* Elements of Turbulence in the life of David Brooks after a cursory Google:
#1 – His son left the USA and is in the IDF
#2 – Brooks is divorced from his Christian wife who converted to Judaism
#3 – Or maybe not
#4 – Brooks is in the process of converting to Catholicism
#5 – Or maybe not
Mid Life Crises — Ain’t it Wonderful?
* “The Republican Party is led by people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the changing (and inevitable) demographic nature of our nation.”
Note the choice of words there. This is intellectual dishonesty and media manipulation.
Demographic change is not “inevitable.” It’s not like a hurricane or winter storm that no one can stop. The rulers of this country can, in fact, control who enters it. They choose not to.
The fact that Brooks and the Times choose to purposely cloud this issue with Newspeak should set off alarm bells. Anytime the elites claim something under their control is “inevitable” it means there is a reason they’re allowing it to happen but not telling us.
* Brooks ignores the disastrous effects of immigration on African-Americans. David Frum wrote:
Despite three years of supposed economic recovery, black children were as likely to be poor in 2013 as in 2010 — and more likely than at any time since the early 1990s. Almost four out of 10 black children are now growing up in poverty, as against one in nine white children. More than 25 percent of the black poor now live in areas of concentrated poverty, triple the rate for poor white people.
“The uniquely harsh African American economic experience since 2007 has divided black opinion further from that of other elements of the Obama coalition. Only 29 percent of Latinos under age 30 think illegal immigrants take jobs from Americans — but 48 percent of African Americans under 30 think so. No wonder.
“African Americans have been very much bypassed in the recovery, as employers substituted immigrant for native-born labor. As of mid-2015 all of the net new job growth from the previous employment peak in 2007 has gone to foreign-born workers. The black unemployment rate — although declining — in summer 2015 still hovered well above the rate in December 2007. Among younger black people, 16-24, the unemployment rate is a Greek-like 20 percent. Nearly half of black youth aren’t in the workforce at all.
….
Even Bernie Sanders is on board:
“You know what youth unemployment is in the United States of America today? If you’re a white high school graduate, it’s 33 percent, Hispanic 36 percent, African American 51 percent. You think we should open the borders and bring in a lot of low-wage workers, or do you think maybe we should try to get jobs for those kids?”
….
Harvard’s George Borjas found:
The employment rate of black men, and particularly of low-skilled black men, fell precipitously between 1960 and 2000. At the same time, their incarceration rate rose. This paper examines the relation between immigration and these trends in employment and incarceration. Using data from the 1960–2000 US censuses, we find that a 10% immigration-induced increase in the supply of workers in a particular skill group reduced the black wage of that group by 2.5%, lowered the employment rate by 5.9 percentage points, and increased the incarceration rate by 1.3 percentage points.
….
And while Brooks correctly points out that legal immigrants have a lower incarceration rate than the general population, he conveniently ignores the fact that ILLEGAL immigrants are locked up at a far higher rate, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission:
According to FY 2014 USSC data, of 74,911 sentencing cases, citizens accounted for 43,479 (or 58.0 percent), illegal immigrants accounted for 27,505 (or 36.7 percent), legal immigrants made up 3,017 (or 4.0 percent), and the remainder (about 1 percent) were cases in which the offender was either extradited or had an unknown status.
Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.
* “The vitriol toward immigrants, Muslims, and all people other than White America coming from the candidates should frighten all Americans.”
This is just pious leftoid nonsense.
There is vitriol directed towards Latin immigrants because large numbers of them are here illegally, and feel that they are entitled to be here. There are some people who dislike Latins as such but most people are fine with Latins, as long as they speak English. (A bi-lingual and bi-cultural America would be as much a disaster for the US as for any European precedents.)
Hostility towards Muslims is two part: (a) Because they engage in cultural practices that are incompatible with life in the West (honor killings, FGM), and (b) because in virtually every culture they go into, they demonstrate a refusal to assimilate, thus creating alien ghettoes, and second, when they aren’t not assimilating they are terrorizing the dominant culture (a la Charlie Hebdo) for refusing to police itself in accordance with their religious laws.
