Bret Stephens: You Didn’t Build That, The Immigrants Who Arrived Today Built That

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Stephens offers a whole new spin on the Warren/Obama ‘You didn’t build that’ spiel.

Not only didn’t the people already in America fail to build that, but it wasn’t even built until those who weren’t even here came and retroactively built it. Got it?

If my construction of this line of reasoning is insane, don’t blame me: I didn’t build that.

* Bret Stephens’ mass deportation, Bill Kristol’s “lazy white, working class” that should be replaced, David Brooks’ and Jennifer Rubin’s “dying white America”…

Do these (((people))) just have no sense of irony or self-awareness? Or is this what having the cultural whip hand looks like: the ability to let your racialist id run wild while implicitly daring anyone to call you on it?

* If that was your self, would you want to be aware of it?

* Schrodinger’s proposition nation. It comes into being when immigrants arrive at it.

* It [is] truly amazing that anti-semitism has never gained a stronger foothold in America. It’s to the credit of the American people.

* David Brooks wrote a book called “The Road to Character” while cheating on his wife with his much-younger research assistant *who helped him write the book*. Self-awareness is not his strong suit.

* Though I remain just as firmly in the anti-antisemite bloc of Sailer commenters (it’s admittedly been a month or two since I’ve been accused of being a closet Jew or Hasbara, but that’s probably because Trump’s sucked up all the oxygen), both parts of this statement are objectively true.

White (ex-)Christian Americans are, by far, in word and deed the most philosemitic non-Jewish people who’ve ever existed, which is remarkable, and it’s very much to our credit, which the bulk of the direct beneficiaries rarely acknowledge or even betray awareness of. (In fairness, in my experience Israeli Jews and ex-USSR immigrant Jews are quite grateful for our friendship and will frequently say so).

Anyway, I’ll admit that Stephens’ piece so enraged me (which, I suppose, was his goal; it’s clearly a troll job) that, with apologies to Mencken and Ace, I was at times tempted to spit upon my hands, hoist the black flag and begin wearing out my “9″ and “0″ keys.

But then, if you showed it to any, Jew or otherwise, of the Goodwhites of Massachusetts, among whom I live, they would simply nod along to the whole thing before the obligatory “like” and “share.” So it’s hard to get angry at Jews in particular, especially since, now that I’m thinking about it, most of the open Trump supporters (which doesn’t describe me outside them and my immediate family; can’t risk getting blacklisted from employment for life) I know in real life are Jews.

* Apparently the United States of America is a teleological enterprise.

Personally, I’d like to thank the incoming hordes for the interstate highway system and the Apollo Program.

* I suppose eventually it will be the people who aren’t here yet are Who We Are. The Congolese, among others, “built that”, are building “that” right now! How can we not let them in?

* America wasn’t really America until we got a bunch of highly intelligent, bookish, neurotic Ashkenazi immigrants who could help us fulfill our promise by tearing down and changing everything we thought we’d built.

Jews, man, is there anything they can’t do?

MORE COMMENTS:

* I was under the impression that Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin were, as the phrase goes, native-born…..That must be one of the lies that my teacher taught me….

Perhaps we should retroactively strip Hamilton of his citizenship? After all, he didn’t seem to “get it”:

“The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.

“The opinion advanced in [Jefferson’s] The Notes on Virginia is undoubtedly correct, that foreigners will generally be apt to bring with them attachments to the persons they have left behind; to the country of their nativity, and to its particular customs and manners. They will also entertain opinions on government congenial with those under which they have lived; or, if they should be led hither from a preference to ours, how extremely unlikely is it that they will bring with them that temperate love of liberty, so essential to real republicanism? There may, as to particular individuals, and at particular times, be occasional exceptions to these remarks, yet such is the general rule. The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency.

“The United States have already felt the evils of incorporating a large number of foreigners into their national mass; by promoting in different classes different predilections in favor of particular foreign nations, and antipathies against others, it has served very much to divide the community and to distract our councils. It has been often likely to compromise the interests of our own country in favor of another. The permanent effect of such a policy will be, that in times of great public danger there will be always a numerous body of men, of whom there may be just grounds of distrust; the suspicion alone will weaken the strength of the nation, but their force may be actually employed in assisting an invader.”

* “Anti-Semitism” (that is, criticism of Jews) can only have one cause: the mental illness of Gentiles.

* Written like a true Jew, open doors, pro-diversity, except for Israel.

* Of course as a highly ethnocentric Jew and Israeli it’s not surprising that Bret Stephens sides with the “newcomers” in certain circumstances – Jews in Palestine, Jews in Emma Lazarus land or non White immigrants to the USA.

