Key Moments From 2016

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Walking into stores and wondering what country I live in. Seeing Muslims. Sending large sums of tax money to pay for a public school that is comprised almost entirely of non-English speakers. Not wanting to go to a mall or movie theater anymore because it feels like the third world. Having unpleasant interactions at almost every restaurant where the person behind the register barely speaks English. Understanding that Obama (a 1950′s third world style, anti-American) got elected because of a third world invasion. Realizing that we wouldn’t have a country anymore if the invasion wasn’t immediately halted. Realizing that bringing in any amount of Muslims was suicidal. I understood this one prior to 9/11 though. That took me in 2013/2014 to Jeff Sessions/Stephen Miller/Vdare/Steve Sailer. When Trump announced, I pretty much knew. He got better and better over time. I think he might just save America and Western Civilization. But it won’t be easy. Cheers to America possibly getting one more chance in 2017.

And Steve – what can I say, the Sailer Strategy was correct. You were right. Very rare is it that a blogger has such an impact. Obvious that Ann Coulter took a lot from you. Coulter gave to Trump. Trump gave to us all. Kudos to you, Steve.

* Steve Sailer: One development was the things that didn’t happen. Hillary ran on an implicit promise of Disarming Evil White Guys.

She seemed to be betting on more Dylann Roofs and Sandy Hooks happening to help her out, but they largely didn’t.

Instead she got Muslim and BLM terrorism.

Some of that was just bad luck for her, some of it was her lack of critical thinking skills at deconstructing The Narrative in the corporate press so she wasn’t good at noticing patterns and trends.

Some of it was that she (and her side) were encouraging dangerous trends like black rage and Muslim immigrant resentfulness.

* The obvious long term trend is the internet and sites like Unz. Fifteen years ago, the Megaphone Holders still pretty much had a lock on public discourse. The internet existed, of course, but the credible outlets were still mostly controlled by the same people as in the offline world: the Megaphone Holders. Gradually over the last decade, the dissenters from the enforced Narrative grew to knew they weren’t alone and indeed, there might be many out there. The online discussion here and even in mainstream comments sections (before they were banned) sharpened and elaborated the dissenters’ awareness and allowed them to break the Sapir-Whorf box and state their dissent in ways that didn’t sound automatically wrong. By 2016, the Narrative was looking pretty threadbare.

Trump deserves some personal credit. A breakthrough moment was when Macy’s threatened to boycott him over his immigration statements, and he didn’t cave! That had never happened before at that level. He was economically vulnerable and paid some financial price for sticking to his guns, but he did it, and that shattered a glass ceiling that had previously constrained discussion.

Finally, there was a significant element of what for lack of a better word we call “luck” or “fate” or the “Hand of God”. When the Megaphone disputed that immigration was a problem, there were high profile nativ-o-cides by immigrants. When the Megaphone disputed that Muslims were a problem, Muslims got all Sudden Jihad Syndrome across former Christendom. When the Megaphone disputed that law and order could be an issue, BLM rioters and terrorists went on murder sprees. When Hillary insisted her health was great, she was wracked by coughing fits. Of course, the Megaphone Holders have been lying for a long time, but this year Hubris met Nemesis in particularly rapid and poignant ways.

Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that the pillars of the Megaphone establishment–Hillary, Merkel, von Juncker–are all superannuated plonkers.

* Earlier today my husband happened to mention that he thought Hillary’s basket of deplorables comment was a turning point in the election. And then, Trump’s reaction to it – with the Les Miserables image and music was impressive and inspired.

* There is a global populist-nationalist trend, including in countries where immigration isn’t an issue. I think Modi is the most nationalist PM India has ever had. Abe seems like the most nationalist Japanese PM since WWII. Erdogan seems like the most populist-nationalist Turkish leader in living memory. Duterte in the Philippines is populism distilled. One way of looking at ISIS is as Sunni Arab nationalism. Religion is often tribalism by proxy, and Sunni Arabs are an ethnic group. The Koran is their flag, symbol, calling card and ancient tradition.

* Seeing the DNC bring Michael Brown’s mother on stage and portrayed as some sort of heroine at their nominating convention should’ve be a real eye opener to a lot of people, but even the majority of staunch conservatives didn’t seem to notice or care.

* Dear Mr. Sailer:

Your achievements are widely noted. You are “Internet-famous.”

