American extinction

A trio of reads, looking at current trends from different lenses:

First, the Wall Street Journal notices how changing demographics are influencing the future of our politics:

For years, the establishment media has admitted that the nation’s changing electorate — almost entirely due to mass legal immigration — is dooming the Republican Party in elections across Orange County, California, and now, Virginia.

Under current legal immigration levels, the U.S. is on track to import about 15 million new foreign-born voters in the next two decades. Those 15 million new foreign-born voters include about eight million who will arrive in the country through chain migration, whereby newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country…

Ronald Brownstein, senior editor for The Atlantic, notes that nearly 90 percent of House congressional districts with a foreign-born population above the national average were won by Democrats. This means that every congressional district with a foreign-born population exceeding roughly 14 percent had a 90 percent chance of being controlled by Democrats and only a ten percent chance of electing a Republican.

But immigration (legal and illegal) isn’t the only driver of this demographic change.  The original posterity of America’s founders, increasingly, isn’t showing up anymore:

The accentuated shift toward racial and ethnic diversity among the nation’s child population is not only driven by a growth in nonwhite racial and ethnic groups. It is also facilitated by a decline in young whites. Overall, the nation’s white population has grown tepidly–by 0.1% since 2010. It declined by 247,000 between 2016-2018 according to the new estimates. But the number of white children under age 15 has declined over the 2010-2018 year period by 2.2 million, continuing a trend already observed in the first decade of the century.

This decline in white youth reflects lower white birth rates. But more importantly for the long term, it reflects an aging of the white population that has led to proportionately fewer women in their childbearing years.

As a result of these trends, the very idea of American citizenship is being rendered moot:

Americans cherish their citizenship. ((I’m not sure that’s demonstrably true anymore — Jemison))  Yet they have all but lost it. The erosion of the citizen is insidiously accelerating in two quite different directions. It seems as if we are reverting to tribal pre-citizenship, in the manner of clan allegiances in the centuries before the rise of the Greek polis and the seventh-century-B.C. invention of the concept of the citizen (politês). Or perhaps the better comparison is to the fifth-century A.D., when northern nomadic ethnic bands crossed the Rhine and Danube and replaced the multiracially encompassing notion of “civis Romanus sum”—“I am a Roman citizen”—with tribal loyalties to fellow Goths, Huns, or Vandals…

…multiculturalism is retribalizing America, in the manner of the fragmentation and evaporation of the Roman Empire. Millions seem to owe their first loyalty to those who share similar ethnic, racial, or religious affinities rather than to shared citizenship, common traditions, and collective histories that transcend race, creed, and clan.

If we wonder why illegal alien residents who commit felonies are rarely deported or must be deported repeatedly, or why few college graduates know much about the Constitution and American history, or why loud social-justice-warrior athletes so eagerly mouth Chinese platitudes about curtailing free speech inside the United States, or why the protections offered by the First and Second Amendments depend largely on where you work or live, one of the reasons is because American citizenship as we once knew it is becoming meaningless.

I highly recommend reading and thinking about each of these linked pieces.  Those who foisted the Immigration Act of 1965 upon the country succeeded: they have dissolved the people and “elected” another… one less likely to oppose their anti-American agendas.

A view from the ground

Given that a large portion of the ‘migrant caravan’ crashing against our southern border is from Honduras, it might be useful to hear from someone familiar with conditions in that country:

I am not involved in politics but would like to present to you a new perspective in regards to the current immigration crisis based on our daily life and experiences on the northern coast of Honduras. I speak fluent Spanish and live alongside Hondurans every day in the workplace, in the local community and in the most intimate corners of my own home. Although I will never be able to change the color of my skin or re-write my cultural history, I do know and love the Honduran people and have lived in this culture my entire adult life…

Some are indeed refugees seeking legitimate asylum. But others are simply fleeing generally difficult (but not dire) conditions, or have simply chosen what seems to be the easier route of escape. It is not impossible to forge a humble living in Honduras (over 9 million Hondurans survive in this culture every day), although it is true that much corruption, lack of opportunities and violence abound…

We who are on the frontlines in Honduras have offered high-quality free education and character formation in the Living Waters Ranch school we operate out of our rural homestead to over 100 at-risk Honduran youth in the past five years. More than half have walked out because they admittedly had no interest in studying or preparing for the future. This type of apathetic attitude is common among youth in our area…

Honduras is in desperate need of reform and an effective judicial system as it is overwhelmingly true that injustice and violence reign. But that does not mean that the solution is for Hondurans to flee the country illegally…

If the United States accepts the several thousand immigrants in the caravan, there are still over 9 million Hondurans living in what those who have fled claim to be unbearable circumstances on Honduran soil. What good can be brought about by extending help to a very small percentage who present themselves as refugees unless wide-scale change will be brought about by and for the masses who have stayed behind?

