rooted.

Don’t expect to hear this from the Marco Rubio wing of the Republican Party any time soon.

Boston Massacre

I was out of town last few days.  Lots of things happening.  Like so many other times I’ve taken a short break from blogging, nothing has happened that shook my world view.

Recently-arrived, alienated Muslim immigrants blew up some Americans and a well behaved visitor.  The perpetrators’ rage at all things–Russia, Christians, basic decency–are on display.  Some relatives, particularly Uncle Ruslan, behaved normally and admirably, but the rest were knee deep in excuses and obfuscation.  Obama made sure to remind us how great diversity is on the eve of his mass amnesty, as evidenced, I suppose, by these two vermin acting like their predecessors on 9/11 and at the El Al Airlines counter. Funny enough, one became a citizen on 9/11.  Diversity is our strength!

What an obvious lie.  It’s really simple:  newcomers mostly do not share our values, do not necessarily like us, and the most alienated among them find ample justification for violence in leftism.  This amplified when the background leftism and anti-Americanism of the culture is combined with the uncompromising and violent tenets of Islam.  So yes, Uncle Ruslan is right, they are losers, and there loserness had something to do with why these two among the legions of American Muslims undertook their jihad.  But there are loser Chinese and African and South American people here too; they rarely seem to direct their energies towards catastrophic violence.

The Chechens are unique even among their coreligionists.  They are the people cutting off Russian heads and making videos of their suffering that  you can easily find on the internet. This happens all the time and in our stupid Russophobia, we spend our energies not on expressing solidarity with fellow Christian victims of terrorism but instead on criticizing their army’s alleged excesses.  Let’s not forget Beslan or the martyrdom of Yevgeni Rodionov while we remember Boston.

Ordinary Violence

Here is your basic satanic story from the daily news:  a Chicago man smothers his baby daughter, while his girlfriend watches.  Stuff like this happens every day:  rapes, beatings, stabbings, torture of children, and all the rest.  True, some of this violence involves guns, but not all of it.  The common denominator is bad people.  Such people are typically from the underclass, of low IQ, young, male, and quick to lose their temper.  They are the people we see on the show “Cops” from every racial background, but with a common style:  wife-beater t-shirts, scary tattoos, flamboyant haircuts, brand new sneakers, disheveled homes, long criminal records, and bad attitudes. 

The recent media locutions–a “gun violence” problem and the related “gun safety” solution–are profoundly misleading.  They serve to remove our focus from the real protagonist in this drama:  the criminal underclass who commit ordinary violence of all kinds that is so routine as to be unworthy of news coverage. 

Everyone knows this problematic part of society cannot be easily “banned.”  They come from the multigenerational poor, which overlaps often with the ranks of fatherless children.  They come from the failed welfare communities trumpeted by our rulers as a solution to poverty, from the disorderly neighborhoods populated by illegal immigrants, and from the drug-addled warrens of trailer parks. 

In other words, gun violence is not unique and does not call for a unique “safety” solution.  Gun violence is a subset of violence, which is itself a subset of the broader problem of antisocial behavior.  These problems have always existed in some measure, but the formerly harsh consequences of such behavior have been removed through a combination of a generous welfare state and a revolving-door justice system.  These perrenial problems have also been fueled in recent decades by widespread societal disorder, illegitimacy, changing demographics, under-parenting among the poor, and a lack of moral confidence among the productive classes in punishing lesser incivilities.

Gun control is at best a naive attempt to address one symptom of broader social pathologies.   At worst, gun control is a mechanism to distract us from these real problems and to create a false moral equality between the underclass the rest of society, which mostly owns guns legally and responsibly.

The driving force of all of this disorder and our lack of collective outrage is the lack of moral confidence instilled into so many by liberalism.  This narrative turns matters upside down.  Perpetrators become victims and inanimate objects become moral actors.  When the President, who is supposed to protect and provide moral leadership for a society, instead champions the Jena Six and Trayvon Martin, we are witnessing the malfunctioning moral compass that makes it so hard to identify and reduce antisocial behavior.  This instinct flows from the moral inversion that took place in the 60s, where minorities in particular were given a pass on criminal behavior due to the allegedly much worse immorality of the general society, but, as a consequence both the majority and minorities have suffered in turn. 

Our society, the one we all live in regardless of our racial background, has some basic requirements to function, and one of those is civilizing young people and punishing antisocial behavior.  Focusing on the technology and legality of guns fails to accomplish this, and, more important, delays the day of reckoning with the massive civilizational breakdown that is the real cause of so much violence.

Orwell Meet Obama

The government amasses much information that destroys liberal shibboleths about race and crime.  What to do?  Well, the Obama administration has simply stopped posting the information from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and pulled down the data that shows the massive disparities in race, crime, and homicide. These are what may be called “hate” facts:  true things that it is considered uncouth and immoral to notice.