* What Bret’s proposing, basically, is to manage America like Jack Welch managed GE: cull the bottom 10% of deadwood every year.

* Next they came for the journalists and editors, which was kind of apropos seeing as they’ve had the megaphone since before 1968.

* What if Americans, without being fed the agitprop bile stew cooked up non-stop by Stephens and his native-hating coethnics, understood that it was Stephens who didn’t get their idea of America as a homeland for themselves and their “posterity”?

Can they make Stephens and his ilk “get out” and go back to (the) Jerusalem (Post)?

* Imagine a Michael Moore-style propagandistic documentary that intercut scenes of Brett Stephens, Alex Nowrasteh, and Jennifer Rubin talking about immigration and foreign policy with scenes of carnage overseas from our pointless wars and carnage here from the heroin epidemic, illegal alien DUIs, etc.

* As a history buff, I cannot think of any parallels (at least in the western world) for certain modern trends. This level of craziness is entirely new. Has it ever happened before in history that the ruling class of a nation actively sought to kick out their fellow citizens and replace them with newcomers? Forget for a moment that Stephens likely considers himself first a Jew and then an American; his attitude is shared by rich gentiles who also despise non-wealthy whites (the undeclared target of Stephens’ article). Unfortunately, I can foresee Stephens’ proposal becoming the enlightened view within academic circles in a couple of years and the official position of the Democratic Party in a decade or so. If you think that I am an alarmist, think about how transgenderism evolved from marginal odd behavior in the late 90s to the most important civil rights issue of our times. A large segment of the population in the West has decided to commit cultural suicide; these people are succeeding and see those who oppose their objectives as their enemies.

* Our country is so damn precious that they have to remake it. You know, like how they repaint the Mona Lisa every year.

Do these people listen to themselves?

* Is there anything else that so effectively misdirects or eradicates noblesse oblige than a hostile takeover of journalistic and academic life, a hijacking of the entire opinion-shaping, issues-setting, history-writing, virtue-defining apparatus by Stephens & Co.?

* Journalists are now in a stage where they’re giddily seeing how far they can go. After the shooting Huffington Post had to delete an article seriously calling for Trumps execution.

I’m not so sure how much of it is conscious (journalists are from the fat part of the curve), but at some level they realize that in a country of 300 million there’s always a bunch of people who’ll just do what you tell them to. I was very close to the Pim Fortuyn situation that Steve likes to reference, and that’s exactly how it happened. The media hysteria right before had to be seen to be believed. Like in Holland, if Trump ever gets assassinated the perp will first get a very stiff sentence to pacify the masses and then after a decade will be quietly released and given police protection.

That one guy with the mustache was right: allowing journalism to run rampant without strict supervision that they aren’t in it to destroy society is madness.

* A study by the Cato Institute notes that nonimmigrants are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of illegal immigrants

A sure sign of knowing dishonesty. People hear “nonimmigrant” and get the mental picture of the largest nonimmigrant group, whites, and immigrant and think Mexicans.

In fact, whites have a much lower crime rate than Mexicans. And lower still than other Meso-Americans.

As Steve notes, the reason that “nonimmigrants” have a high crime rate is that the group includes a lot of blacks, puerto ricans, and native-born hispanics, while the “immigrant” group includes a lot of very low crime NE Asians, whose own very low birthrate means they are not producing very many law abiding native Americans.

* I’m sure Bret wrote lots of editorials when he was editor of the Jerusalem Post about how Israel needs lots of non-Jewish immigrants. Right?

* Wrong newspaper for that. But plenty of editorials in Israel call for a “right of return” for descendants of Arabs who lived in Israel proper. That includes the majority of the population of Jordan, who mostly would “return.” Jordan’s per capita GDP is $5,000, Israel’s is $39,000.

That raises the question, do you think the USA should have an Israel-like policy of encouraging the immigration of compatible-to-the-majority populations? A large percentage of the population of Eastern Europe would come here if they could, but it is substantially harder for a bright Latvian or Ukrainian to come to the USA than a typical Haitian or Somali.

* Part of the problem the US is facing now is that the enemy isn’t tied to a state. It’s pretty clear that this Bret Stephens is just a traitor–a simple old-fashioned traitor who has chosen to side against his fellows. The problem is that he hasn’t chosen to side with Krauts, Japs, Reds, or other easily identifiable enemies of the US. His real ally is too nebulous to pin anything on him. Imagine McCarthyism without the USSR, the CPUSA, or any of the other institutional manifestations. Where would McCarthyism have gone?