The natural bent of human beings is to travel the path of least resistance.  That’s why upholding standards is important — to incentivize desired outcomes and deter undesirable ones.  Right now our squishy enforcement of immigration law means that for many, trying to jump the fence in Tijuana is far easier than organizing to try to improve conditions at home.  A major problem is that this wave of invaders is bringing with it the very cultural patterns that facilitate those conditions in the country they left, such as a lack of planning for the future, a disregard for law and order and a willingness to step on others to achieve what one has not earned on their own.

None of that is to say that individual Hondurans are somehow subhuman or unworthy of a better life.  (For the record, my wife and I sponsored three children in Honduras for about a dozen years through Compassion International).  The problem here is collective culture.  The roots of Latin American culture are inarguably different from those that resulted in the formation of the United States.  Indeed, the cultural path from which the United States descended is different from just about every other part of the world, save certain portions of Europe (which, tragically, are even farther along in the process of abandoning it).  We are justified in saying to those sneaking in for the benefits that, in the words of a former President, “you didn’t build that.”  They don’t sustain it, either.

Politics, it is said, is downstream from culture.  That’s why the emphasis on multiculturalism in the U.S. over the past half century has been so destructive: it is eroding the foundation upon which our social norms and system of governance rest.  We have been inundated with new arrivals who do not understand why our nation has been so successful, and have little to no desire to learn.  They just want the U.S. to subsidize a lifestyle their own cultures couldn’t produce.  Trouble is, as more such people arrive, it is transforming our own culture in such a way we may not be so successful for much longer.

Being a compassionate nation is praiseworthy.  But there is no compassion in taking away the birthright of one to hand it to another.  Those who profess sympathy for the plight of Hondurans have other options available to them.  The author of the linked piece is far from being the only American to forego the comforts of home to invest their life with another people.  Missionaries have done so for decades — centuries, even.  The difference is that in the past a consciously Christian West was sending them out and sustaining them to bring to others the light of Christ, from Whom all other lasting blessings flow.

Now, however, the “bleeding hearts” follow their own path of least resistance: “it’s easier to help by just letting in anyone who wants to come.”  That attitude is indicative of the same short-sightedness and willingness to step on the rights of others that hobbles many other countries around the world.  It is treating the symptoms, not the problems.  For many, it’s also a cynical move to “elect a new people” more amenable to their political agenda.

Everyone has the right to take personal action to help another.  No one has the right to subsume an entire country in aliens just to feed their self-esteem or lust for power.

The asylum racket

Across Western Civilization, the Left demands entry for anyone “seeking a better life,” often promoting the use of ‘asylum’ claims for situations that are anything but systematic oppression.  Simply being born to a lower standard of living than is found in the West does not an asylum claim make.  If it did, we would have no choice but to accept the wholesale migration of most of the world.

Being a Christian in Pakistan, however…

A Pakistani Christian woman’s appeal to Britain for asylum has been denied because her arrival in the country may stir civil unrest, HuffPost UK has been told.

Asia Bibi, a Christian farm labourer, was released from prison in Pakistan on Wednesday after being acquitted of blasphemy. She had spent eight years on death row after an argument with a group of Muslim women in June 2009.

The Supreme Court of Pakistan overturned Bibi’s 2010 conviction for “insulting the prophet Mohammed” last week, saying the case against her was based on flimsy evidence.

But her acquittal sparked violent protests led by Islamic religious hardliners, and the government has now agreed to try to stop her leaving the country.

On Saturday her lawyer, Saif Mulook, fled Pakistan, saying he feared for his life. Bibi’s husband, Ashiq Masih, has also released a video message saying he too fears for his family’s safety.

“I am requesting the Prime Minister of the UK help us and as far as possible grant us freedom,” he said.

But campaigners working to secure Bibi’s move abroad said the UK government had not offered her asylum, citing security concerns.

The frankly surprising ruling by Pakistan’s Supreme Court merely makes it more likely Bibi will be killed by Muslim vigilantes instead of the state — which may be the intent, since it would relieve the government in Islamabad of some of the international condemnation it would receive.  I’ve personally spent time in Pakistan, and can say the Christian community there is under constant pressure.  Wild accusations of “burning Korans” and other unlikely inflammatory actions are often used to justify hurting or killing Christians in the country.