Expect more of this on everything from health outcomes and women in combat to gay sex crimes and anti-social behavior in the years ahead.  Of course, while everyone does not know these omissions are part of a web of lies, their daily life experience, monthly race riots in downtown Chicago, and the indignities of encounters with the underclass cannot easily be explained away.

A regime that depends on lies is very fragile, indeed.  That is not to say it is doomed or incapable of paroxysms of violence in its decline.

South of the Border

Mexico has de facto colonized much of the United States, and with the growth of its population has come its culture:  some good, much not so good.

Of course, Mexicans themselves know this difference; that’s why they come here.  They know America is orderly, clean, mostly law abiding, prosperous, devoid of petty corruption, organized, built up, and more free.  Mexico, by tradition and by the metastatic spread of violence and corruption from its drug cartels, is the opposite:  violent, dirty, lawless, poor, corrupt, disorganized, shoddy, and somewhat authoritarian.  Its refugees carry with them the very plague from which they are escaping.  And, if they do not in large part share these characteristics, the porous border through which they enter allows every unsavory element from that society to enter alongside those who are merely poor and seeking work.

Should it be any great surprise that the hallmark of Latin American crime, the assassination and intimidation of public officials, has now migrated to Texas, a state immediately adjacent to some of the most violent quarters of Mexico: Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and the entire state of Tamaulipas?

Two prosecutors and one of their wives are down. More are sure to come.  Even the mainstream media is suggesting it is some combination of Mexican cartels and their allied American gangs, such as the Aryan Nations. 

Americans are proud people.  I don’t think they’ll back down in the fact of this, especially down in Texas.  But then again relatively few people find their ordinary jobs life and death affairs.

This immigration problem is not merely a question of language, or culture, or jobs, or the stress on schools and infrastructure.  All of these things and more make up a way of life.  And the mass introduction of very different people with a very different way of life threatens to undo what has taken several centuries to build and that was based entirely on inherited Anglo-Saxon customs, a largely Anglo-Saxon people, and the deliberate assimilation and forced conformity of newcomers.

Smashing Idols

Good take down by Ace of the “pseudo provacative” flattery involved in the Florida college professor who wanted students to stomp on the name of Jesus and found one (and sadly, only one) objector in the form of a religious Mormon.

Ace notes:

Consider, there might be some kind of a bracing Kill Your Assumptions/Smash Your Symbols experience were a Christian to stomp on the name of Jesus. (Just roll with the hypothetical for a moment.) In that particular case, the Christian would, arguably at least, be learning (or at least being subject to) some kind of lesson that The Word is Not The Thing and The Symbol Is Not the Signified and also various Question Your Beliefs type kindergarten horsehshit.

But does a Muslim learn that lesson from stomping on the name Jesus? No. How about an atheist? Again, no. How about a gay guy who hates “Bible Thumpers”? No. How about a feminist who hates the Patriarch and considers patriarchal religion to be the most important perpetuator of Male Privilege? Again, obviously not.

These folks don’t learn any of these Very Important Lessons from these actions. In fact, they learn the opposite lesson, don’t they? While the Christian is arguably learning to “not be so tribal in outlook,” or something, the other groups are learning the power of tribalism.

After all, their symbols aren’t being smashed. The symbols of their Destested Enemy are being smashed. Their Symbols are being elevated by contrast to the treatment of the Symbol of the Enemy.

But, of course, so much education of the “consciousness raising” variety is the very opposite of real education, which I understand to be the development of critical thinking, the expansion of the imagination, knowledge of the world around us (and before us), and increased sensitivity to nuance, truth, beauty, and the good.  Indeed, consciousness raising is indoctrination by people who want, more than anything else, everyone to agree with them.

Now Mormons and religious conservatives and many others have that in common too.  But the difference is they mostly have more or less regard for freedom as one among several important societal goods, they’re aware not everyone agrees with them, and they don’t mistakenly think their attempt to drive people to the good is somehow an expression of “open mindedness.”  They at least know what they’re doing and why.

This scene happens in small ways every day, and the kids emerge with a degree, debt, and they can barely read and write.  In other words, most “college education” is not worth crap, and I say that as someone who thinks education should do a lot more than “get you ready for a job.”

The GOP’s Doubling Down

The GOP establishment has been trying moderation of one kind or another for the last 20 years.  Moderation here being defined as a partial compromise with the extremist leftism that defines the Democratic Party.  It is by no means moderate or reasonable in any ordinary sense of the term.

George H.W. Bush was certainly a moderate.  He banned the import of so-called assault weapons, signed off on the ADA and Civil Rights Act of 1991, and his refusal to stick with “no new taxes” cost him the election in ’92. 

Dole in ’96 was the quintessential moderate.  He was a lifelong establishment senator, totally out of steam, weak on social issues and abortion, and got trounced by Clinton. 