Your exact genetic composition has been a matter for speculation. Some believe that you are one-quarter Jew, but no one (to my knowledge) has published physical proof that your genes are one-quarter Jewish.

Let me be plain, Mr. Sailer.

The Jews are the cause of our misfortunes.

We are not allowed to say it.

That merely reinforces our awareness of it.

If you seek the trends, Mr. Sailer, seek the ways in which the Jews have immiserated the population.

White people are stupid enough to be immiserated for a long, long time.

But even white people eventually wake up and say: “Who caused this misfortune?”

Likewise, white people eventually say: “Is it good for the whites?”

* The voters in Dave Brat’s district sent an unmistakable early message; a virtual political earthquake. But the Republican Establishment continued as though nothing at all had happened.

* Donald Trump flying around relentlessly from one well attended rally to another, was the new trend of the year. Towards the end he was hitting four-five rallies per day and mostly in the battleground states. This was the DJT version of retail politicking and won the election for him. Hillary was static while The Donald was kinetic.
Can’t blame Hill too much, due to her ill health she was unable to campaign half as vigorously as The Donald. The Dems bet on the horse headed to the glue factory. The Donald is the strong horse and reluctant Republicans will join forces with him in 2017 and beyond. Why? Because everybody loves a winner.

* A significant number of Jews (especially Israeli Jews) thinking that philosemitic civic nationalism might actually be preferable to the unlimited Merkel-style third-world invasion, especially when the invasion leads to tens of thousands of Germans marching through the streets in protest.

* Nationalism is the major multi-century historical trend still going on. Why? Hard to say. There are just certain implacable zeitgeists in certain periods. Nationalism has been in the current zeitgeist since at least the French revolution, though I think you can trace it back further in Anglo history (and hence in its American offshoot). It is by definition democratic, hostile to elite excess, communitarian and language-dependent. When anything stands in the way of those trends, conflict will follow. It started in and was strongest in the West, but continues to spread over the world.

* Multinational/multicultural empires get into conflict all the time. Indeed, for many of them, constant conflict is a way of life, not only externally but internally: you have to keep all those jostling nations/cultures in their place somehow.

A properly nationalist nation can’t really expand faster than its own birth rate. You can’t have a bigger nation than there are nationals to populate it. But with a multi-ethnic empire, the sky is the limit. If any population can be part of your empire, there is nothing to stop your expansion but military defeat.

Good borders make good neighbors. And with nationalism, a good border is available: where one ethnicity ends and the next one begins, where one language ends and the next one begins. With multi-ethnic empires, no border is ever really good because the ending of one ethnicity or language and the beginning of the next is not relevant to a multi-ethnic empire. Since there is no obvious reason for anyone to be either in or out of such an empire, violent expansion and/or violent repression of internal dissent is baked in.

All of the biggest, most violent (both externally and internally) states have been multi-ethnic: the Soviet Union, the Mongol Hordes, the Ottoman Empire, even the anti-nationalist’s trump card–Nazi Germany–was really a multi-ethnic empire: the Third Reich. When it embarked on its brutal and megalomaniac Eastern conquests and associated mass civilian murders, the Nazi war machine was not only ethnic German but also had formations of Scandinavians, Dutch, Ukrainians, Russian, Vichy French, allies of Italians, Romanians, Hungarians, Finns, auxiliaries of Balts, Slavs, Croats, Slovenes and Arabs, and I’m probably forgetting some. So the favorite nationalist boogie man is really just another cautionary tale about excessive multicultural, multi-ethnic overreach.

* Obama was made possible by Tiger Woods.
Trump was made possible by Don Draper, Roger Sterling, Tywin Lannister, Tony Soprano.

The arts began foreshadowing a sharp turn to the reactionary 10-20 years ago. Shockingly so … and consistently so. Most surprisingly, all the lefties were into it.

My favorite reactionary is … Lena Dunham. “Girls” is “Sex and the City” 20 years later and completely gone to hell. She got it. She helped make Trump possible.

* I view the elections as a series of tests administered to Trump and his followers. Trump had the most tests, and he passed them all. He didn’t apologize for offending Mexicans in that first speech, or John McCain, or Curiel, or the Khans.. He didn’t give in to the GOP elites in an effort to win their approval. He didn’t spend money on meaningless ads and polls. He came back after the Access Hollywood tape and debated Hillary to a draw. He never backed down.

His followers had to show up and vote for him despite being told by everyone–and I mean, everyone–he’d lose.