The cowardly capitulation of the British government is another matter entirely.  It’s not as if there is a policy of restricting immigration from Pakistan — far from it.  More than a million Pakistanis live in the U.K., the largest such population in all of Europe.  Roughly half of that group are people born in the U.K. to Pakistani immigrants, while the other half — roughly 500,000 people — are first-generation immigrants.  The community makes up a third of Britain’s roughly 3.4 million Muslim residents.  While they will not say so directly, it is the reaction of this group the British officials are concerned about, if they were to allow Bibi asylum.  Such concerns are not unwarranted.  The irony is that Britons have been convinced to allow in tens of thousands of immigrants with an alien worldview, but now refuse to allow entry to someone closer to their own.

This is not an accident.  The deliberate dilution and dissipation of Christendom continues.  The enemies of Western Civilization rightly recognize the Christian worldview as one of the essential pillars, even as our own intellectuals try to deny it.  This is why there is a pattern of policy geared toward letting anyone in, except those who would be spiritual kin.  This is one reason why the neighborhood YMCA where I took swimming lessons almost 40 years ago is now a Buddhist meditation center.  As Western governments yield to pressure from the alien populations they’ve already admitted, those pressures will only continue to grow.

At the founding of our nation, there were aspirations for us to be a “city on a hill,” a Christian example to the world.  Instead, we’ve allowed ourselves to become a microcosm of the world.  When our society does recall Christian virtues – charity, mercy, and so forth – they’re often cynically manipulated to cause us to act against our own  long-term interests.

This needs to stop.  Light has no fellowship with darkness, and it’s time we stopped pretending otherwise.

Those blissful pre-Columbians

Archeologists continue to find out more about the utopia that was the Western Hemisphere before paradise was troubled by the arrival of the Europeans:

Aztec human sacrifices were far more widespread and grisly that previously thought, archaeologists have revealed.

In 2015 archaeologists from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) found a gruesome ‘trophy rack’ near the site of the Templo Mayor, one of the main temples in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which later became Mexico City.

Now, they say the find was just the tip of the iceberg, and that the ‘skull tower’ was just a small part of a massive display of skulls known as Huey Tzompantli that was the size of a basketball court…

Some Spanish conquistadors wrote about the tzompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls…

And since not only men but women and children are represented in the excavation’s finds, it shows how progressively egalitarian Aztec society was.

OK, enough sarcasm.  Imagine being a sincerely devoted Spanish Christian who came upon such a scene in its heyday.  Would you have tried to understand it as a legitimate alternative cultural norm equally valid to your own, or would you have seen a literally monumental affront against God’s greatest creation (human beings), and acted accordingly?

It’s one thing to criticize the abuses Europeans inflicted upon the native peoples of the Americas.  It’s quite another to consider the two societies to be on the same moral footing.  The word “savage” is no longer in vogue, but correctly used it describes a society completely cut off from the Truth and the Word of God.

But before we moderns become too conceited, let’s remember that savagery and human sacrifice aren’t extinct, and some of the worldviews that lead to it are still very much with us.

A beginning, perhaps

The unexpected election of Trump in 2016 gave voice to many in America who felt their country slipping away, beset by illegal invaders from without and traitors/enablers from within.  Since then, other countries are seeming to find their own voices:

New Italian government vows to create jobs, deport migrants

“The free ride is over,” League leader Matteo Salvini, Italy’s new interior minister, warned migrants at a rally in northern Italy. “It’s time to pack your bags.”

Austria’s government plans to shut down mosques, expel foreign-funded imams

‘Parallel societies, political Islam and radicalization have no place in our country,’ (Chancellor) Kurz told a news conference outlining the government’s decisions…

‘This is just the beginning,’ Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache added.

And in England, if the crowd in Trafalgar Square and marching through London yesterday is any indication, it seems the jailing of Tommy Robinson for continuing to cover the cancer of Muslim rape gangs across the United Kingdom has been the last straw for thousands.

No wonder globalist meddler George Soros is whining that “everything that could go wrong, has gone wrong.” All of these developments have one thing in common: the “leadership” of nations refusing utterly to listen to their people. The countries of the world have been governed for some time by a class of people who have more in common with each other than with the countries they purport to represent. As a result, history and symbols of national pride are squelched or twisted, policies enforced despite popular resentment, and unwanted immigration floods the West. Such a disconnect can only go unexpressed for so long.

It is high time the peoples of Europe and the United States reclaim their authority over their governments. It will take much more than these small gestures for that to truly occur.  But perhaps we see the will still exists to make it happen.

Looking back 50 years later

Before Britain became knife-ophobic, before it became subsumed into the European Union experiment, there were those who remembered what it meant to be a Briton.  There were those who meant it when they sang (or thought) the words “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.”

