The unintended theme this week has been back on immigration, particularly the kind that swamps small communities and results from one-sided tolerance. Since I’ve already uncorked that bottle, I figured I’d like the wine flow with this week’s TBT feature.
This piece, dating back to late May of this year, was a full-throated screed against the manifold injustices of illegal immigration. Few topics make my blood boil more: the flagrant violation of the rule of law, the entitled attitude (“we have it tough, so we have a right to be here”), the two-tier system of justice—all are make my stomach turn.
So, here’s my prescription to cure our ills: a healthy dose of “Deportemal“:
Then there’s the matter of the vast gulf between mainstream American culture and the virtually premodern peasant cultures from which most illegal migrants come. Child rape is serious problem among men of certain Latin American cultures, as a recent piece from The Blaze demonstrates. A twenty-year old illegal immigrant impregnated an eleven-year old.
A major theme—perhaps clumsily conveyed—of yesterday’s post was that Americans should be able to keep their culture and local identity without shame. As I noted, struggling rural communities are particularly susceptible to being swept away by large-scale immigration, legal or otherwise. Thus, we see small South Carolina towns gradually hispanicize, turning into little replicas of various Latin American cultures, rather than the old Southern culture that predominated.
One often hears that Americans should be tolerant and open-minded to other cultures, and to extend maximum understanding and patience. That is a generous and worthy view: I don’t expect the Chinese foreign exchange students at our school to speak accent-less English and understand liberty their first day off the plane. In that instance, we go out of our way to attempt to understand the cultural background from which those students came.
It’s another matter, though, when it involves the permanent or long-term relocation of foreign aliens to our land. Remember the expression, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do?” That rule always seems to apply to Americans—who are routinely criticized for being uncouth abroad—but never to any other ethnic group, and especially not to cultures outside of the West.
It’s an enduring frustration of mine: one-way cosmopolitanism.
This weekend I drove through some very rural parts of western South Carolina to check out some small-town festivals (Subscribe Star subscribers will get the full story this Saturday, and read my ode to candy apples, which this same trip also inspired). My route took me north from Aiken through Ridge Spring, South Carolina, then up through Chappells and Saluda to Clinton, located on the cusp of the Upstate. Then it was a 90-minute drive back south through Saluda, Chappells, and Johnston on the way back to Aiken.
Most of this section of South Carolina is farmland, dotted with small towns or unincorporated communities. Some of these towns were once thriving little railroad junctions, or the communities of prosperous farmers or textile mills.
Now, they often feature quaint but dilapidated downtowns (often full of barber shops and wig stores, but plenty of boarded-up windows), a few stately old homes, and a great deal of poverty.
What I noticed on this most recent trip, however, was the clear uptick in Hispanic residents and businesses.
When breaking that number down by partisan affiliation, it’s not surprising that 90% of Republicans believe that illegal immigration is bad. What is somewhat surprising is that 63% of Democrats believe that illegal immigration is bad. That suggests that opposing illegal immigration and border control continue to be winning issues.
It’s a start—a good one—but it’s only that. President Trump argues that the raids will act as a deterrent to future illegal immigration. I think he’s correct—to an extent.
The larger question, though, is how effective of a deterrent will this raid be?
It’s been a brutalworkweek for yours portly. “Brutal” is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but it’s been busy, with a lot of late nights and early mornings. Fortunately, I’ve been a painting dynamo, and all those music lessons and extra work are reaping dividends.
My planned post summarizing and analyzing the introduction to Richard Weaver‘s seminal Ideas Have Consequences, then, is going to wait until Monday, when I have a bit more mental energy to spare. My students in History of Conservative Thought are writing an essay about the introduction to that book for their final class session, which is Tuesday. It’s a dense read for high school students, so that post will help break down some of the main ideas for them.
Instead, this evening’s posts will be a rare “Phone if in Friday” featuring some pieces that crossed my transom today. Enjoy!
The world has been on fire this week because—in the absence of any real news—President Trump said something on Twitter that’s funny.
The hand-wringing over President Trump’s tweet about “‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen” returning to their home countries to fix them up has had the Left and the Right scurrying to condemn the president. Ben Shapiro, whose podcast I quite enjoy, dedicated an entire hour to excoriating the president over the Tweet, and another hour to analyze it further.
Shapiro is wrong on this one, and more than a tad disingenuous, which is unusual for him. He claims that President Trump tweeted that these women should be “sent back” to their countries of origin—which, as far as I can tell, he never said or wrote! When a crowd at a rally in North Carolina began chanting “Send Her Back!” after the president ran down a litany of Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s anti-American, anti-Semitic, pro-terrorist, pro-Islamist statements, that seemed to exacerbate things, the president quickly stated that he did not like or agree with the chant.