* If US is indeed all about ‘diversity’ and ‘multi-culti’ stuff, then there is no single Americanism. So, it is wrong for Brooks to talk as if he represents the only American Dream.
It may well be that the Jewish-American Dream is to increase diversity to play divide-and-rule among goyim.
But white-American Dream is to maintain some degree of white dominance because, from its very beginning, America began as an extension of European civilization.
As for Palestinian-Americans, their dream could be the hope that US stop supporting the Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Palestinian-American Dream differs from Jewish-American Dream.
From now on, there is no more American Dream. There is only the
Hyphenated-American Dream, and Brooks should know that it’s wrong and arrogant for him to claim that the dream of his ethnic group is THE American Dream. No, it is merely one among many that differ and are in conflict.
* David Brooks (not a social conservative) is busy telling social conservatives what they should believe – just like David Brooks the Jewish, Israeli nationalist is busy telling non-Jewish Americans they should not be nationalists.
* Following the Obergefell ruling, Brooks urged social conservatives to abandon the culture war to focus on serving the vibrantly diverse populations:
“The defining face of social conservatism could be this: Those are the people who go into underprivileged areas and form organizations to help nurture stable families. Those are the people who build community institutions in places where they are sparse. Those are the people who can help us think about how economic joblessness and spiritual poverty reinforce each other.”
If you’re wondering why that isn’t the defining face of neoconservatism, it’s because neoconservatives are busy doing important things.
* Brooks values American nationalism for one reason and one reason alone: it convinces gullible young Americans to enlist in the military and die fighting the enemies of Israel.
* People forget how the US and the West, in general, are indirectly subsidizing the living standards of low GDP countries or of low income people by having simply existed and developing things on their own – medicine, tech etc.
The more ambitious nations, like Japan, S. Korea and China, industrialized rapidly by simply adopting and adapting the technology, modes of organization and knowledge that the West had already run through numerous iterations, absorbing the costs of the initial research, the initial failures and the repeated upgrades. They also find export markets ready made, as well as abundant willing capital if they can ensure low wages or other favorable terms. Of course, there’s nothing simple about it, as HBDers, culturalists and institutionalists know, the world being strewn with failures to catch up or to even take off.
Cuba has its life expectancy partially because it can tap into capitalist advances in dentistry, pharmacology, surgery etc without paying the usual costs or having to absorb some of the sunk costs of R&D.
The best example I can think of are the Amish and other low-tech, low GDP groups that people like to praise for their wholesome simplicity and other qualities. By living in the US, or in the proximity of nations beholden to Mammon:
– They get to live in a place where their security is subsidized by an advanced power, protecting them from invading armies, rape, plunder etc.
– Their property rights are secure.
– If they deign to make their own horseshoes or other implements, the steel they can buy is of much higher quality and lower cost in real terms than 150 years ago.
– If they make overpriced handmade furniture or bric-a-brac, then they are bought because their customers enjoy disposable incomes and their creations are given value by the contrast with the cheap, mass produced stuff that every pleb has.
– Their economic activities invariably rely on continental transport systems or information systems underlying banking, weather forecasts etc.
– Their crops might be specially developed, if not GMO. Let’s remember who started the Green Revolution in Africa that primed the population growth since the 1960s.
– They have access to insurance, medical services, emergency services etc.
– I read an article about an Amish community tolerating a high tech gene sequencing center among them to study and find solutions to the problems posed by inbreeding.
All of those benefits might be reduced by the rich countries de-developing themselves, or they may stagnate. Stagnation might not sound that bad for GDP-fatigued people, but it’s hard philosophically to consciously put a lid on innovation or development (do you do it before or after the Salk vaccine, or some theoretical cure for cancers? What about space?). That saying about tipping over the ladder behind you is also applicable. I kind of want to develop in my own land properly and, for most small nations, that involves piggybacking on foreign markets, tech and capital. If that stagnates, can I edge out the other dude? If I can’t, then what’s left for the economically ambitious if not to change their country of residence and skip 20 years of development that are not going to happen and get the best buck for your bang straight away? We know where that leads. The high-IQ prevalence or the advanced PISA score proportions may differ, but I hardly doubt my Romanian trucker or hair dresser is in some personal way the lesser of an American one, yet the income differences are staggering. This can be put down to the value of the cargo, the profitability of the market, the better infrastructure, the lower equipment wear and tear, the lower transport times on good infrastructure, the amortization of prior costs, the lower capital costs of the firm etc etc but not on IQ or some specialized knowledge of the driver.