* No one is seriously proposing deportations of anyone. The purpose of this exercise is to accelerate the disenfranchisement, dispossession, and delegitimating of white Americans. This is why it finds space in the NYT.

* The problem is that the “improvements” (like throwing the doors open to wretched refuse, “nudging” the plebs away from the First Amendment and cash currency, etc.) are likely to prove fatal to the host in the long run. And the covetous, oh so helpful new tenant knows this.

* At least he’s honest about what he wants: the racial dispossession , displacement and replacement of the founding stock of the United States, or at least it’s less prosperous (European-origin) portion. Genocide, in another word.

* Astonishing how liberals seem to believe the United States was a failed state prior to their world view becoming ascendant. That there was nothing really going on here except slavery. Yet somehow the US became the world’s largest economy in 1890 when our population was only 63 million people. That by 1929 90 percent of all privately owned automobiles in the world were in the United States and Canada.

* The interesting thing about official narratives are the vain attempts on the part of advocates to make them appear bulletproof with respect to their first order rational shortcomings and inconsistencies.

You see, it’s okay that Israelis and their supporters are anti-open door and anti-diversity with respect to Israel but not to the United States since Yahweh gave Greater Israel to the Jews and their posterity in a prehistoric epoch. Israel is the God-given homeland for God’s Chosen People, get it. Those who occupied Palestine in the interim are transient marauders.

Yahweh, on the other hand, did not give America to its original European immigrants. Therefore, European Americans are likewise transient marauders. Therefore, it is immoral and irrational for European Americans to try to justify the same things for Americans that Israelis justify for Jewish Israelis … mixing apples and oranges, at it were.

As the Muslims say, Mashallah … God has willed it! He also takes care of logical inconsistencies that might otherwise bother his Chosen People.

* The Irish, the Russians and other continental Europeans know that regimes come and go but nations remain. We in the US, UK and former White Dominions have enjoyed such a long winning streak of relative prosperity and stability that we came to forget that fact. We may come to learn it again in the next few years.

People like Bret Stephens and the Young Turks crowd think Trump is the last chance for the White men who just don’t get it. They think once Whitey is finally brought down along with Trump, then the good times can begin again. Maybe it’s they who don’t get it? Maybe they don’t get that the Trump presidency is their last chance to enjoy rule of law under the “First Republic” of the United States? Maybe Bret Stephens — and the smart-ass judges blocking Trump’s travel ban, the members of Congress warming up for the impeachment of Trump and the cute Attorneys-General of Maryland and DC — don’t understand they’re dancing as the sun goes down on their playground? Maybe someone needs to tell Bret Stephens this kind of humour will be taken seriously by the kind of people who shoot up baseball practices and by the surplus human resources he dreams of deporting?

* I find it interesting that on the national level in the US there is almost no discussion of Native Americans and their issues unlike in Canada. Once Native American sports mascots and and names are abandoned they will have virtually representation in the national culture. It will be as though they never existed.

* Stephens began as some kind of business-y journalist for Rupert Murdoch’s Hong Kong media properties. Though he might have “immigrant parents” they were of the rich, globetrotting professional variety, in the way he is a U.S. national incidentally but spending most of his life in jet-set elite havens. The Jerusalem Post was actually run by Tom Rose, an immigrant from Indiana, and I think it was in the News Corp family at some point. What I’m getting from his screeds over the years is that Stephens is a cosseted, parochial person traveling in un-diverse circles, but constantly invoking the Stars & Stripes imagery like he cribbed it from part of an edited Frank Capra film he watched on a plane. What use would liberal cocoon NYT subscribers have for this yawping poodle conservative?

* Here’s a more honest version of this nasty shot across our bow by Stephens:

Dear White American goyim,

The Jewish dream of an America without boring, backward, reactionary white bread is righteous and eternal. It is the New American Dream and you need to accept it. Or else.

Writings like mine, while painful to read at first, are designed to change your psychology as regarding your own deportation from the country that your ancestors built. This is the only way for you to begin addressing your guilt: you must leave.

Sincerely,

Bret

* What we’re dealing with as a society has gone past the societal equivalent of AIDS. In an immune deficiency syndrome, the body fails to distinguish self from non-self to protect the self’s resources from non-self. In our case, however, we are directed to distinguish self from non-self in order to favor non-self over self.

Our societal immune system is inverted. And people like Stephens are now ratcheting up the level of immune response we are expected launch against our collective self.

* America has a very severe case of Lupus.

Lupus is a chronic inflammatory disease that occurs when your body’s immune system attacks your own tissues and organs. Inflammation caused by lupus can affect many different body systems — including your joints, skin, kidneys, blood cells, brain, heart and lungs.