Consistent with my own posts on immigration, and particularly Somalian immigration, Tucker Carlson nails it (see the video in the Tweet below):
Tucker Carlson: “No country can import large numbers of ppl who hate it & expect to survive…So be grateful for Ilhan Omar, as annoying as she is, she’s a living fire alarm, a warning to the rest of us that we better change our immigration system immediately or else.” pic.twitter.com/jNIinGngA5
— The Columbia Bugle 🇺🇸 (@ColumbiaBugle) July 10, 2019
The immigration problem is serious for many reasons that I’ve detailed on this site. For Europeans and Minnesotans, unassimilable Muslim immigrants present a particularly explosive problem. The West generally struggles against the elite desire to import cheap labor and hostile foreign cultures, and any talk of border control or deportation is denounced as wicked or inhumane.
President Trump officially kicked off his 2020 reelection campaign earlier this week, and it’s been almost exactly one year since the post below. I’ve been quite impressed with President Trump, who has governed far more conservatively than I and many other conservatives could have ever hoped. While there is still much to be done on immigration—border crossings have accelerated due to misguided progressive policies that encourage child trafficking—and the wall seems to be more an abstraction than a concrete reality, Trump has slashed taxes, created jobs, and strengthened national security.
His record speaks for itself. President Trump has taken the reins of the Republican Party and has done much to shore up the Republic. Here’s looking to four more years—and to Keeping America Great!
I was, initially, a Trump skeptic, and I voted for Texas Senator Ted Cruz in the South Carolina primaries the following February. When Trump first announced, I wrote him off—as so many others—as a joke. I appreciated his boldness on immigration, but I still thought the PC Police and the campus Social Justice Warriors were firmly in control of the culture, and that no one could speak hard truths.
I also remembered his brief flirtation with running in 2012, and thought this was just another episode in what I learned was a long history of Trump considering a presidential bid. At the South Carolina Republican Party’s state convention earlier in 2015, I asked two young men working on Trump’s pre-campaign (this was before The Announcement) if he was reallyserious this time. The two of them—they looked like the well-coifed dreamboat vampires from the Twilight franchise—both assured me that Trump was for real, and I left with some Trump stickers more skeptical than ever (note, too, that this was before the distinctive but simple red, white, and blue “Trump” lawn signs, and definitely before the ubiquitous “Make America Great Again” hats).
I even briefly—briefly!—considered not voting for Trump, thinking that he was not a “real” conservative. I still don’t think he’s a conservative in the way, say, that a National Review columnist is (although, the way they’ve gotten so noodle-wristed lately, that’s a good thing; I’ve just about lost all respect for David French’s hand-wringing, and Kevin Williamson went off the deep-end), but rather—as Newt Gingrich would put it—an “anti-Leftist.” That’s more than enough for me.
But my conversion to Trump came only belatedly. I can still find a notebook of notes from church sermons in which I wrote, “Ted Cruz won the Wyoming primary. Thank God!” in the margins.
Then something happened—something I predicted would happen on the old TPP site—and I couldn’t get enough of the guy. It wasn’t a “road to Damascus” epiphany. I started listening to his speeches. I read up on his brilliant immigration plan (why haven’t we taxed remittances yet?). I stopped taking him literally, and began taking him seriously.
And I noticed it happening in others all around me. Friends who had once disdained the Republican Party were coming around on Trump. Sure, it helped that Secretary Hillary Clinton was a sleazebag suffused with the filth of grasping careerism and political chicanery. But more than being a vote against Hillary, my vote—and the vote of millions of other Americans—became a vote for Trump—and for reform.
Trump made politics interesting again, too, not just because he said outrageous stuff on live television (I attended his rally in Florence, South Carolina before the SC primaries, and I could feel his charisma from 200 feet away; it was like attending a rock concert). Rather, Trump busted wide open the political orthodoxy that dominated both political parties at the expense of the American people.
Take trade, for example. Since World War II, both Democrats and Republicans have unquestioningly supported free trade. Along comes Trump, and suddenly we’re having serious debates again about whether or not some tariffs might be beneficial—that maybe it’s worth paying a little more for a stove or plastic knick-knacks if it means employing more Americans.
That’s not even to mention Trump’s legacy on immigration—probably the most pressing issue of our time, and one about which I will write at greater length another time.
Regardless, after over 500 days in office, the record speaks for itself: lower taxes, fewer regulations, greater economic growth, greater security abroad. At this point, the only reasons I can see why anyone would hate Trump are either a.) he’s disrupting their sweet government job and/or bennies; b.) they don’t like his rhetorical style, and can’t get past it (the Jonah Goldbergite “Never Trumpers”—a dying breed—fall into this group); or c.) they’re radical Cultural Marxists who recognize a natural foe. Folks in “Option B” are probably the most common, but they’re too focused on rhetoric and “decorum”—who cares if he’s mean to Justin Trudeau if he gets results? The folks in “Option C” are willfully ignorant, evil, or blinded by indoctrination.
As the IG report from last Thursday revealed—even if it wouldn’t come out and say it—the Deep State is very, very real. That there were elements within the FBI willing to use extralegal means to disrupt the Trump campaign—and, one has to believe, to destroy the Trump presidency—suggests that our delicate system of checks and balances has been undermined by an out-of-control, unelected federal bureaucracy. Such a dangerous threat to our republic is why we elected Trump.
President Trump, keep draining the swamp. We’re with you 100%.
The Portly Politico 