Meanwhile, the Africans are sitting on some major resources (that haven’t even been exhausted at the surface the way Europe’s have been) and a huge continent that’s just a killer jungle or a dustbowl to them.
* As is typical of the dewey-eyed* Emma Lazarus genre, the only quantification Brooks bothers to supply in this column comes from an opinion survey (that fraction posing as an arrest statistic at the end is laughable, as everyone here recognizes).
But numbers are of the essence when it comes to immigration, and the question, “How many?” is the proper (and effective) reply to anyone who spouts the tired “nation of immigrants” line as an excuse from argumentation.
“So why don’t we let in a billion immigrants?” is the question to ask Brooks. No “sane” person would agree to that (although people with academic credentials have proposed it), but having established that there might be an upper limit, the discussion turns to “What’s the right number?” and its corollaries, “How do we choose?”, “Whom do we admit?”, and “How do we make sure?”
Maybe it won’t amount to anything in practice, but I feel that the doorway to discussing these questions publicly has been decisively opened. I take Brooks’ column as evidence of the panic that’s set in on open borders side.
* The desire of old stock Americans to minimize immigration of ethnically different individuals reflects the deep instincts, probably going back to Paleolithic days that were discovered by Harvard’s Robert Putnam: diversity creates anomie and the loss of social capital.
Who would want to create such a situation in their own society? One might imagine that enemies of that society might want to create it.
It was America’s high level of social capital that enabled to create a great industrial system and to win two world wars. It was a similar high level of social capital that enabled England to initiate the Industrial Revolution and to create the greatest empire the world is ever seen.
* Your interpretation of the founding of the United States is revisionist hogwash. It was part of the 3rd wave of propaganda from the people who brought you the idea of “civil rights”. Originally, civil rights and equality under the law was sold to a Christian America under the guise of fairness and meritocratic ideals, very Christian indeed. Once majority America capitulated to that first violation of A)freedom of association and B) self interest, the assaults just kept coming. We were ordered to condemn our history, then our own families and grandparents, then our Christian Faith, and finally we have been asked to condemn ourselves. We won’t do it. You say our whiteness is part of a mark against us for supposed injuries of generations past.
Do African-Americans have to apologize for their ancestors’ cannibalism or part in the slave trade (selling)? No. Do Jews have to apologize for their ancestors part in the slave trade (middle men)? No. Do whites have to apologize? Yes, and we have. But there is no forgiveness given. Those original ideas of supposed belief in meritocracy have been shown to be a lie simply to gain power.
The media, the universities, and yes, the Obama Justice Department have been waging a war to frame whites as evil-doers in hundreds of situations. The idea of “white privilege” as some sort of call to action is communism at best, blood libel and genocide at worst. Your type has smeared us as a race, and we are finally ready to give back in kind.
We are done apologizing for things we didn’t do. We are ready to demand apologies from blacks for their asymmetrical warfare waged as violent crimes against us- and poverty is no excuse particularly not for rapes or homicides. We are ready to demand apologies from Jewish-owned media for their part in smearing us over the last fifty years. We are ready to demand apologies from illegal invaders who have trespassed on sovereign ground and forged their way into unearned benefits. And we are ready to tell leftists of all stripes to sit the hell down; their reign of terror is over. This includes the type of leftists that run NRO and the Weekly Standard. We are no longer fooled. We don’t care one bit about the childish names they will call us, anymore.
This is a rightwing movement that is growing exponentially. The comments sections of every online newspaper have become extremely rightwing, so much so that they are removing them in a hasty panic. Every day a new right wing website pops up. Every year the Amren and NPI conferences get bigger and younger. We are winning the war of ideas and we are winning the youth. Our movement is even more advanced in Europe. If you are frightened as a leftist, you should be.
If Trump can be our strong man, so be it. If not, there will be another to come along. Our movement will not die.