Lupus can be difficult to diagnose because its signs and symptoms often mimic those of other ailments. The most distinctive sign of lupus — a facial rash that resembles the wings of a butterfly unfolding across both cheeks — occurs in many but not all cases of lupus.

Some people are born with a tendency toward developing lupus, which may be triggered by infections, certain drugs or even sunlight. While there’s no cure for lupus, treatments can help control symptoms.

* The black abortion rate already serves to keep black population growth in check. Blacks aren’t really increasing notably as a percentage of the population. They just continue to behave badly, on average, and out of proportion to their numbers, no matter what we try.

If you removed black criminality from U.S. crime statistics, our crime rates would look like most Western European countries.

* There certainly are historical precedents.

For instance, after large numbers of Jews arrived in Medieval Poland, they joined with the nobility and the Lipka Tatars to form a privileged class which took away all the rights of the common people, turning them into serfs. The Polish nobility were ethnically identical to Polish commoners, but they invented a mythological history of themselves as Sarmatian conquerors of the Poles. They dressed like Turks, unlike the commoners who dressed like Europeans. The story of Ham, Japeth and Shem was interpreted by both the nobles and the Jews as justification for their privileged position. Europeans were interpreted as the descendants of Ham, destined to be slaves. Turks and nobles were interpreted to be descendants of Japeth, and Jews of course to be descendants of Shem; together they formed the divinely ordained master race. Built on such a rotten foundation, Poland’s economy was always backward, and the state was easy prey to the Russians, Prussians and Austrians in the mid-18th century.

(The Sephardic Jewish slave traders who, after the failure of the Dutch invasion of Brazil, moved from Brazil to Barbados in 1640, and from Barbados on to London, Jamaica, Charleston etc., interpreted Ham/Japeth/Shem differently: Blacks = Ham, Europeans = Japeth. The Caribbean islands, formerly home to more Englishmen than the mainland colonies, capable of fielding a formidable privateer force against the enemies of England, subsequently declined into plantation dominated historical dead ends.)

In England, the opposite historical development took place. After the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 the Normans nobles, who really were alien conquerors, came to identify with the English commoners, creating national solidarity and strength. Serfdom disappeared. With a productive, non-parasitic middle class ethnically identifying with both the nobles above and the peasants below, the English economy became the wonder of the world. England and her mainland colonies were the greatest power in the world by the mid-18th century.

* “Jews, man, is there anything they can’t do?”

Asbestos removal. They leave that to blacks, who apparently excel in that nation-building endeavor.

* Stephens is a guy with a culturally appropriated surname – his real surname should be Ehrlich – who believes that America should be “the world’s policeman” but has never actually served in the military.

I’m sure his three children are reasonably intelligent, but I doubt if any of them can hold a candle to the Intel Science Talent Search finalists. Perhaps the top three ISTS winners should ask Bret Stephens if he would disinherit his own three children in favor of them, since Stephens clearly and expressly believes that inheritance should be based on merit, not blood.

Stephens clearly belongs to the neoconservative crowd which believes that America is a “proposition nation” rather than a nation of “blood and soil.” Well. Every great nation is a combination of ideas, beliefs, laws, blood, and soil. It is not really an either/or kind of thing. Despite the beliefs that have been retroactively applied to our founders, the fact is that probably most of them understood that this nation, if it was to prosper, required shared blood and beliefs to hold it together. Quite a few of them didn’t think much of the African race, and openly admitted it.

Within a decade of the Constitution’s ratification the same generation of men who won our independence and authored our Constitution – a Constitution that promises to “ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity – passed a naturalization law limiting naturalization to whites. Then again just 17 years after winning the Civil War and freeing the slaves – and before the French gifted us the Statue of Liberty – Congress overwhelmingly passed severe restrictions on Chinese immigration. Probably most of the men in Congress back in 1882 had served in the Union Army that liberated the slaves, yet Americans today – very few of whom have risked their lives for anything – think themselves qualified to sit in judgment of that august body.

Bret Stephens may pretend to have been writing tongue in cheek, but those of us who have been listening to the open borders neofeudalists for well over a decade now know that he was quite serious. The irony, though, is that if our government were to follow his prescription, a vastly disproportionate number of the people it would deport would be the very people who voted for the party that most fanatically and openly supports unrestricted immigration.

About Luke Ford

I've written five books (see Amazon.com). My work has been covered in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and on 60 Minutes. I teach Alexander Technique in Beverly Hills (Alexander90210.com).
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