George W. Bush with his “compassionate conservatism” was also a moderate, and though he became a hated figure of the far left, mostly governed from the center.  He was pushing immigration amnesty and stimulus packages in his latter years.  And let’s not forget about the nominatino of Hariett Miers.  He barely won in 2004, but that was mostly due to the prominence of foreign policy and the failure of John Kerry to convince Americans he would protect them from terrorism.

McCain, while hawkish and crazy, was also a moderate or even a liberal, as evidenced by his continuing flirtation with immigration amnesty, idiotic “idealistic” wars, indifference to free market principles, and the like.  He lost too.  The country’s mood on foreign policy changed, and, on everything else, he failed to get conservatives to trust him.  He certainly loved his cozy relationship with the media, which was driven by his criticism of other Republicans.  It did him no good.

Then there was Romney.  He was picked as an establishment, moderate guy.  He hailed from liberal Massachusetts, had little stomach or passion for social issue fights, and also lost. 

So, in the end, the GOP won some and lost some, but there were no real conservatives in the bunch; indeed, very few other than Pat Buchanan, arguably Ron Paul, and a few other less-than-noteworthies made the cut. Can’t say I really regret voting for Chuck Baldwin back in ’08.

Now they have gone back to the drawing board and come up with an autopsy that is the biggest collection of lies, wishful thinking, and outright stupidity that has ever infected the Stupid Party.  The GOP’s coroners have suggested abandoning social issues and reaching out to Hispanics through amnesty as their brilliant conclusion.  This has been a popular theme, in spite of Reagan, going back to the 1980s.  It is also a losing proposition.

Here’s the truth:  Republicans misread the immigration problem during the boom years, thought they could manage it and throw a bone to the cheap-labor-loving business class, allowed problem to get out of hand, and now are facing point of no return.

And the math is simple:  Hispanics vote about 2/3 Democrat in every election going back to Eisenhower.  As they get less numerous or more assimilated, they trend more Republican and tend to intermarry at fairly high rates.  This only really takes place, however, after they are not the overwhelming majority in a community.  Incidentally, high levels of immigration prevent all of these things and instead encourage ethnic neighborhoods and solidarity, prevention of upward mobility, and the devolution of politics into one of ethnic spoils.  It’s the kind of politics that prevails in Chicago or New York, but is mostly alien to the rest of the nation.

The GOP can’t out-lib the libs.  It can’t out-gay the Democrats on gay marriage either.   We can’t unwish a demographic disaster that Republicans did a lot to create.  And if they think the exceptional–and pretty much white–Cuban demographic that produced Marco Rubio will save them, they are living on another planet.  Has the Democratic trend in California and South Texas totally escaped their notice?  Have they ever read a history book about Mexico or Central America to see that these places and the people who have come here from them are very different from the anti-Castro cohort that has given us such reliable Republican constituents as the Miami Cubans?

We have to stop mass Latin and Third World immigration generally and prevent the demographic destruction of the white majority or there is no hope for conservatism or the Republican party or the political culture of traditional America.  It’s really that simple.  No other group that is arriving trends Republican or conservative. They certainly do not do so on the GOP unifying issues of small government and fiscal austerity.  Finally, immigrants are all being brought here by explicitly hostile Democratic pols and dim-witted and short-sighted greedy Republican business owners. A pox on all of them. It is a coalition of the shilling . . . indeed, it’s a group of the most unpatriotic people imaginable.

Everyone got a little excited about Rand Paul’s rant about drones last week, not least because Republicans, like the country at large, are mostly sick of foreign wars and tired of the trappings of a “security state.”  And it was nice to see a guy in action who had some guts.  That said, his moment in the sun didn’t last, as he came out this week hardcore for amnesty. This should be no surprise.  He is no standard bearer of conservatism.  This guy is a libertarian, not a cultural conservative.  Like all libertarians, he says some things I agree with, and his idealism is worthy of respect.  But his value compass is way off, and his speech on amnesty is more proof of it, as is his quasi-pacifism on foreign policy.  What is missing from both views is some concept of nation, a coherent people with its own distinct group identity, collective interest, and particularized interest in preserving the benefits of that nation for its offspring.

I have suggested a revamped Republican party should trend nationalistic, abandoning its ideology of free trade, militarism, and uncritical support of big business, in favor of a genuine concern for the working, productive classes who face predations from a motley crew of the super poor, the super rich, idiotic campaigns of nation building abroad, and hostile newcomers at home. If not the GOP, then a new party might fill this space. The GOP appears finished if it follows the idiotic counsel coming from the RNC’s pathologists.

That said, I’m pretty pessimistic on the whole.  Conservatism is mostly dead, and the GOP may be accelerating this trend, but it is also a reflection of it.  Maybe 30-40% of the country is genuinely conservative, and the media and schools and social pressures are doing much to turn this rump group into a pariah class. And, even if that is not successful, their immigration and welfare policies are doing everything possible to turn the GOP’s core constituents into a numerical minority, as they already have become in places like California.

And they wonder why we’re so passionate about the Right to Bear Arms!