It was that simple. Everything else was glorious theater.

* It was pretty much the launching of World War Trans that made me realize that the world had gone pretty insane. I wouldn’t have otherwise cared much, I wanted to be left alone.

* The deleterious effects of unrestricted free trade and mass third-world immigration in the post Cold War period — neither of which were politically correct topics for honest public discussion — reached the breaking point (which was bound to happen sooner or later). The politics of distraction finally broke down.

* 9/11.

Hillary’s collapse on 9/11, that is. Followed by her people saying it was the heat, when everyone knew it was a very mild day. Then she comes out of Chelsea’s apartment and says she feels, “Great!”

A cascade of lies from a candidate already truth-challenged.

We didn’t find out about her collapse from the press, and might not have ever if not for the cameras everyone carries around now.

The biggest story IMO is the collapse of establishment media credibility. They used to intimidate the public with their cleverness, but the newsrooms are full of SJW dingbats & low-paid Asians willing to write anything for a Prestige Job at the Times.

* …the media and Obama administration reactions to the Trayvon Martin case did the most to show White millennial men that they are hated and lied to by the elites that rule them. When asked about their first red pill, many, many millennials say it was a Skittle.

* A young woman known to me since birth, raised in a Whitopia county, schooled in a SJW factory where the greatest crime of all is to hate blacks, learns all Left-approved attitudes, beliefs, talking points … Now grown up very pretty, very fair, Nordic-looking, sought after by every male within eyeshot, goes to NYC to make her actress/model career, lives in Harlem(!), gets harassed by black guys every day, usually with sexual overtones (which I could have told her would happen) … Comes home and declares she hates blacks and doesn’t care if she is racist, plainly and unapologetically breaking the highest Commandment of her SJW Goodwhite milieu. Who is going to contradict her? No male. No less pretty female = no female. Many converts that day.

* The Missouri Rule of Heterosexual Public Political Discourse is that the right-hand constraint of publicly espoused politics for the majority of males is the right-most position they have heard a desirable woman espouse. In other words, most men don’t want to appear further to the right than at least one woman they would want to be with.

* Here’s a somewhat different list – the things that I wish were turning points, because they are extremely important markers of the state of the country and the world, but weren’t, because most people are not paying close enough attention:

– Rolling Stone UVA hoax

– College SJW brat incidents, e.g.students surrounding and yelling at the Yale woman’s husband, throwing tantrums at lectures, etc.

– Mansplaining, white-splaining, ‘check your privilege’, etc.

– The left-wing’s poster boy for the supposed scourge of unfair anti-Muslim discrimination turns out to join ISIS (to me this is probably the single most under-reported story of the past few years)

– The video of ISIS roasting that Jordanian pilot alive in a cage

– The video of a Syrian Civil War participant on some side slicing open the chest of his captive from another side and taking a raw bite of the heart

– Realization of the African population bomb

* Steve says something like ‘conservatism is the act of noticing.’ I think that over the past few years, many more people have been noticing the opinions of others who are not going along with the narrative. Because the lying and partisanship coming from mainstream media had gotten so obvious, many turned to online forums to voice their displeasure with the latest outrages. I don’t know how many readers reflexively view comments after reading an article online, but I know I do. There used to be a lot of places to comment–not so much anymore. Many lefty media outlets banned comments or linked them to a Facebook identity in order to control trolling and opinions they did not like. But the comment sections of the (not specifically conservative) places that remained– Yahoo News, Youtube, even Rolling Stone– have been lopsidedly packed with Red Pill commenters. Righty realtalkers vastly outnumber the lefty SJWs on these sites. Middle of the road people notice things like that. While the comment sections of the NYT and WashPost are still heavily Blue Pill, that;s probably because Red Pill people have largely given up reading those media (although obviously Steve still does).

When conservative or even centrist minded people know they are not alone and their way of thinking is butressed by others of the same ilk, it creates a strength and a willingness to punch back and be vocal about their opinions. This can have a snowball effect. I don’t know if there is some outfit that sorts comments on news/opinion stories, but it would probably make a good business selling such info to companies if someone could figure out a way to automate it.

* My list:

-Violence, too much violence – whether it was BLM riots/shootings (Dallas and Charlotte stand out for me, maybe because I watched a lot of Periscopes of those events), riots/blocked freeways/property destruction outside of Trump’s rallies (Chicago/Phoenix/Orange County), or massacres at the hands of muslims in Paris and San Bernardino, and the left’s insistence that, at the root, it’s all white people’s fault.