One such man was Enoch Powell, who today is remembered either as a prophet or the personification of bigotry, depending on one’s view of the last half century of unprecedented demographic change.  Today, the 50th anniversary of his most famous address, it’s worth reading and comparing to today’s conditions.  Keep in mind that in 1968, London did not have a murder rate exceeding that of New York.  Nor did the UK regularly suffer from terrorist attacks using vehicles or acid thrown onto passersby. Some links and information are included in the text below to provide further points to ponder.

*****

This is the full text of Enoch Powell’s so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, which was delivered to a Conservative Association meeting in Birmingham on April 20 1968: 

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature.
One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.”

Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.  At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time the most necessary occupation for the politician. Those who knowingly shirk it deserve, and not infrequently receive, the curses of those who come after.

A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.  After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: “If I had the money to go, I wouldn’t stay in this country.” I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn’t last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: “I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan’t be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years’ time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.  I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking – not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General’s Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. Of course, it will not be evenly distributed from Margate to Aberystwyth and from Penzance to Aberdeen. Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population.

As time goes on, the proportion of this total who are immigrant descendants, those born in England, who arrived here by exactly the same route as the rest of us, will rapidly increase. Already by 1985 the native-born would constitute the majority. It is this fact which creates the extreme urgency of action now, of just that kind of action which is hardest for politicians to take, action where the difficulties lie in the present but the evils to be prevented or minimised lie several parliaments ahead.     ((Note: by 2012, children of foreign-born mothers represented one-fourth of the population of the United Kingdom!))

Is “diversity” good for America?

At every turn, we are assured by the media, too many politicians, and a whole host of activists that “diversity is our strength.”  Is it?  Some of the Founders would have dismissed such an idea.  John Quincy Adams, son of the second President, had this to say to his father in 1811:

“America is destined to be peopled by one nation, speaking one language, professing one general system of religious and political principles, and accustomed to one general tenor of social usages and customs.”  (emphasis added)

In this he was not falling far from the tree, so to speak.  During and after the American Revolution, the elder Adams strongly advocated English as a common language for the new nation.  George Washington, in his Farewell Address, noted the conditions of the younger Adams’ later observations were already present:

“With slight shades of difference, you have the same religion, manners, habits, and political principles. You have in a common cause fought and triumphed together; the independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint counsels, and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and successes.” (emphasis added)

We’re told that American-style liberty and self-governance is the desire of every human being; that in everyone, there’s an American struggling to break out.  Is that really true?  If so, then why are second-generation immigrants participating in terrorism?  Why are some advocating the adoption of an alien Sharia law system in the U.S.?  Why are there alien enclaves here waving foreign flags (while burning the U.S. one) and looking more like the lands of their ancestors than part of the United States?  Most importantly, who benefits from this conscious policy and why?

Culture is the wellspring from which a nation’s institutions flow.  The culture that created the United States was steeped in the Christian faith, the history of British self-governance and Enlightenment thinking about limited government.  Even today, those are hardly universal foundations for societies.   Around the world there are plenty of examples of what results when any or all of those pillars are missing.  So why would we not demand they continue to predominate here?  

America is now decades into its multicultural fetish.  But there is a tremendous difference between enjoying colorful assortments of dress, dance and cuisine, and acting as if all worldviews produce the same positive results.  They clearly do not.  I couldn’t help but think of the multiculturalists when I recently read about the custom in Madagascar of literally dancing with the corpses of dead family members.  I guarantee there are doctrinaire multiculturalists who would demand we not frown on such a horrific practice; that instead we celebrate what they would emphasize as an expression of love.  The problem is, such things have predictable consequences, such as the spreading of disease.  In most of Latin America (especially Brazil), the annual “Carnival” celebration is a license for utter debauchery.  In much of Islamic Africa, the genitals of young girls are mutilated in an attempt to mute their sexuality, a practice now flourishing in immigrant communities such as Detroit.

So what do we expect to happen when we have “diversity lotteries” for admission to the U.S., resulting in people moving here in large numbers directly from societies with such practices?  Is it not strange we have elected officials more concerned with protecting illegal immigrants than U.S. citizens?  We have forgotten, to our own peril, that the U.S., and more broadly Western Civilization, is unique in human history and that most of the world’s story is a uniform one of various flavors of subservience and misery for the average individual.  Too few Americans have personally experienced how different life outside the “developed world” can be, so they have no idea what’s at stake.