– The open anti-white hate in the media, that just grew and grew under Obama, that I was just supposed to tolerate as the new normal.

– Clinton Emails and wikileaks – Comey letting Clinton skate, Bill’s meeting with Loretta on the tarmac just thrust home the point that there is one set of rules for the elite and another for the little people.

– trannies in locker rooms and school bathrooms. I still don’t understand why Obama is so obsessed with trannies. It represented to me that the left felt free to shove their weirdness down our throats without debate and we were all supposed to put up with it. As a woman, the tranny rulings really pissed me off.

– massive homelessness all over, rising crime all over – symptoms that the US is going in the wrong direction

– my area (Orange County) becoming more and more muslim, particularly in the last 3 or so years.

– I agree with Boomstick and others that Gamergate played a big role behind the scenes – it was the training for the election fight. The chans, via Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube, helped make Trump/the right cool to younger people, who get their information from the internet. The Trump campaign was definitely aware of their influence.

– the fact that Trump doesn’t do PC and just seemed to have common sense positions about everything. It was so refreshing.

* I would suggest that part of this year’s story is that the gatekeepers lost a ton of power that they had twenty years ago … and that this year it mattered for the outcome of the US presidential election. Could Trump have won without blogs/twitter/Breitbart/etc? I don’t know, but I suspect not.

* The concept of a ‘cuckservative’ is pretty simple. It is an analogy to cuckoldry applied to conservative politics.

Implicit in a marriage is a pact that spouses remain faithful to each other. To take the anthropological perspective, the husband is expected to provide for the wife and their children through his labor, and the wife is expected to provide children and care for them and the household. If the wife cuckolds the husband, the husband ends up spending a portion of his labor providing for children who are not his own.

‘Cuckservative’ is an analogy to this. Implicit in conservatism is the pact that conservative politicians/pundits/stakeholders will protect their constituents’ interest in exchange for votes, donations, and other forms of support. When conservative politicians/pundits/stakeholders support policies that divert their constituents’ assets to non-constituents, this is akin to an unfaithful wife using her husband’s income to raise a bastard child.

For example, policies that cuckservatives have supported that arguably betray their constituents include: amnesty for illegal immigrants, wage-depressing legal immigration, affirmatively-furthering fair housing, unnecessary refugee resettlement, pro-democracy foreign adventurism, anti-police activism, ending the war on drugs, affirmative action (especially expansions to new categories), whole swathes of anti-discrimination laws, etc.

What these all have in common is that they purportedly draw votes and support from people who don’t traditionally align with conservative causes, while simultaneously annoying (at best) the conservative base.

The reason the cuckservative meme has become popular is because in recent years these cuckservative shenanigans have not resulted in increased support for conservative politics, and the base has lost its patience.

I don’t think the meme itself changed many minds, but it does encapsulate conservatives’ frustration with their supposed representatives.

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Blacks Being Racist

Comment: The Bills recently played Cleveland and Robert Griffin III was the Browns’ starting QB. A Buffalo cornerback, Nickell Robey-Coleman made the following eye popping comment about RGIII: “He wasn’t just a regular African-American quarterback. I felt like, when he came into the league, he had the mental capacity as a Tom Brady-type guy. When you hear him talk, he’s so articulate, he’s very intelligent….” Nickell, which rhymes with Michelle, is an African-American. Try adding that quote to your CV and see how far you progress in any role that includes inter action with the press. The quote is from the Buffalo News, December 17, 2016 front page of the sports section. No retraction was printed as far as I know. Place this quote next to what Limbaugh said about Donovan McNabb that got Rush trashed as a racist.

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Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004)

Wikipedia: Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004) is a treatise by political scientist and historian Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008). The book attempts to understand the nature of American identity and the challenges it will face in the future.

In describing the American identity, Huntington first contests the notion that the country is, as often repeated, “a nation of immigrants”. He writes that America’s founders were not immigrants, but settlers, since British settlers came to North America to establish a new society, as opposed to migrating from one existing society to another one as immigrants do. Later peoples who joined the culture present in the original British colonies, already established by these settlers, were indeed immigrants.

Many people point to the American Creed as the core of American identity. Huntington defines the American Creed as embodying the “principles of liberty, equality, individualism, representative government, and private property”.[1] Yet Huntington asks:

Would America be the America it is today if in the 17th and 18th centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.[2]

Huntington argues that, of all the nations in Europe, and of all the colonies, America alone developed the American Creed, and that this simple observation requires explanation. This observation leads to two conclusions: that America was an English colony, and that America alone was formed as a result of the Reformation.

To advance his argument about the contribution to America of its English heritage, he says:

The political and legal institutions the settlers created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries embodied in large part the institutions and practices of England’s late-sixteenth-century and early-seventeenth-century “Tudor constitution.” These included: the concept of a fundamental law superior to and limiting government; the fusion of executive, legislative, and judicial functions and the division of power among separate institutions and governments; the relative power of the legislature and chief executive; the merger of the “dignified” and “efficient” functions in the chief executive; a two-house legislature; the responsibility of the legislature to their local constituencies; a legislative committee system; and primary reliance for defense on militia rather than a standing army.[3]

As for the importance of Protestantism, Huntington states: “The American Creed is the unique creation of a dissenting Protestant culture”. In particular, he highlights the:

Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience and the responsibility of individuals to learn God’s truths directly from the Bible promoted American commitment to individualism, equality, and the rights to freedom of religion and opinion. Protestantism stressed the work ethic and the responsibility of the individual for his own success or failure in life…With its congregational forms of church organization, Protestantism fostered opposition to hierarchy and the assumption that similar democratic forms should be employed in government.[4]

Challenges to American identity[edit]
Huntington argues that it is during the 1960s that American identity begins to erode. This was the result of several factors:

The beginning of economic globalization and the rise of global subnational identities
The easing of the Cold War and its end in 1989 reduced the importance of national identity
Attempts by candidates for political offices to win over groups of voters
The desire of subnational group leaders to enhance the status of their respective groups and their personal status within them
The interpretation of Congressional acts that led to their execution in expedient ways, but not necessarily in the ways the framers intended
The passing on of feelings of sympathy and guilt for past actions as encouraged by academic elites and intellectuals
The changes in views of race and ethnicity as promoted by civil rights and immigration laws
Huntington places the passage and subsequent misinterpretation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 at the center of government actions that eroded the American Creed. Huntington writes:

Senator Hubert Humphrey, the floor manager of the bill, assured the Senate that nothing in the bill gave courts or executive agencies the power “to require hiring, firing, or promotion of employees in order to meet a racial ‘quota’ or to achieve a certain balance…Title VII prohibits discrimination…[and] is designed to encourage hiring on the basis of ability and qualifications, not race or religion.”[5]

Yet these acts gave rise to a system of quotas and affirmative action, so that “the Court derived from Title VII a legal requirement that the proponents of the law had expressly disclaimed”.[6] Another component of American identity that Huntington sees as under attack is the use of English. Up until the late 20th century, English has been the dominant language of America and was actively taught to immigrants. This was not only because Americans throughout history had spoken this language, but also because, with a variety of languages brought by different immigrant groups to the United States, teaching everyone to learn to speak and write English ensured communication among these groups. This tradition was inadvertently undermined by Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of “national origin”. The act was interpreted to mean that potential voters who did not speak English were entitled to assistance under this “national origin” clause so that they would not be disadvantaged. This led to bilingual voting ballots and the beginning of bilingual education. In 1974, the Civil Rights Act “was amended to require schools to provide instruction in a student’s native language and culture ‘to the extent necessary to allow the child to progress effectively through the education system.'” However, Huntington states that the result was, as stated by 1985 Secretary of Education William Bennett, that the program became:

a way of enhancing students’ knowledge of their native language and culture. Bilingual education was no longer seen so much as a means to ensure that students learned English, or as a transitional method until students learned English. Rather, it became an emblem of cultural pride, a means of producing a positive self-image in the student.[7]

Finally, the single most imposing challenge to America, in Huntington’s view, is the problem of Mexican immigration and the resulting “Hispanization” of those regions of the United States adjacent to and acquired from Mexico. He fears that the result of Mexican immigration could be a “bifurcated” America. Huntington argues that Mexican immigration differs from previous waves of immigration in several fundamental ways, including:

Contiguity: America is the only First World country in the world sharing a long, undefended border with a Third World country, making the crossing both easy and appealing to Mexicans.[8]
Numbers: In the 1990s, Mexican immigration accounted for 25% of all legal immigration, much larger than the influx of Irish or German immigrants earlier in American history.[9]
Illegality: Roughly 8–10 million illegal immigrants were in the United States by 2003, 58% of which were Mexican.[10]
Regional concentration: “In 2000, nearly two thirds of Mexican immigrants lived in the West, and nearly half in California”.[11]
Persistence: It is estimated that nearly half a million Mexicans will immigrate to the United States each year until 2030, culminating in nearly a half century of high immigration from a single country.[12]
Historical presence: “No other immigrant group in American history has asserted or has been able to assert a historical claim to American territory. Mexicans and Mexican-Americans can and do make that claim”.[13]
Not only does Mexican immigration differ from previous immigration in these ways, but Huntington argues that Mexicans lag other immigrants in their assimilation into American society for several reasons, including:

Language: Different from other immigrants, Hispanic immigrants emphasize the need for their children to be fluent in Spanish.
Education: Mexicans were less likely to graduate high school and attend college than other immigrant groups.[14]
Occupation and income: Mexican immigrants were far less likely to hold professional or managerial positions, and had low rates of self-employment and entrepreneurship. This parallels their educational attainment. Mexican immigrants were also more likely to live in poverty and to be on welfare than any other ethnic group, except Dominicans.[15]
Citizenship: The rate of naturalization of Mexican immigrants was among the lowest of all immigrant groups. At least part of this may be attributable to the influence of illegal immigration.
Intermarriage: Rates of Hispanic intermarriage are roughly equivalent to that of other immigrant groups.
Identity: Mexican immigrants and their children generally refer to themselves as Mexican first and American second. However, approximately one quarter of Hispanics convert to Protestantism, a fact that Huntington attributes to assimilation of American culture, as many Hispanics come from a Catholic tradition.[16]
Huntington argues that these differences are the result of cultural differences between American Anglo Protestant culture and Hispanic “culture of Catholicism”. Lionel Sosa, a Texas Mexican-American businessman, summarizes these differences as “mistrust of people outside the family; lack of initiative, self-reliance, and ambition; low priority for education; acceptance of poverty as a virtue necessary for entrance into heaven”.[17]

Huntington argues that this persistent pattern of a massive influx of immigrants from Latin America, especially Mexico, has already resulted in changes in culture, business, language, and education in the Southwestern United States. If the trend continues, this could result in the consolidation of this part of the country into a distinct cultural bloc within the United States that threatens to bifurcate America.

Finally, Huntington lists other ways in which America’s identity has weakened. These include: the collapse of the Soviet Union left the United States without an enemy against which to define itself; the denationalization of business, professional, intellectual, and academic elites; and the influence of diasporas. By “denationalization”, Huntington means that these Americans think of themselves mostly as members of an international community and not really as citizens of the United States.

Renewing American identity[edit]
After laying out the concerns for the weakening and subsequent dissolution of America, which could plausibly occur due to cultural bifurcation and/or a government formed of denationalized elites that increasingly ignore the will of the public, Huntington attempts to formulate a solution to these problems. He argues that adherence to the American Creed is by itself not enough to sustain an American identity. An example of a state that attempted to use ideology alone was the Soviet Union, which attempted to impose communism on different cultures and nationalities, and eventually collapsed. A similar fate could lie in store for the United States unless Americans “participate in American life, learn America’s language [English], history, and customs, absorb America’s Anglo-Protestant culture, and identify primarily with America rather than with their country of birth”.[18] In particular, Huntington suggests that Americans turn to Protestantism, and recognize that what distinguishes America from other countries is that it is an extremely religious Western country, founded on the principles of the Enlightenment and Protestant Reformation.

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Islam, Judaism & Democracy

Paul Gottfried writes:

During the last few months I’ve seen on TV and read in Newsmax the views of an earnest American patriot, Zudhi Jasser. A onetime naval officer, distinguished cardiologist and more recently, an inspired leader of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, Dr. Yasser has been second to none in denouncing Islamicist terror and in exhorting his fellow-Muslims in the US and throughout the West to turn in suspected terrorists. It pains me to criticize such a decent fellow, but much of what I hear him saying about purifying Islam of Sharia and making Muslims accept “human rights,” “gender equality” and “secular governance” as part of their belief system is arrant nonsense. I make this point not because I wish to savage Islam, in either its Sunni or Shiite form, but because it is hard for me to imagine that anyone who accepts the claims of a traditional religion could in good conscience adopt Yasser’s position. Biblical or Koranic religion antedates by many centuries the modern principles or attitudes around which Yasser proposes to restructure his faith tradition (Yes, I have availed myself of this insipid commodified term).