At the rate we’re going, though, many are about to find out.  Western Civilization once had the audacity to proclaim universal truths and standards of right and wrong.  But today it thinks of itself as merely one voice among many, and nothing special worth defending.  I believe the “diversity drive,” coupled with the now-prevalent idea there is no objective truth, will be noted by historians as the fatal acid that ate away the foundations of the United States.  The key question at this point is whether any of the original culture of this country will be preserved in what follows its approaching demise, or whether, as Winston Churchill once warned of the Nazi threat, “the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.” 

Never forget September 11, 2001

Sixteen years.  That’s how long it’s been since the worst terrorist attack in American history.  A total of 2,996 people dead or never accounted for.  Symbols of American power struck without warning: both World Trade center towers and the Pentagon.  The actions of informed passengers on a fourth plane likely averted a strike on the White House or Congress.

An entire generation had horrifying visions of previously unimaginable events happening in their own nation, with memories firmly etched into their minds.

They say time heals all wounds. And for the families of those lost that day I hope there is some measure of truth in it. But there is a flip side: such events fade in the public consciousness, such that they no longer inform or shape how the nation acts. To quote the opening of the movie “The Fellowship of the Ring,”

“…some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend, legend became myth…” (click “continue reading” below to continue)

Idiots everywhere

I’m looking forward to seeing the movie “Dunkirk.”  Fewer and fewer Americans are aware of just how close Hitler came to dealing a fatal blow to the Allied cause well before America formally entered the war.

But when some people wonder why the corporate media have no credibility, they need look no further than USA Today’s review of the movie:

The movie captures the real-life heroism of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940, when nearly 400,000 Allied soldiers were pulled out after the Germans trapped them on a beach in Nazi-occupied France. Nolan’s ambitious story revolves around three tales unfolding at different times over land, sea and air, only coming together at the end…

Dunkirk is also one of the best-scored films in recent memory, and Hans Zimmer’s music plays as important a role as any character. With shades of Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, the melodies are glorious, yet Zimmer also creates an instrumental ticking-clock soundtrack that’s a propulsive force in the action scenes.

So far, so good.  But then:

The trio of timelines can be jarring as you figure out how they all fit, and the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color may rub some the wrong way.

(Cue scratching needle record here.)

The ONLY people who could be rubbed the wrong way by the casting of this film are those who are so historically and factually ignorant they should not be allowed within 100 miles of a voting booth or anywhere else that requires an informed decision.  For the record:

• Nazi Germany was a nation of whites led by rabid Aryan supremacists
• The United Kingdom in 1940 had not yet been overrun by the backwash from its imperial expansion, and so was just as white.  Admittedly, there were a handful of Indian troops among the British Expeditionary Force, but they hardly played a “lead” role.
• The evacuation of Dunkirk occurred in France.  And while that country has long been in the vanguard of multiculturalism, only the Foreign Legion in 1940 would have had many “people of color” — and they weren’t at Dunkirk.

I suspect the reviewer was aware of most, if not all of the above. The fact he felt it necessary to insert that tripe into what was otherwise a very informative review just shows where we are as a society today.

Who knows… maybe in 25 years the role of Winston Churchill will be played by a transgendered black actress. Because diversity.

Same pablum, different day

This article is worth your attention, as it encapsulates the feelings of an already large and growing number of people (myself included):

The sad truth, and getting sadder with every attack, is that the political class has little interest in doing what would really be necessary to combat Islamist terrorism, let alone talk about it. They don’t want to talk about how Britain’s (the West’s) lax immigration policies over decades led to hundreds of thousands of immigrants entering the country with varying degrees of willingness to assimilate and adopt Western values. They don’t want to openly criticize the blatant problems with the multiculturalism the UK (West) has pursued for years and the obvious impact it has had on the immigrant population.

Oh no. This would cost them too much. It would shatter the façade of political correctness that’s been constructed over our “civilized” western world, and destroy the illusion, so vital to the political class, that Western values are universal.

The politicians are only willing to give speeches about how united we are and how terrorists cannot tear us apart. But the truth—so clear and obvious—is that with every attack the West becomes more and more divided. We are not united, not by a long shot…

There’s little to no tolerance in polite society for the kind of honesty for which many in the West are hungry…

Our political leaders are basically telling us that this kind of terrorism, random and deadly, is the price we have to pay for their policies of multiculturalism and political correctness. They know that their weak platitudes can’t stop terrorism, and so do the people. They might as well come out and say what they mean: get used to the new normal.  ((slight editing and emphasis by yours truly))

Close the borders.  Send the illegals home.  And stop importing more of the medium — hundreds of thousands of Muslims from broken and radicalized countries — in which this ideology flourishes.