A believer may try to accommodate himself to the new order but it is foolish to insist that his millennial faith and the rules that it enjoins are entirely compatible with the latest version of American liberal democracy. Why should a devout Muslim care if Dr. Jasser wishes to put him “on the right side of History”? Like Rabbinic Judaism or Canon Law, Sharia dictates a way of life for those who accept the authority of their faith. Are we to say, as Dr. Yasser sometimes seem to be suggesting, that pious Muslims should now accept only those of their precepts and injunctions that don’t conflict with the concept of democratic equality and with the ongoing feminist revolution?

I once had friends who were members of the American Council for Judaism. These friends would insist that Judaism, at least as they understood it, was a universal ethical religion that had nothing to do with accepting Israel as a homeland. From my own more thorough knowledge of the subject, it seemed to me that what they said was hot air. Being Jewish is about observing complicated dietary laws and rituals, which only in some cases have a relation to ethics. Moreover, there is no way that national identity can be viewed as extraneous to being Jewish. Jewish prayers and Hebrew Scriptures abound in references to Israel as the Jewish homeland. Jewish messianic hopes center on having all Jews return to Zion. While my friends in the American Council for Judaism were expressing feel-good sentiments, these sentiments do not belong to traditional Rabbinic Judaism. Like Yasser’s plan to make secular democratic equality the basis of Islamic religion, the ACJ was (and is) equating an inherited religious and communal faith with certain modern notions.

There is of course nothing wrong with groups disputing our late modern form of democracy or our current worship of the equality principle. I myself have been ripping into these idols, as an old-fashioned American constitutionalist, for many decades and can cite other authors who do the same. But there is a critical difference between me and those devout Muslims who are waging Jihad. My contrarian views do not lead me into being violent; nor do I have any desire to set up a caliphate on this continent or in Europe. What makes Muslims different from others who question certain modernist dogmas is the possibility that they may turn violent and that they may want to impose their way of life on others by force.

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NYT: India’s Call-Center Talents Put to a Criminal Use: Swindling Americans

I received countless calls from this particular scam. I never answered.

New York Times:

THANE, India — Betsy Broder, who tracks international fraud at the Federal Trade Commission, was in her office in Washington last summer when she got a call from two Indian teenagers.

Calling from a high-rise building in a suburb of Mumbai, they told her, in tones that were alternately earnest and melodramatic, that they wanted to share the details of a sprawling criminal operation targeting Americans. Ms. Broder, who was no stranger to whistle-blowers, pressed the young men for details.

“He said his name was Adam,” she said, referring to one of the pair. “I said, ‘Your name is not Adam. What does your grandmother call you?’ He said, ‘Babu.’”

Babu was Jayesh Dubey, a skinny 19-year-old with hair gelled into vertical bristles, a little like a chimney brush. He told her that he was working in a seven-story building and that everyone there was engaged in the same activity: impersonating Internal Revenue Service officials and threatening Americans, demanding immediate payment to cover back taxes.

If they reached a person who was sufficiently terrified or gullible — this was known in the business as a “sale” — they would instruct that person to buy thousands of dollars’ worth of iTunes cards to avoid prosecution, they said; the most rattled among them complied. The victim would then send the codes from the iTunes cards to the swindlers, giving them access to the money on the card.

As it happened, the United States government had been tracking this India-based scheme since 2013, a period during which Americans, many of them recent immigrants, have lost $100 million to it.

Though India had no reputation as a large-scale exporter of fraud in the past, it is now seen as a major center for cyberfraud, said Suhel Daud, an F.B.I. agent who serves as assistant legal attaché at the embassy in New Delhi. Several trends have converged to make this happen, he said: a demographic bulge of computer-savvy, young, English-speaking job seekers; a vast call-center culture; super-efficient technology; and what can only be described as ingenuity…

But those who believe that the drop is permanent should consider this: In the weeks after Mr. Poojary and Mr. Dubey left the call center, several lucrative job opportunities were presented to them. Each involved a telephone scheme targeting Americans, they said. There was the Viagra scam, in which the callers offered to sell cut-rate Viagra; there was a low-interest loan scam, in which people were asked to deposit $1,000 as proof of income. There was a tech scam, which warned Americans that their computer had been infected by a virus, and an American Express scam, which involved gathering personal information to break through security barriers on online accounts.

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